Outside the cathedral’s carved doors, a crowd watches a bizarre rite of passage. To celebrate the final days of freedom before her wedding, Aurelie L, wearing aerobics gear, surrounded by cheering friends, armed with bowling pins, scuba flippers and weights, is exercising in front of Notre Dame. Aurelie’s marriage, three weeks away, will take place in a church, but for reasons of convention, not faith. “Just because I’m getting married in a church, that doesn’t mean my marriage is going to last any longer,” she says, still breathless from a bout of sit-ups. “God? That’s for the day of marriage.”
Small wonder that Father Claude–and his fellow clergymen across Europe–are worried. Judging by the statistics of people at prayer, Europe is a post-Christian continent. While churches in Latin America, Africa and the United States are full of worshipers, those in Europe–from village chapels to some of the world’s most sublime works of architecture–are lucky if they attract tourists. Eighty-nine percent of Britons don’t bother to go to church regularly at all. “Life is not as dramatic in Britain as it is in Latin America or Central Africa, so perhaps it doesn’t require a Christian revelation to interpret it,” said Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey, in a wistful speech this spring warning fellow Anglicans that the Church of England was “one generation away from extinction.” What chance has the old Christian God–a white male with a white beard–have in a youth-oriented society? Why should prayer matter in a world that has found the power to clone sheep and build its own cyber-infinity on the Web?
As universal symbols go, the sign of the cross seems to have less pulling power than Nike’s Swoosh or other symbols of global capitalism. “Christianity is family based,” notes David Martin, a sociologist of religion at the London School of Economics. “We’re supposed to get on with our brothers and sisters and our Heavenly Father and Our Lady. It’s not about beating other people on the stock exchange.”
Though Christianity and capitalism have existed symbiotically for centuries, the new Information Age strains the old ties. Christianity can’t seem to compete against the icons of a pop, consumer culture. Earlier this spring the sides of London buses displayed the hand of God from Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling–holding up a McDonald’s mozzarella burger. When a German polling agency asked a group of under-30-year-olds to choose the people they respect most, the pope got 11 percent approval–just one more percentage point than Cher. In his New Year’s sermon, Cardinal Joachim Meisner, Archbishop of Cologne, Christendom’s richest diocese, declared that “in our society, God is no longer a topic.”
That’s a bit harsh. Reports of God’s death have been exaggerated; and in any event, the decline of organized religion in Europe has been gathering pace for a century. Even before the carnage of World War I and the horrors of fascism–still, for many Europeans, the events that more than any shook their faith to its roots–church attendance was becoming monopolized by women and the elderly. More recently, Europeans have characterized religion as a shelter for sexual hypocrisy and a force behind ethnic hatred from Ireland to the Balkans. Yet an abiding respect for faith endures. Some experts say that secularism actually peaked in the 1980s. According to the Turin-based Center for the Study of New Religions, 90 percent of Europeans think there’s a God–up 20 percent in the last decade. Europeans may not be trundling off to Sunday mass, but at least some of them spend their vacations on pilgrimages or spiritual retreats. They may not be poring over the Scriptures, but they’re avidly reading up on religion. The French are dipping into the two-volume Encyclopedia of World Religions, a 1997 best seller; the Irish and Germans are buying books on Celtic Catholicism, and Italians have recently discovered a taste for Buddhism.
Young Europeans, in particular, are creating mix-and-match faiths, forging moralities where they can find them. Stalls in the Spanish pilgrimage town of Santiago de Compostela sell Rastafarian hats, Hindu incense and Kurt Cobain T shirts along with the crucifixes. Veritas, the leading Roman Catholic bookshop in Dublin, does its best business in self-help titles like “Chicken Soup for the Soul.” The countries that, until a generation ago, were the heartland of Christendom are, says British sociologist Grace Davie, going through an era of “believing, but not belonging.”
Every generation gets the god–or gods–it deserves. European religion today mirrors social and economic life. In an individualist age, Europeans may not be joining a church; but then they aren’t joining trade unions or political parties either. And for many modern Europeans, at least some of the purposes of religion have been appropriated by the welfare state; after World War II, the charity, identity and community for which millions once flocked to church came to be provided by government bureaucrats. “You get a secularized Christian ethic in the state,” notes the LSE’s Martin. “So why bother getting it through the church?”
Europe has changed in one more profound way. With 6 million Muslims on the old continent, and sizable populations who practice the great Asian religions, “Europe” is no longer congruent with “Christendom.” Just as the certainties of left and right collapsed with the Berlin wall, so has the notion of Christianity as Europe’s moral bedrock. With the new range of spiritual choices, Christianity has become just another alternative lifestyle–as wacky as atheism or vegetarianism were to the grandparents of modern Europeans. “I only think of God when I’m in a beautiful church in Italy, or when I see the war in Kosovo on TV,” says Julia Flittner, a 22-year-old cafe waitress in Berlin, who says she doesn’t believe in a Christian God–and doesn’t know any of her friends who do either. “It’s too bad. I’m sure it can give you a lot of strength to believe. I see that when I look at my grandmother.”
In Europe’s Catholic countries, religion is a bit like a phantom limb: ghostly, invisible, but twitching every so often–generally at times of sacrament or scandal. Most Spanish, Italian and Irish babies are baptized; 95 percent of European funerals are religious. But for many people, these rituals are just relics. The children’s sections of Dublin’s department stores boast rows of net veils and hooped first-communion dresses. Parents spend up to £200 on the outfits, but not because it’s a sacred occasion. “It’s a day out,” says a Dublin salesclerk. “For the parents, it’s about whose child is going to be the best-looking one there.” Few of these children will grow up to become priests or nuns: in 1997, in Ireland, only 53 men became priests, and only 32 Irish entered religious orders–half the numbers from 1992. In the past decade, Irish confidence in its Catholic church hasn’t just been sapped, as it has in Italy, Germany and France. Ireland’s faith has been blasted away by a series of sex scandals. In the past few months alone, a nun has been found guilty of assisting a rape and is awaiting sentence in Dublin, while a Wexford County priest committed suicide after revelations about his abuse of children in his parish. Those old enough to remember an Ireland where parents hoped their sons would grow up to be priests feel particularly betrayed. Dubliner Alan O’Conner refuses to go to mass. “Perverts, they’re all perverts,” he says. “Why should I go and confess all my sins to a pervert?”
More corrosive than anticlericalism among the middle-aged is indifference among the young. Fears of offending secularists mean that even in Catholic schools, religion classes tend to stress multiculturalism and ’life skills’ instead of Bible stories. When Dubliner Phillip Kenny asked his 8-year-old daughter Grace who Moses was, she looked at him blankly. In France, a rigorously secular state with a strong anticlerical tradition, the modern church isn’t even powerful enough to be despised. “Religion doesn’t interest me,” says Caroline, 17, a student at a Gay Pride parade in Paris. “It’s just fantasy.”
In a sense, Europe’s Catholics have started to act like Protestants; they treat religion as just a personal affair. For Catholics, schooled in a faith that stresses ritual and community, the retreat into an era of “believing without belonging” can be tough. “When I’m sad, I don’t need others to think about God,” says Jan, a German student. “But you can’t really celebrate a Catholic festival alone.” Yet prayer, most Europeans seem to think, should be enjoyed in private. In Britain, the Archbishop of Canterbury has wrangled for months with Downing Street over whether he’ll be allowed say a 90-second prayer at the Millennium Dome’s opening on New Year’s Eve. “Unless there is some Christian component in the celebration, I won’t be there,” he has said. “In Europe today, religion is assumed rather than articulated,” notes sociologist Davie. She cites a recent survey that asked Britons whether they believed in God. Most respondents said they did. The next question: “Do you believe in a God who can change the course of events on Earth?” A popular response: “No, just the ordinary one.”
Even those Europeans who do go to church often do so for reasons of culture, not faith. Nada Danic’s parents emigrated from the former Yugoslavia to Yorkshire, and raised her to respect the traditions of the Serbian Orthodox Church. She still does, in a sense. “I’ll go to church and say a prayer and light a candle,” says the 26-year-old stall owner. “But I do it because it’s my family–and my heritage.” Danic thinks that her youth spent in the wild beauty of the Yorkshire moors led her to seek the transcendent not in churches but nature. “Religion isn’t about giving donations or worshiping in a particular place or kissing a cross,” she says. “It’s got to touch your heart and spirit, and encircle your life.”
The state churches in Northern Europe have become a bit like post offices: government institutions you visit in times of need, but not places you want to spend any time. In Germany, the state collects an obligatory church tax–9 percent of your income-tax bill–from every registered, baptized Protestant and Catholic. Crucifixes adorn schoolrooms, members of the clergy sit on councils approving radio and television programs, and the churches get free TV ads. But despite all that institutional support, only 12 percent of Germans go to church regularly. When the EMNID Institute asked young Germans which institutions they trusted most, the church placed fifth–after Greenpeace, the police, the courts and Amnesty International. In Sweden the Lutheran Church will be disestablished next year, and fewer than half of Swedes say they believe. But old habits die hard: 85 percent of the population still belongs to the Church of Sweden and pays its church tax. Why? Perhaps because, according to a recent study, Swedes like to use church buildings to seek peace and refreshment for daily life.
And there, perhaps, lies the churches’ salvation. As economic change in modern Europe gathers pace, the institutions that once took the place of religion are themselves newly challenged. The generosity of the post-1945 welfare states is under attack; in an increasingly mobile society, the old sustaining networks of family and neighborhood have atrophied. And that in turn explains why so many European clergy concentrate on pastoral roles rather than spiritual ones. “More and more these days, people are just coming because they need to be listened to and understood,” says Notre Dame’s Father Claude. “Some people go to the doctor for that, and some come here.” In an almost self-parodic example of the odd state of European religion, Britain’s Methodists debated at their annual conference last week whether to let people join the church without believing in God. That, perhaps, was a recognition that it is not ecstatic conversions that bring people to church, but a sense of how they can be helped in times of need.
For Father Claude, stuck behind a glass booth in Notre Dame, that division between the church and faith is the ultimate insult. “It’s a pit stop,” he laments, watching the tourists file by his confessional. That may be. But eventually, every soul needs fuel.
Alex Cadman remembers saying his prayers every night: “it was ‘God bless the family and God bless me,’ and good night, really.” He also remembers the night at dinner when he was 13 or so, and his father announced he didn’t believe in God anymore. “I was a little taken aback,” recalls the 24-year-old Brighton English teacher. “I’ve been fairly confused since then.” Cadman says he’s felt glimmers of the infinite at raves but not at the couple of Christian meetings he went to during college. For many of his generation “the E scene was a good substitute for weekend worship.” Still, says Cadman, “I think the Big Daddy’s still around.”
Building a Faith of Her Own
Xoana Pintos Castro didn’t know that her father had been a Jesuit priest until she was 13 ; Juan-Luis Pintos had left the priesthood before she was born. “There was a gap between my two marriages,” says her father, now a sociology professor, with a grin. “The first was to the Jesuits, and the second was to Xoana’s mother.” Xoana, raised in Santiago de Compostela, studied ethics when other students had classes in Catholicism. Now in college, she believes in God–but not her father’s. Drawing on Buddhism, the rituals of Roman Catholicism and the community spirit of Islam, “I’ve built a faith of my own.”
Hey, It’s a Great Atmostphere
Raised in East Germany, Inka Kopetz used to be Protestant. She’s since quit the church–a procedure that meant filling out a form in a local courthouse to exempt her from paying Germany’s church tax. “The church is a sect like any other,” says the 30-year-old, who works at Berlin’s all-news-channel, NTV. “They’re criminals. They tell Africans to multiply and not to use condoms, despite HIV.” She wears crosses, because they’re chic and has been to church twice in her life: once in Notre Dame in Paris and once at St. Paul’s in London. “I wanted to see where Lady Di and Charles got married. I have to admit, it’s a great atmosphere. They really know how to sell their tricks.”
