The Triumph of Christianity (43 page)

To demonstrate the connection between the lack of effective missionizing centuries ago and the lack of religious participation in Europe today, for each of sixteen nations of Western Europe I calculated the number of centuries since their supposed Christianization (twenty-one minus the century), with values ranging from seventeen for Italy down to eight for Finland.
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I then coded the current church attendance rate for each country, based on the World Values Surveys. As suspected, the duration of Christianity is extremely highly correlated with contemporary rates of church attendance, r = 0.72.
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It’s not that Scandinavians, for example, have stopped going to church; they never did go. In contrast, attendance remains quite high in Southern Europe, in the areas that were Christianized before Constantine. So, the historic lack of effective missionizing partly explains Europe’s “exceptionalism.”

Lazy, Obstructionist State Churches

In most European nations there is nothing resembling a religious “free” market. In many there are still established state churches supported by taxes. In most of the rest, a particular religion is the object of considerable government “favoritism.” And in nearly all European nations, the government bureaucracy engages in overt and covert interference with all religious “outsiders” and “newcomers” that challenge the established religious order.

There are Lutheran state churches in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, and Norway, while in Sweden, the established position of the Church of Sweden (Lutheran) was ended in 2006, although the government continues to collect a religious tax on its behalf. There are two state churches in Germany, the Evangelical Church (Protestant) and the Roman Catholic Church, both supported by taxes, and their clergy are classified as civil servants. Some cantons in Switzerland recognize Roman Catholicism as the state church; other cantons support an Evangelical Reformed state church. The Roman Catholic Church receives tax support in Austria and payments of more than six billion Euros a year in Spain. In Italy, people choose the group to receive their church tax from a short list of Christian denominations and in Belgium there is no church tax, but the government provides very substantial support to Catholicism, Protestantism, Anglicanism, Judaism, Islam, and a category called “nondenominational.” There is no church tax in the Netherlands, but the two primary Protestant churches and the Roman Catholics receive many large subsidies. No religious group receives direct government support in France, but the Catholic schools receive huge subsidies, and immense favoritism is shown to the Roman Catholic Church by the bureaucracy. Finally, the Church of England remains the established faith, but is not supported by taxes or government funds, being able to sustain itself from huge endowments built up during prior centuries of mandatory tithing.

These close links between church and state have many consequences. First of all, they create lazy churches. The money continues to come whether or not people attend, so there is no need for clergy to exert themselves. Second, these links encourage people to view religion “as a type of public utility.”
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Individuals need do nothing to preserve the church; the government will see to it. This attitude makes it difficult for nonsubsidized faiths to compete—people will be reluctant to contribute to a church. Thus, when some German evangelists attempted television ministries, they drew viewers, but not contributions,
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since religion is supposed to come free.

The existence of favored churches also encourages government hindrance and harassment of other churches. The French government has officially designated 173 religious groups (most of them evangelical Protestants, including Baptists) as dangerous cults, imposing heavy tax burdens upon them and subjecting their members to official discrimination in such things as employment. Subsequently, Belgium has outdone the French, identifying 189 dangerous cults, including the Quakers, the YWCA (but not the YMCA), Hasidic Jews, Assemblies of God, the Amish, Buddhists, and Seventh-day Adventists.

But even groups not condemned by parliamentary action are targets of government interference. As the distinguished British sociologist James Beckford noted, all across Europe government bureaucrats impose “administrative sanctions... behind a curtain of official detachment.”
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Many Protestant groups report waiting for years to obtain a building permit for a church, or even for a permit to allow an existing building to be used as a church. This is especially common in Scandinavian nations where it is often ruled that there is “no need” for an additional church in some area, and hence no permit is granted.
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In Germany, many Pentecostal groups have been denied tax-free status unless they register with the government as secular groups such as sports clubs rather than as churches. Subsequently, the government sometimes revokes their tax-exempt status and imposes unpayable fines and back tax demands on congregations.
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Nevertheless, many European scholars are adamant that their nations enjoy full religious liberty. To challenge that claim, it no longer is necessary to recite examples of state intrusions because Brian Grim and Roger Finke
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have created quantitative measures of government interference in religious life. They based their coding on the highly respected annual
International Religious Freedom Report
produced by the U.S. Department of State. One of Grim and Finke’s measures is the Government Regulation Index, which reflects “the restrictions placed on the practice, profession, or selection of religion by the official laws, policies, or administrative actions of the state,” scored from 0.0 (no restrictions) to 10.0 (only one religion allowed). On this measure, most European nations appear to offer a fair amount of religious freedom, although far less than the United States, France having the highest level of restrictions (3.9). But Grim and Finke’s second measure, the Government Favoritism Index, tells a very different story.

The favoritism index is based on “subsidies, privileges, support, or favorable sanctions provided by the state to a select religion or a small group of religions.” This index also varies from 0.0 (no favoritism) to 10.0 (extreme favoritism). Taiwan scores 0.0 and Saudi Arabia and Iran each score 9.3. And while Afghanistan and the United Arab Emirates score 7.8, so do Iceland, Spain, and Greece, while Belgium scores 7.5, slightly higher than Bangladesh’s 7.3 and India’s 7.0. Morocco scores 6.3, while Denmark scores 6.7, Finland 6.5, Austria 6.2, Switzerland 5.8, France 5.5, Italy 5.3, and Norway 5.2. Europe has a religious “market” highly distorted by government policies of favoritism.

“Enlightened” Churches

Not content to make little or no effort to arouse public religious participation, in much of Europe the dominant churches, especially the Protestant state churches, have modeled themselves on those American denominations that have been declining so precipitously. In the name of theological “enlightenment” they offer extremely inexpensive religion, stripped of moral demands and of all but the vaguest sort of supernaturalism. In this regard, the recent case of a parish priest in the Church of Denmark is instructive.

Thorkild Grosbøll served for many years as the priest of the Danish Church in Tarbaek, a town about ten miles north of Copenhagen. In 2003 he published a book in which he explained that he did not believe in God. This attracted some attention and led to an interview with a national newspaper in which Grosbøll said, “God belongs in the past. He actually is so old fashioned that I am baffled by modern people believing in his existence. I am thoroughly fed up with empty words about miracles and eternal life.”
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Subsequently, he told the
New York Times,
“I do not believe in a physical God, in the afterlife, in the resurrection, in the Virgin Mary.... And I believe Jesus was [only] a nice guy.”
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Nevertheless, Grosbøll planned to continue as a priest, obviously assuming that his beliefs were within the acceptable limits of the Danish Church. And that appears to be the case. It was not until a year after these outbursts that Grosbøll’s bishop relieved him of his duties. Later, the case was transferred to an ecclesiastical court. Then in 2006 Grosbøll resumed serving as a parish priest after reconfirming his priestly vows, but without recanting any of his views, albeit he was instructed not to talk to the press. The Ministry of Ecclesiastical Affairs had decided that no further action was needed since Grosbøll was eligible for retirement in February 2008.

This was not a freak event. The Scandinavian state churches have been flirting with irreligion for at least a century. Consider that in Sweden the church has been largely controlled locally by elected boards, the candidates being nominated by the national political parties. That has meant that for several generations the favored candidates were socialists, which often has resulted in placing avowed atheists in charge of the church. “Members of parish boards and the church council are elected more for their political positions and conviction than for their religious faith. No religious qualifications are required of the candidates—indeed, they need not even be baptized or confirmed. The state church is governed by a majority of nonbelievers—citizens who seldom or never attend church services.”
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As with other Scandinavian state churches, until disestablishment was adopted in 2006, the Church of Sweden was controlled by the Ministry of Ecclesiastical Affairs, and for many years the Minister of Ecclesiastical Affairs was Alva Myrdahl, a well-known leftist economist and nonbeliever. She was inspired to appoint a commission to compose a new Swedish translation of the New Testament, on grounds that “the timeworn Holy Bible [is] becoming increasingly marginalized in the modern, rational, world view.”
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Even its ardent supporters acknowledge that this translation (published in 1981) contains “sweeping transformation[s] of accepted interpretations.... In important ways, it must of necessity run against the grain of Bible traditions.”
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This demystified translation is now the official Church of Sweden version. Is it really any wonder that by far the majority of the Swedes who are in church of a Sunday attend small Protestant denominations that oppose the state church?

It is instructive too that the Roman Catholic Church has nowhere in Europe been at the mercy of the state vis-à-vis its teachings and scriptures. And religion remains far stronger in the Catholic nations of Europe than in the Protestant regions.

Clearly, the lack of meaningful religious messages did not cause the decline of Europe’s churches, but, given the fate of similar American denominations, it seems likely that this lack
keeps them empty
.

Believing Nonbelongers

S
O FAR THE DISCUSSION
has been focused on lazy and empty churches in Europe. But just as the nonattending medieval Europeans had religion (if a rather unorthodox mixture), so do most Europeans today. So much so that the British sociologist Grace Davie coined the term “believing non-belongers.”
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It is close to the truth to say that almost no one goes to church in the Scandinavian nations—about one person out of twenty or even fewer attends weekly. But it is equally true to say no one admits to being an atheist—again about one person in twenty. In all but Sweden, the majority of Scandinavians identify themselves as a “religious person,” and even in Sweden, 62 percent pray.
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The majority of Norwegians believe in life after death and that the Bible “is inspired by God.”
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New Age beliefs in such things as reincarnation, “healing” crystals, and ghosts are widespread all across Scandinavia
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(echoing the magical religion of their medieval ancestors). Similar patterns exist in all of the European societies that have been held as exemplars of secularization. It is absurd to call these secularized societies when what they really are is unchurched.

Leftist Politics

During the French Revolution, the French Encyclopedist Denis Diderot (1713–1784) proposed that freedom required that “the last king be strangled with the guts of the last priest.” What this reflected, in addition to Diderot’s liking for excessive rhetoric, is that in Europe the link between church and state tended to result in church support for the aristocracy in opposition to rebels and revolutionaries. As a result, in 1911 the British Socialist Party officially declared that “it is a profound truth that Socialism is the natural enemy of religion.” Indeed, the entire European Left took this position, often expressing angry and strident atheism. Thus, in data collected in 1957 by the British Gallup Organization, supporters of the Conservative Party were almost twice as likely to attend church at least “now and again” (62 percent) than were supporters of the Labour Party (36 percent).
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An even stronger effect of Leftism on church attendance existed in France at this same time: 7 percent of Communist voters and 16 percent of Socialists said they currently were practicing their faith (Catholicism), compared with 67 percent of the Gaulists and 68 percent of the Peasant and Independent Party voters. In the Netherlands, based on data from 1956, 79 percent of voters supporting the Anti-Revolutionary Party had attended church in the past seven days, compared with 10 percent of the Labor Party.
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Consequently, it has often been argued that the popularity of Leftist parties in Europe prompted substantial defections from religion, at least from participation in the churches. But given that participation has always been low, it probably is more the case that the success of the Left in Europe had much to do with the churches having been weak in the first place. An exception may be France, both because of the out-of-control intensity of the revolution and its militant anticlericalism, legacies which long lived on in the post–World War II popularity of the French Communist Party and in the fact that France far surpasses other European nations in terms of the prevalence of militant atheism. Another exception may be Spain where bitterness going back to the Franco era still animates leftist antagonisms toward the church.