Europe's Christian Comeback

By Philip Jenkins
Foreign Policy, June 2007

Edited by Andy Ross

The West is awash with fear of the Islamization of Europe. "A youthful Muslim society to the south and east of the Mediterranean is poised to colonize — the term is not too strong — a senescent Europe," Niall Ferguson has predicted. Such grim prophecies ignore reality. Europe remains a stronger Christian fortress than people realize.

Among the ruins of faith, European Christianity is adapting to a world in which its convinced adherents represent a small but vigorous minority. Within European Catholicism, new religious currents have become a potent force. Similar trends are at work within the Protestant churches of Northern and Western Europe. Alongside these older Christian communities are energetic immigrant congregations.

Ironically, the coming of Islam is also reviving political issues most thought extinct in Europe, including debates about the limits of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the right to proselytize. The result has been a rediscovery of the continent's Christian roots and a renewed sense of European cultural Christianity. Jürgen Habermas, a veteran leftist German philosopher not long ago proclaimed, "Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization."
 

AR  (June 2007) An interesting perspective, and defensible too. Ferguson is fanning the flames with his talk of colonization to get a reaction from passive Europeans. Habermas is getting old and surely sees that Marxism as an ersatz for religion is hopeless — he debated Pope Benedict XVI recently and must have realized that the Pope won.

(December 2010) The revival is a prelude to a rebirth of faith in a quite new context that goes beyond Christianity as we have known it. My attempt to prefigure some elements of the reborn form is sketched in my book on Globorg.