Looking at things from this side of the Atlantic, it is easy to
think of Europe as a single, united entity. Seen up close it’s not so clear.
National identity keeps getting in the way.
French, German, Italian, Polish, and so on — those ancient
identities still matter to many people. As arguably they should.
National identity bestows a sense of rootedness and continuity
that the new European institutions apparently haven’t been able to supply up to
now. A case in point: last year’s Brexit vote in Great Britain, shocking to the
pundits, which took the country out of the European Union (or, more precisely,
set that process in motion). Being English, it seems, still counts for more
with the English than being European does.
Religious identity also is part of the equation — today, a
disputed one. This relationship once seemed overwhelmingly clear to someone
like the Catholic apologist Hilaire Belloc, who famously wrote: “Europe will
return to the Faith, or she will perish. The Faith is Europe, and Europe is the
Faith.”
Today’s secularized Europeans obviously aren’t buying that. Yet
if they’re honest, many would agree that it’s a species of historical blindness
to ignore the role played by Christianity in shaping Europe — both the Europe
of the nations and Europe as a whole — not only in the past but also now.
Yet ignore it some do. An institution that opened its doors in
Brussels last spring stands as a kind of monument to that.
It’s called the House of European History. Situated in a former
dental museum close to the European parliament (of which it’s a project) and
other European institutions, the House of European History offers an account of
Europe described by one writer as “both typically modern and emphatically French
and socialist.”
Here, reports Arnold Huijgen, writing at Acton Institute online,
“the French Revolution seems to be the birthplace of Europe; and there is
little room for anything that may have preceded it.” In this narrative, the
European Union itself is “the high point of European history,” he notes.
But, says Huijgen, a professor at a Reformed Church theological
school in The Netherlands, what’s most striking about the House of European
History’s vision of European history is that “religion does not exist … No
longer is European secularism fighting the Christian religion; it simply
ignores every religious aspect in life altogether.”
This is hardly new. On the contrary, it’s been taking shape for
many years. The erasure of religion from a museum of European history reminds
me of a telling observation by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran theologian
whom the Nazis executed shortly before the end of the war for his involvement
in a plot against Hitler.
In his unfinished, fragmentary, powerful Ethics, he identified
the “new unity” introduced into Europe by the French Revolution in place of the
old Christian unity shattered by the events surrounding the Reformation as a
unity in “western godlessness.”
“It is not the theoretical denial of the existence of a God. It
is itself a religion, a religion of hostility to God,” Bonhoeffer wrote, adding
that this modern godlessness “ranges from the religion of Bolshevism to the
midst of the Christian churches.”
No more can secular Europe ignore the formative role of religion
than it can ignore the national identities within it. Pope Francis speaks of
Europe as having a “spiritual patrimony” that needs communicating to Europeans
themselves with “passion and a renewed freshness.” He was right. But where is
that happening now? Not in Brussels, unfortunately.
Shaw is a freelance writer from Washington and author of American Church: The
Remarkable Rise, Meteoric Fall, and Uncertain Future of Catholicism in America.