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Technology is a wonderful thing. The spread of global travel, news media, and communications networks means not only that opportunities for international rancor and misunderstanding have never been greater, but that societies can much more rapidly discover how much they are disliked around the globe.
In recent years, North Americans and Europeans have increasingly discovered that the vast and frigid Atlantic Ocean is emblematic of the deep differences between them in values and outlook. Take attitudes toward the Middle East. Most Americans, whether liberal or conservative, have a strong and largely uncritical view of the state of Israel, in marked contrast to the general hostility to Israel that exists across much of Europe. Explanations for this intercontinental divide are not immediately obvious. Certainly, Europe has larger Muslim minorities than the United States, and is more dependent on Middle Eastern oil. While the U.S. media have accused Europeans (and especially the French) of a continuing anti-Semitism, we might equally point to the strong American tradition of philo-Semitism, which grows so naturally from the nation's roots in the Old Testament and in apocalyptic. At least on this side of the water, it seems only natural that an overwhelmingly Christian country should see its fate intimately bound up with that of the Jewish state. Some recent surveys confirm this notion of religious America confronting godless Europe, to the extent that in terms of religious worldviews, U.S. Christians have more in common with Africans or Latin Americans than with the British or the Dutch.
Indeed, Europe seems prima facie to offer a classic model of the secularization thesis, the idea that religion inevitably declines as post-industrial society matures. Somewhere along the line, extensive remodeling seems to have removed the Sacred Canopy that had given Christian Europe its raison d'être. So familiar, in fact, is the notion of secular Europe that it is refreshing, and a little startling, to find a book that tries to battle the received wisdom. Not surprisingly, the would-be heretic is Andrew Greeley, an enormously accomplished sociologist who relishes nothing more than an academic controversy. (Incidentally, while challenging academic orthodoxies is a valuable task, does he have to be so wearyingly combative on every single issue with which he disagrees with other scholars?)
Greeley makes a number of excellent points that deserve careful consideration. One is historical. He argues that the secularization thesis wrongly assumes a decline in religiosity from some past Age of Faith, which in fact never existed. The more we examine the beliefs of ordinary Europeans in bygone times, Greeley maintains, the less evidence we see of monolithic orthodoxy or even of the near-universal notional adherence to Christianity posited by many scholars.
Turning to modern times, he is equally dismissive of the core claims of secularization. Using survey evidence, he argues that Europeans still affirm a surprising level of continuing belief in religious and supernatural doctrines, overwhelmingly in the case of the existence of God, but also with large numbers accepting life after death and miracles. Even in Britain and the former West Germany, 40 percent of respondents claim to believe in miracles. Greeley also argues, very fairly, that Europe is anything but homogenous, and that it is unwise to extrapolate from secular Britain or the Netherlands. The smaller countries often demonstrate higher levels of religious commitment, though sometimes in bizarre or wildly heterodox forms, and occult and New Age doctrines are especially strong in the former Soviet Bloc. (Oddly, in stressing the diversity of European countries and societies, he says virtually nothing about the overseas immigrants, the Asians, Africans, and Afro-Caribbeans who are reinvigorating Christian churches in so many regions).
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