As an American in Europe, when you tell Europeans that you go to church on Sunday, they look at you like a museum piece--something strange,” said journalist Richard Miniter.
Near Brussels, at Christian Center, an Assemblies of God church, Belgian Pastor Paul Devos ministers to a culture in which Christianity is largely irrelevant.
“In the United States, people would more quickly turn toward at least Christ in general and Christianity, because it's still somewhat part of the culture in general. Here in Europe we have gone beyond that point, and we do not expect anything from religion apart from some very abstract hope that there is something after this life,” Devos said.
Among the clergy in the state churches, unbelief is extraordinarily high.
Baylor Sociologist Rodney Stark said, “It's easy to have a negative religious experience going to church in Europe. The one place unbelief is rampant is in the churches.”
The study "Fragmented Faith?" found that in Britain, one out of five Anglican pastors does not believe in the bodily resurrection of Christ. And only 60 percent believe in the virgin birth--that's a lower level of belief than among churchgoers.
“It's the churches they don't go to. And one of the reasons is [that] they don't go is the people running them don't care if they don't go,” Stark explained.
There have been reports recently that although church attendance in Europe is low, belief in God is actually very high, but belief in what sort of God? Judging from surveys, it's a new age faith with a large dose of moral relativism.
Vince Esterman, a Frenchman who grew up in Australia, has been a French pastor for almost 20 years, and has a dynamic street ministry in Paris. Although he has led a lot of Frenchmen to Christ, he doesn't talk much about revival. He speaks of a Europe that is still moving away from God.
“Europe that was the custodian of the gospel in the very early decades now is the continent that is rejecting the gospel and Christianity,” Esterman said. “And so we have seen France go into decline and with it, Europe generally.”
But instead of looking to faith for answers, the European media continue to mock America's high church attendance as weird. The British Economist Magazine wrote, "To Europeans, religion is the strangest and most disturbing feature about (America).”
Esterman said, “This last week in prime time television on one of the French national stations they had a program on God in America. And again it was Pentecostal Christians in the states, and they were ridiculed and treated as a simple minded naive people. But absolutely nothing can be said against Muslims of course because there's always retaliation.”
Stark wrote in the Victory of Reason that Europe owes everything--its culture, its freedom, its science, and its wealth--to Christianity. But European leaders today are defiant in their efforts to keep God and Christian faith out of public life.
A sociologist at the Sorbonne in Paris summed it up this way: "We are not going to sacrifice women's equality, democracy, and individual freedoms on the altar of a new religion,” said Patrick Weil, University of Paris-Sorbonne, Christian Science Monitor.
But some would say Europe has a new religion. Italy's Culture Minister Rocco Buttiglione, a devout Catholic, calls it "a nihilistic fundamentalism against truth." Stark calls it hedonism, and says it is why Europe is dying. No Western European country is having enough babies to replace its current population.
“The loss of faith in Europe is like an unseen black star that still has a tremendous gravitational pull,” Miniter said. “They don't understand why their culture is failing. They don't understand why divorce rates and suicide rates are so high. They don't understand why so few European women have more than one child, and why on most European streets, you see more dogs than children. This is the impact of the death of real Christian belief in Europe.”
One writer described Europe today as a majority of Christian atheists and a minority of Muslim fanatics--an exaggeration. But there is a spiritual void on the continent that Islam waits to fill. It was this void in the life of a Belgian woman, a former drug addict named Muriel DeGauque that caused her to convert to Islam, go to Iraq, and blow herself up trying to kill U.S. troops.
“I have been an eyewitness to France becoming increasingly Islamicized. There is no longer an ability to morally resist a strong culture like Islam coming into the country,” Esterman said.
Stark said, “Europe is going to get more religious than it is either because of a revival of Christianity or because they go Muslim…you can't sit there with no babies for ever.”
And because belief impacts everything from culture, to economics, to the war on terror, religious America and anti-religious Europe are likely to drift farther apart unless Europe returns to God.
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