Ed Vitagliano
AFA Journal news editor
July 2007 – If you had a few bucks to spare and were, as the expression goes, a “bettin’ man,” where would you place your money on this question: Will Europe continue to depart from its Christian roots, or will it return to its ancient faith?
“For many Americans, the expression ‘Christian Europe’ is an oxymoron,” said Chuck Colson, writer, culture critic and founder of Prison Fellowship Ministries. “As both the secular and religious press tell us, Europe is ‘post-Christian’ and thoroughly secularized….”
However, pointing out in a recent column that there are some signs of a spiritual awakening, Colson added, “[T]o paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of Christianity’s demise in Europe may have been greatly exaggerated.”
Still a lot left
Philip Jenkins, professor of history and religious studies at Pennsylvania State University, would probably agree with Colson’s assessment. Jenkins has written extensively on religion and especially Christianity, and three of his books on the subject, The Next Christendom, The New Faces of Christianity, and God’s Continent: Christianity, Islam, and Europe’s Religious Crisis, have gotten plenty of attention in Christian circles.
“There are a lot of Christians in Europe and there’s a lot of Christian sentiment remaining. If you talk about institutional, organized Christianity, it’s in deep trouble, but there’s still a lot left,” he told The Catholic World Reporter.
How much is “a lot” in Jenkins’ mind? “If you assume that there are about a half billion nominally Christian people in Europe, about 75 million would be pretty dedicated, pretty devoted, pretty hard core.”
With just over 725 million people in Europe, according to 2005 estimates, Jenkins’ estimate places the number of dedicated Christians at slightly more than 10%.
They appear to be making a difference. “Cultural Christianity is a much stronger force probably than it has been for 50 years in Europe,” Jenkins said.
Even within the denominations that appear to be dying, Christians are still active. “In all the major churches, including the state churches, there are smaller hardcore activist minority movements, like the evangelical congregations within the Church of England, some Lutheran movements, but above all these new religious movements, new religious orders within the Roman Catholic Church,” he said. Of these renewal movements, he added, “Though they don’t include a huge number of members, they do command a lot of influence.”
Miracle in the Netherlands?
For evidence that Christianity is not dead in Europe, one need look no further than what is arguably the continent’s most culturally liberal nation – the Netherlands.
Writing in The Weekly Standard, Dutch author Joshua Livestro said that, despite the dominant idea “that secularization is the irreversible wave of the future,” there appears to be underway what he called “a Dutch relapse into religiosity.”
In fact, Livestro said there was a growing body of evidence which suggested that “Holland is on the threshold of a new era – one we might call the age of ‘post-secularization.’”
What exactly is happening? According to Adjiedj Bakas and Minne Buwalda, authors of a study titled The Future of God, there are two main trends within Dutch Christianity: “[L]iberal Protestantism is in its death throes. It will be replaced by a new orthodoxy.”
Livestro said there’s no question that liberal Christianity is dying in the Netherlands, as the numbers of people attending mainline church services continue to tumble. He said census figures show that the membership of mainline Protestant churches “declined from 23% of the population in the late 1950s to 6% today. According to government estimates, by 2020 this figure will have dwindled to a mere 2%.”
But that is a measurement of church membership. Statistics released by the Dutch Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) indicate that a slight majority of people in the Netherlands (52%) claim to be Christian. Even the Social and Cultural Planning Agency (SCP), which uses a much stricter definition in compiling numbers, said the percentage of Dutch Christians is still probably around the 40% mark.
Beyond these figures, however, Livestro points to developments that indicate – if not an incipient religious awakening – a religious stirring is occurring.
One manifestation is the “corporate prayer” movement, in which “prayer in the workplace is fast becoming a universally accepted phenomenon.” He said that in his country government offices, universities and more than 100 companies “all allow groups of employees to organize regular prayer meetings at their premises. Trade unions have even started lobbying the government for recognition of workers’ rights to prayer in the workplace.”
Then there is the “remarkable critical and commercial success” of openly Christian writers, Livestro said, and the growing popularity of Christian teaching in informal settings.
Young people in the Netherlands also seem to be a segment that has a growing interest in Christianity, as youth churches are popping up everywhere.
“A CBS survey noted that between 2003 and 2004, church attendance among under-20s rose seemingly inexplicably, from 9% to 14%,” he noted.
There is also a change in other youth, who are unwilling to go to a church but for whom Christianity is appealing. These youthful seekers have a desire to “move away from the church of bricks and mortar to a less recognizable, more informal setting,” Livestro said. They are willing to meet “anywhere but in traditional church buildings,” and congregate in schools, parking lots, sports halls – and especially homes.
Christian immigrants moving in
Finally, Livestro said, part of the Christian renewal taking place in the Netherlands may be due to immigration.
Of course, for the last few years, when the words “immigration in Europe” have been linked to religion, the faith most frequently mentioned is Islam. And in the Netherlands – a nation of some 16 million people – the one million Muslims who have immigrated since the early 1950s are no small phenomenon.
“But in the past decade, Muslim immigration has been overtaken by a larger stream of immigrants, namely Christians from Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe,” he said. “An SCP estimate puts the number of Christian immigrants in Holland at around 700,000 – and rising fast. Recent immigration reports suggest that for every new Muslim moving to Holland, there are at least two new Christian immigrants.”
Jenkins said similar trends are cropping up elsewhere. “There is a huge network of immigrant churches, in Britain certainly, but also in basically every country there are some very large congregations. When people look at immigrant areas in France, they tend just to see Muslims, but a lot of the folks are actually black Christians … and they really provide a whole alternative religious structure across Europe. In London on an average Sunday, somewhere between 50 and 60% of people in church are nonwhite, and a lot of those are very recent immigrants.”
Poland’s courageous stand
If there is an undercurrent of renewal in Europe, that would probably come as welcome news to the Christians of Poland. Among all the nations on that continent, Poland has steadfastly refused to embrace the secularist trends of the last 50 years. (See related story here.)
“Poland cuts across the grain” when it comes to the still very secular atmosphere in Europe, said the Chicago Tribune’s Tom Hundley, for in Poland “the faith still burns brightly.”
Hundley said, “Poland’s churches are packed; its seminaries still are churning out healthy numbers of priests. According to census data, 96% of the population identify themselves as Roman Catholic; 57% say they attend Mass every Sunday.”
Even the Polish government has stood firm. For example, it recently refused to allow homosexual propaganda into its public schools – despite angry threats from European Union officials.
“What’s new in Poland is that political parties want to express their Catholicism,” said Pawel Spiewak, a Polish sociologist who spoke with Hundley. “A few years ago, a typical Pole was Catholic in his private life. Now he’s expressing it openly and wants to express it as public policy. It’s atypical for Europe.”
That desire on the part of Christians to take their faith public in Poland has created a burgeoning pro-life and pro-family movement. And according to Piotr Slusarcyk, spokesman for the League of Polish Families, a Catholic political party, that movement gets a lot of its inspiration from pro-family groups in the U.S.
“I like what I see happening in the United States – the emphasis on the family, the emergence of so many pro-life groups,” Slusarcyk said. “I feel much closer to the United States than to Europe. I’m very concerned about France, Germany, even Italy – they’ve lost their way in terms of moral development.”
Whatever is happening in Poland, and whatever might be the final outcome of things happening elsewhere in Europe, Christians should discard their gloom-and-doom sentiments and rejoice that God can move anywhere, anytime.
“As the Dutch are discovering after a century of secularization, it’s not too late. It never is with the Gospel,” said Colson. “While Christianity may be ‘completely new’ to them, its truths are eternal. And that gives Europeans – and all of us – great hope indeed.” 
