The Stones Without the Men

When I see the pictures of Islam’s new onslaught against Europe and do not see the Don Pelayos, the Charles Martels, the Crusaders crying Deus vult, John of Austria at Lepanto or John Sobieski at the gates of Vienna, my rage turns quickly into the sadder thing: impotence. The old continent still has the stones. It no longer has the men who believed the stones represented something worth dying for. And I cannot help comparing that exhausted inheritance with our United States — vulgar, unfinished, without a long history or true class — and yet still capable, at least in part, of kicking back.

That is why I believe that the United States, with all its known defects, has a fundamental advantage over a Western Europe where apostasy from Christian civilization has not merely emptied the churches but reshaped the soul of society. Not irreversibly, perhaps. But reversal would take an effort I do not see even in its infancy. Even much of what calls itself “the Right” there has absorbed a socialist habit of mind: the State as first provider, the citizen as client, risk as an offense, and the Christian past as a source of embarrassment rather than of gratitude. They will defend cathedrals as heritage and blush at the faith that built them.

What collapsed in much of Western Europe was not only Mass attendance. It was the public anthropology that Christian civilization had slowly imposed: the human being as creature, not raw material; the family as prior to the State; sin and forgiveness instead of therapy and management; a law that presumed a moral order it did not invent. Apostasy, in that older sense, is not the private decision to skip Sunday. It is the substitution of belief in God — and of the old duty to order man and society to Him — with a doctrine of man. Once God is no longer the measure, the person becomes the measure: a will with rights, a self to be redesigned, a problem for the State to manage. Empty naves are only the visible wound. The real change is this: a civilization that asked how to live before God now asks only how man may live before himself.

It would be too long to trace here the long, older cracks in Christian Europe — the wars of religion, the Enlightenment’s pride, the slow cooling of practice. I focus on the twentieth century, when the break from the past became a governing project. Two world wars shattered the old confidence. The postwar settlement offered security, health, and dignity through administration rather than through parish, guild, or household. Established churches had already taught generations that Christianity was the furniture of the State; so, when the State changed its mind, the furniture could be moved to the museum. Then came the cultural revolt of the 1960s. And inside the Church herself a storm broke that Vatican II did not create alone, but that the Council’s ambiguities and the spirit claimed in its name made far worse: liturgy stripped of awe, doctrine spoken in the tone of a press release, shepherds more anxious not to offend the age than to convert it. By then large parts of the elite already regarded the faith as a provincial residue.

John Paul II saw the danger with terrible clarity. From Santiago de Compostela, on 9 November 1982, he cried out to the continent as few modern popes have dared: “I, Bishop of Rome and Pastor of the universal Church, from Santiago, cry out with love to you, old Europe: Find yourself again. Be yourself. Discover your origins. Revive your roots. Live again those authentic values that made your history glorious and your presence on other continents beneficial. Rebuild your spiritual unity…” It seems to me no one listened. Certainly not enough.

Years later, in Ecclesia in Europa, he spoke of a “silent apostasy,” of Europeans living as heirs who had squandered a patrimony entrusted to them by history. And when he spoke of popular piety — that last warm vein of the old faith in processions, confraternities, and local devotion — he warned that to detach it from the Gospel and reduce it to a mere folkloric or costumbrista display would be to betray its essence. Benedict XVI pressed the knife deeper. Europe, he said, was committing a kind of “apostasy from itself, even before apostasy from God,” to the point of doubting its own identity. That is the temptation of the present hour: to invoke “Christian Europe” as scenery against Islam while emptying the creed that once made the scenery more than a set. Folklore can decorate a square. It cannot hold a frontier.

The numbers, without rhetoric, confirm the hollowing. In the United States about seven in ten adults still claim a religion and some 62 percent still call themselves Christian; daily prayer sits near 44 percent. In high-income Western Europe the same measures fall off a cliff: daily prayer at 18 percent in France, 16 percent in Germany, 8 percent in Sweden; religious identity itself often a cultural leftover rather than a practiced allegiance. Spain’s Catholic majority, still near-total in the 1970s, has been gutted with particular speed among the young. Poland, Hungary, Greece, and to a degree Italy remain partial exceptions. But these are not the rule of the West that built the EU.

Is that irreversible? No civilization’s unbelief is a law of physics. Adult baptisms have ticked up in places that were supposed to be finished with the subject. That is interesting. But it is not yet an infancy of restoration. A few thousand converts do not reverse a half-century in which the schools, the broadcasters, the civil service, and the prestige professions learned to treat Christian moral structure as a public hygiene problem. Recovery would mean recovering limits: that not every desire is a right, that sex is not a costume, that children need a father and a mother, that the State is not the source of meaning. It would mean treating the ordinary family again as a public good, not a lifestyle option. And it would mean facing a hard fact the managers of decline refuse: you can keep the cathedrals, the legal codes, and the tourist routes after you have thrown away the truths that made them, but you will not keep the civilization. What I see instead is the management of decline, and a Christian name still used as a slogan — often as folklore — while the faith that forged it is treated as an inconvenience.

The United States is not immune. The same poison is here, and it has made huge inroads. Christian identification fell from 78 percent in 2007 to 62 percent in the latest Pew landscape study. The “nones” became a durable third of the adult population. Coastal metros, universities, and much of the professional class already live inside a European ecosystem: the self as a project to be endlessly redesigned, identity as a political weapon, bureaucratic moralism, a polite horror of the country (the “deplorables” in the “flyover states”) that still prays and still reproduces. Anyone who pretends otherwise is not looking. The decline, however, has at least paused in the last several years rather than continuing its straight line toward the Dutch or Swedish pattern. That pause is not a revival. It is a reminder that the floor may be higher.

The “strategic reserve” is not a campaign slogan and it is not the old Moral Majority. It is simply this: a large remainder of Christianity and common sense that has not yet been administered out of existence, and that still has political weight.

First, Christianity in America was never one established church that could be captured and then discarded. It was a quarreling marketplace of congregations. That made it vulgar. Noisy. It also made it hard to kill with a single elite decision. Evangelical Protestantism, immigrant Catholicism, Black churches, and the newer Pentecostal energy of Latin America inside the United States are not the same thing as a state Lutheranism or the Church of England that forgot why it existed.

Second, the reserve is geographic and social, not merely poll-deep. Mississippi is not Massachusetts. The South, much of the interior, and a large share of working people still treat God, work, children, and local competence as more real than the latest moral fashion. Common sense here is not an IQ score. It is a folk metaphysics: the world is not infinitely plastic; men and women are not interchangeable parts; expertise is useful and also frequently drunk on itself; a people that cannot say “no” will be administered until it cannot say anything.

Third — and this is the part polite Europe prefers to treat as a joke — the reserve is armed. Civilian gun ownership in the United States is not in the same civilizational category as Switzerland’s militia tradition or Finland’s hunting culture. It is an order of magnitude apart: on the order of 120 firearms per 100 residents, with tens of millions of owners and a constitutional mythos that still treats the armed householder as a legitimate political fact. That does not make Americans wiser. It does make certain European methods of cultural enforcement harder to import intact. When British or Scottish police knock on doors over a joke, a prayer, or an unfashionable sentence posted online, that style of rule still feels, to millions here, like a foreign country. A society that has outsourced both meaning and force to the State can be redesigned from the ministries. A society that still contains a large, dispersed, armed minority which does not share the redesign has a different problem, and a different kind of veto.

The laugh in “armed to the teeth” is real. So is the point underneath it. Power that cannot imagine being refused will always underestimate people who have not outsourced refusal.

None of this licenses American self-congratulation. The United States can lose the reserve the same way Europe did: by educating its children out of it, by turning churches into branding operations, by teaching the professional class to treat the founding inheritance — faith, family, limited government, the givenness of nature — as a stain, by confusing Christian civilization with a voting bloc. The advantage is not that America is holy. It is that the apostasy is incomplete, the memory is shorter and therefore less exhausted, and the people who still believe the old things are numerous enough, distributed enough, and materially independent enough that they have not yet been reduced to a heritage committee.

Western Europe may yet surprise itself. Stranger recoveries have happened, and not by human cleverness alone. God and His Divine Providence has raised that soil from worse ruins than these: from the barbarian kingdoms after Rome, from the Black Death, from the wars that should have ended her. God is not bound by Pew numbers. But recovery is not a mood, and it is not a costume. It is conversion, children, vows, parishes, and the courage to be unfashionable — a long reconstruction of what a person is, what a family is for, and what a law may not do. Until that work is visible, the American condition remains the less finished, and therefore the less surrendered, of the two.

by Alfonso Beccar Varela and Grok