What’s happening in Europe?

Katie van Schaijik | Sep 18, 2009

Paul Marshall reviews Christopher Caldwell’s book, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe.   Caldwell “ponders the current state of a continent where the aging indigenous population is gradually being supplanted by young newcomers. Today’s immigrants might be considered hostile to European values, except that Europe itself increasingly has only a foggy sense of what those values might be.”

The author notes that even the prominent German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who is an atheist, has acknowledged that “Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. To this we have no other options. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter.”

Yet much of Europe has discarded its historic religious underpinnings as irrelevant at best, harmful at worst. Even the memory of what a religiously ordered society was like has seemed to disappear, Mr. Caldwell observes. “A good definition of religion” for most modern Europeans, he says, might be “an irrational opinion, strongly held.”