|
|
FEATURES
One nation under God
The US is powerful and
religious; the EU is weak and secular. Mark Steyn
wonders whether it is any coincidence
The other day, the guy on my local
radio station mentioned that The Passion of The Christ was the
Number One movie in America. ‘So congrats to Mel Gibson,’ he
said. ‘And it’ll probably hold on to the Number One slot until
the new Starsky & Hutch opens.’
It’s always useful to keep things in proportion. But, in fact,
Starsky & Hutch opened and The Passion cleaned its clock. Last
weekend, it took in $51.4 million, as against S&H’s $29.05
million. By then, The Passion’s total gross was up around $212
million. Pace my radio guy, mid-Seventies nostalgia is no
threat to early first-century nostalgia. It’s true that, as
the critic Stanley Crouch likes to point out, nothing is that
popular. If ten million people see a movie, you’ll make 80
million bucks, and 97 per cent of the American public won’t
even have to be involved. But I think it’s reasonable to say
that, strictly in Hollywood terms, Mel Gibson has a huge smash
on his hands. I would expect the week-on-week fall-off rate to
be slower than most movies, including The Lord of the Rings,
and the DVD sales to be colossal.
In the United States, that is. Britain and Europe are another
matter. Leaving aside for the moment the question of
anti-Semitism, the most notable characteristic of the negative
reviews is a metropolitan condescension that Mel Gibson has
had the bad taste to make a religious movie about a Jesus who
isn’t an Episcopalian social worker with enlightened views on
women, gay marriage, and so forth. Jesus, they assure us, is
about ‘love’, not ‘violence’. Fine. Make your own Jesus movie.
But this is the one Mel wanted to make, and it seems there are
many millions of Americans prepared to sit through an R-rated
movie in Aramaic and Latin on Christ’s suffering.
In Britain, I’ll bet, those of an Anglican sensibility will
find it all a bit strong meat, and the godless masses will
ignore it, and on the Continent Mel’s fellow Catholics, having
wiggled free of their Church in little more than a generation,
will have no desire to be reminded of what they’re missing. At
the European box-office, Starsky & Hutch stands a good chance
of clobbering The Passion. If so, this movie will join that
select group of cultural markers that separate Europe from
‘Bush’s America’. I say ‘Bush’s America’ because even though,
at least in his impeachment period, Bill Clinton had hordes of
‘spiritual advisers’ and was on a permanent touring circuit of
‘prayer breakfasts’ and had his press secretary issue press
releases on which psalms he was studying during the
impeachment trial and ostentatiously carried his Bible in his
hand on any number of occasions — including the Easter Day
service, after which he went back to the Oval Office to
observe the resurrection in a more personal sense with his
trusty intern — despite all that, it’s George W. Bush’s
religiosity that seems to have got under Europe’s skin.
As Max Hastings wrote in the Guardian, ‘It is hard not to hate
George Bush. His ignorance and conceit, his professed special
relationship with God, invite revulsion.’ Just for the record,
he does not claim a ‘special relationship’ with God, just a
relationship. But to secular Europe, where fewer and fewer
profess any sort of relationship with the Big Guy, even that
modest claim is enough for them to lump him in the same
category as his near neighbours in Texas, the incinerated
cultists of Waco. Malcolm Fraser, the former Australian prime
minister and like Sir Max a nominal conservative, calls the
Bush administration ‘fundamentalist’. If one had to distil
into one sentence the contempt that Britain’s great thinkers
have for Tony Blair, it would be from Jeremy Paxman’s
interrogation about the Prime Minister’s relationship with the
President: ‘Do you pray together?’ The studio audience
sniggered.
America is the last religious nation in the Western world, the
last in which a majority of the population are practising
believers and regular attenders of church (or synagogue, or
mosque). So Bush praying is only a joke to foreigners like
Pax’n’Max. No Democratic candidates have been suicidal enough
to mock him on those grounds, and even in the party’s more
decadent precincts it’s understood that the hard math of
electoral politics requires campaigners at least not to appear
ungodly. God-wise, to the American people, Bush is normal, not
weird. Going to church is normal. Going to Bible study is
normal. Buying albums of sacred songs by country singers is
normal.
Anti-Americanism makes strange bedfellows. The Arab Islamists
despise America because it’s all lap-dancing and gay-phone
sex; Europe’s radical secularists despise America because it’s
all born-again Christians hung up on abortion. They’re both
right. The free market enables Hustler to thrive. And the free
market in churches enables religion to thrive. In Europe, the
established church, whether formal (the Church of England) or
informal (as in Catholic Ireland, Italy and Spain), killed
religion as surely as state ownership killed the British car
industry. When the Episcopal Church degenerates into a bunch
of wimpsville self-doubters, Americans go elsewhere. When the
Church of England undergoes similar institutional decline,
Britons give up on religion entirely.
‘When men cease to believe in God,’ said Chesterton, ‘they do
not believe in nothing; they believe in anything!’ The
anything most of the Western world’s non-believers believe in
is government: instead of a state church, Europe believes in
the state as church — the purveyor of cradle-to-grave welfare
will provide daycare for your babies and take your aged
parents off your hands. The people are happy to have cast off
the supposed stultifying oppressiveness of religion for a
world in which the state regulates every aspect of life. The
French government’s recent headscarf ban — which, in the
interests of an ecumenical fig-leaf, is also a ban on
yarmulkes and ‘large’ crucifixes — seems the way of the
future, an attempt to push all religion to the fringes of
life. A couple of years back, a Canadian ‘human rights
commission’, in its ruling that a Christian printer had
illegally discriminated against a gay group by turning down a
printing job for pro-gay literature, said he had the right to
his religious beliefs in his own home but he had to check them
at the door when he left for work in the morning. Who’s in the
closet now?
Last year, I had a long talk with a ‘senior EU official’ and I
was amazed at the way, quite unprompted, he used the phrase
‘Europe’s post-Christian future’, presuming that I would agree
with him that this was a condition to aspire to. Europe’s
quite post-Christian enough, and most of the horrors of our
time came about through the most prominent expressions of its
post-Christian state, Nazism and Communism. And yet faith in
secularism is indestructible. The other day a correspondent
emailed a swipe at me by the Independent’s Johann Hari in a
vain effort to goad me into swiping back. Mr Hari was
discussing the term ‘Islamofascism’: ‘It has been picked up by
some people, like the vile Mark Steyn, who seem to think that
all Islam is evil. I dislike all religions and would happily
see the whittling away of every last church and mosque, but to
imply that all Islam is on a par with al-Qa’eda is grotesque.’
I certainly don’t think ‘all Islam is evil’, though much of it
is problematic for a liberal, Western, pluralist society. But
I love the way that, even as he’s slurring me as anti-Islam,
Johann Hari casually reveals that he’d like to see the end of
‘every last church and mosque’. Surely Islamophobia isn’t any
more politically correct for being subsumed within theophobia,
is it? The assumption of virtue by radical secularists comes
so easily you wonder whether they ever stop to think it
through.
For example, it is a fact that the most religious nation in
the West is also the most powerful militarily, economically
and culturally. Is that a coincidence? It could be. To suggest
otherwise would be to claim the ‘special relationship with
God’ that so distresses Max Hastings. So let’s look at it the
other way: what happens when you opt for the ‘post-Christian
future’?
Take my beloved Quebec. As recently as 1960, the birth rate in
the province was an average of four children per couple. (Jean
Chrétien, the recently retired Canadian prime minister, was
the 18th of 19 children of a Quebec mill worker.) But then
came the so-called ‘Quiet Revolution’, determined to free the
people not just from the House of Windsor but from the Church
of Rome, too. There’s a fine scene in Denys Arcand’s Barbarian
Invasions in which a sad Catholic priest in Montreal explains
to an art appraiser from London that one month in the Sixties
the churches simply emptied out and the people never came
back.
Fast forward to 1995, and Quebec’s referendum on
‘sovereignty’. Lucien Bouchard, the separatist leader of Her
Majesty’s loyal opposition, wanders off-message in one speech
and urges the women of the province to have more children
because they have one of the lowest fertility rates of any
‘white race’ on the planet. Immediately, all the bien pensant
types berate him for his faux pas. But the thing is, he wasn’t
wrong. A couple of weeks later, his side narrowly lost the
referendum, by a few thousand votes. Given that young
Francophones tend to be separatist, had Quebec Catholics of
the mid-Seventies had children at the same rate as their
parents, M. Bouchard would now have his glorious république.
Now he never will. Quebec couples have an average of 1.4
children, and their shrivelled fertility rate has cost them
their country.
In the space of a generation, a Catholic backwater became the
most militantly secularist jurisdiction in North America.
Marriage is a dying institution: Quebec has the highest rate
of common-law relationships on the continent. Families are a
dying institution: Quebec has the highest rate of abortion in
Canada. And more to the point, as far as the separatists are
concerned, the dream of an independent country is dead. Andre
Langevin, the enterprising mayor of Coaticook, a small town on
my commute from New Hampshire to Montreal, offers his citizens
$75 for their first child, $150 for the second, and $750 for
every child thereafter, plus various other incentives. M.
Langevin understands the basic arithmetic of the Euro-Canadian
welfare state: without population growth, it’s insolvent.
Unfortunately, the paradox of a welfarist society is that it
weans people away from the familial impulse necessary to
sustain it.
Maybe the collapse of the church and the looming demographic
disaster facing Quebec and most of Catholic Europe is just
another coincidence. But, for whatever reason, Europeans have
less and less interest in God’s first injunction, to ‘go forth
and multiply’. And, as a consequence, they’ll enjoy their
post-Christian EUtopia, but only for the two or three
generations it lasts. Russia is headed for the same fate.
China, where Christianity is booming, seems unlikely to make
the same mistake.
In his new book, Civilization and its Enemies, Lee Harris
begins with the following observation: ‘Forgetfulness occurs
when those who have been long inured to civilized order can no
longer remember a time in which they had to wonder whether
their crops would grow to maturity without being stolen or
their children sold into slavery by a victorious foe. That,
before 9/11, was what had happened to us. The very concept of
the enemy had been banished from our moral and political
vocabulary.’
Very true. But other countries at other times have been made
‘forgetful’ by civilised order. It’s the particular form of
civilisation that makes this bout of forgetfulness potentially
fatal. In post-Christian Europe — where fertile women who not
so long ago would have had three children by the age of 24 now
have one designer child at 39, where social welfare programmes
depend on a growing population, where the main source of
immigration is from a culture that despises secularism as
weak, short-sighted narcissism — societal ‘forgetfulness’
isn’t just a passing phase you can snap out of. In this
situation, the Christian fundamentalists, Holy Rollers,
born-again Bible Belters and Jesus freaks of America are the
rationalists. It’s the hyper-rationalists of secular Europe
who are living on blind faith.
|
|
| |
