I'm Right Again Dot ComA new commentary every Wednesday - January 7, 2015
The rapidly growing number of deserted Christian Churches littering the landscape of Great Britain and Europe.
The empty, deteriorating buildings that were once places of worship have become a huge problem. What does this portend for American religious organizations and the rest of the world?
At first, it was anecdotal: The few relatives and friends who visited Europe in the early 1950s, would often remark after their return on the number of empty pews in the churches they visited. Later, it was noted in the media that church membership, not only in Great Britain but all of Europe, was on a precipitous decline. I've a good friend who commented about this in an eMail only this week.
It was natural to expect that the type and vast number of horrendous wounds shared by enemies in the great war would need time to heal. Many churches destroyed in the conflict would never be rebuilt. We also recognized that the hegemony; the dominance imposed on all facets of society by "godless" Russian Socialism, was destroying organized religion behind what Winston Churchill first called "The Iron Curtain"
But that was 70 years ago. It appears that the Russian Orthodox Church is not only fully sanctioned, but encouraged by the powers guiding Russia from the Kremlin.
The downtrend cannot be blamed on the rise of Islam. To get a better grasp on this theory, I went to the most recent tabulations of the prestigious Pew Research Center. Bottom line: Despite isolated scenes in certain neighborhoods of streets filled with worshippers touching their heads to the pavestones and the Islamist terror attack this week on a French satirical magazine, there is little likelihood that minarets are going to be rising to match church steeples across the Atlantic—not even the ones above deserted Christian sanctuaries.
Only 4.4% of the total population of the United Kingdom are Muslims. The total percentage of the population of Austria that is Islamist is only 5.7%. In Denmark-4%, France-7.5%. Germany-5%, Italy-2.6%, Netherlands-5.5%, Spain-3.3%, Sweden-4.9 (Of all "progressive-liberal" countries, Sweden is undergoing some sort of anti-muslim backlash currently). The middle European countries, such as the Czech Republic, report a tiny 0.1% Muslim population. Only Bosnia-Herzegovina, once part of the Turkish-Ottoman empire, has the most number of Muslims, at 41.6% of its population.
There are supposed to be 1.57 billion adherents to Islam world-wide—23% of the planet's population. Yet according to Pew Research, less than 6% of the Europeans in 27 countries are followers of the faith. So, this is not the reason for the great number of empty and abandoned Christian churches across Europe and the British Isles. For whatever reasons, droves of people across the region are abandoning Christianity in all of its forms. Something else is going on, and I for one believe this is a bad thing.
I happened to run across a remark made recently at a gathering of religious personages by George Cary, former Archbishop of Canterbury, stating his belief that Christianity in Britain is one generation away from extinction. Immediately afterwards, the Daily Mail, distributed over all parts of England, Scotland and Wales, conducted a survey that revealed that nearly half of all persons born in that island nation do not believe there is a God. To me, that is disturbing.
This is not just some vagary of the newspaper's editorial policy. As late as 2010, The British Social Attitudes Survey verified that 50.7% of the British public say they are not only not religious, but 68% of the respondents state that they have no connection of any sort with any religion or church.
In 2010, a very large polling company, the Euroberometer, did a vast amount of research on the subject. You could be astounded to learn that 30% of all of those staid Dutch people say that they do not believe in any sort of "God," or as the form put it: "Spirit or Life Force." 27% of all Germans feel the same way. It may be unfair to add the comment that I was not surprised to find that 40% of all persons in France agree with the Germans. For once. It appears that anti-sectarian France is paying a greater price for the heavier integration of Arabs in its society.
Roughly half of the people in 27 European countries polled by Eurobometer say they have never attended church, except perhaps for a wedding or funeral.
One has to wonder what this portends for the rest of the world, and particularly the United States. Despite the fact that the old, mainline U.S. denominations (American Baptist, Episcopalian, Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian, United Church of of Christ), have taken a serious hit since 1945, according to a Gallup poll taken in 2012, 77% of the adult population in the United States identify with a Christian religion. Better still, 64% of all Protestants, 81% of all Mormons, and 68% of all Catholics taking the poll say they attend worship services regularly—at least once a month.
There is a counterbalancing movement going on in the United States. I don't have the stats on attendance of U.S. churches whose members may be termed "fundamentalist," "evangelical," "charismatic," or "pentecostal," but it is greatly apparent that their congregations continue to grow—many of them exploding into mega-churches with thousands of fervent followers who are not strongly affiliated with any national religious body.
The most dramatic growth is in members of Latino charismatic movements. Although two thirds of them continue to adhere to the Roman Catholicism of their forbearers, Hispanics are changing the religious landscape of the Americas, on both sides of the border. More and more of them are establishing or joining fundamentalist Christian churches under charismatic leadership.
Is this not a call for action? Perhaps Europe and the British Isles need a "Great Awakening," fueled by the younger, more energetic evangelicals from these "emerging" Christian movements in America. Yes, missionaries from The New World back to Old Country, as both were once called.
SHOEL: In all of this, I have made no referral to the absolutely monumental, horrendous impact the Holocaust had on European society. One cannot murder almost 11-million innocent persons, including six million of the combined nine million Jews who lived in Europe in 1934 without there being a residual affect for generations. The statistics on destroyed synagogues is fragmented across more than two dozen countries, but my guess is that something like 20 thousand to 25 thousand places of worship for the combined Jewish populations were targeted by the Nazi's and either destroyed or appropriated.
To personalize this: How would you feel toward your good Lutheran grandfather's faith if you knew he was once a Nazi, or worse, employed at Auschwitz, Baden-Belson, Buchenwald, Dachau, or one of the many death camps spanning Europe from Bavaria to Bucharest? Many hundreds of thousands of persons were intimately employed in Hitler's Final Solution. Not just Germans, but French, Dutch, Swedish, Czech, Polish, Hungarian etc., as well.
-Phil Richardson, Observer and Storyteller
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