One bit I want for my files:
...Yet what set of values can energize the French and other Europeans to reclaim their culture? It is said that you can’t fight something with nothing, and now that it is under fire, secular hedonism seems, in effect, to be fairly close to nothing. In this connection, a small but indicative detail emerging from this conference has remained in my mind. One of the presenters, a British sociologist who has done extensive polling on religion and religious identity across Europe, discovered that a significant number of the French (somewhere around 10 percent, as I recall) insist upon identifying themselves both as atheists and as Catholics. How to explain this? I doubt they are “Santayana Catholics,” who embrace the rituals and symbolism as a form of poetry, while rejecting the faith itself. The speaker himself said that he believes these Frenchmen were using “Catholic” as a passive cultural (or, in more Huntingtonian terms, civilizational) identity marker. In other words, it was a convenient (and not entirely socially unacceptable) way of saying “I am European, white, and not a Muslim.”
To say “Christian” apparently would imply positive belief in a way that they aren't willing to do. Thus, “Catholic,” to them, is not so demanding as a moniker. But somehow I think this is likely to be just a way station for them, and I greatly fear it's more on the way to being “white” than anything else. Such cultural use of religious markers tends to mangle and degrade the religion they batten upon. I’m reminded of the famous joke about the Irish terrorist who grabs an unsuspecting fellow, hauls him into an alley, and demands at knifepoint to know whether he is a Protestant or a Catholic. The man calmly replies, “Actually, I’m an atheist.” Impatient with such fine points, the mugger insists, “Are ye a Protestant atheist or a Catholic atheist?” The joke is, of course, no joke at all.
hat tip: Joseph Knippenberg's post Europe’s "regressive" future? at No Left Turns.
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