Last weekend, more than two million Protestants and Catholics in the UK attended church to celebrate Easter, millions fewer than just 50 years ago. The great fathers of sociology -- Weber, Marx, Durkheim -- all believed that industrialization, wealth and democracy would lead to the development of a massively secular society. Religion and its myths, the linchpin of dirt-poor traditional societies, would evaporate before detraditionalizing modernity.
They were right about Europe, but wrong about almost everywhere else. Evangelical Protestantism in the United States and Islamic fundamentalism are the planet's two fastest-growing religions; even Hindu and Buddhist fundamentalism are on the increase. Only Europe has moved in the direction the classic sociologists predicted.
A mere third of Europeans report that they think that life is worth living because God exists. In the US, 61 percent do, a proportion seemingly matched, although we don't have reliable evidence, within Islam. In those religiously inclined majorities, fundamentalists find it easier to recruit.
But why is rich Europe secular and rich America religious? And does the answer to that question give any clues about the rise in religious fundamentalism? For this increase advances one of the most pernicious and hateful phenomena in human history, ranking with polarization of the political right and left in its destructive and poisonous influence.
Whether it is the perpetrators of the Madrid atrocity or Franklin Graham, son of evangelist Billy Graham, calling Islam a "wicked religion," fervent fundamentalist religiosity breeds violence, intolerance and sexism. The sacred texts of Christianity and Islam may plead love, mutual respect and peace; their fundamentalist followers observe these doctrines in the breach.
You cannot watch Mel Gibson's controversial The Passion of the Christ without being provoked into these questions, for while it is breaking box-office records in the US and even playing to crowded cinemas in the Arab world, European audiences are smaller, less credulous and mostly interested in the film as a cultural and cinematic phenomenon rather than as a religious experience.
They are right. Gibson is a conservative Catholic fundamentalist. Each day's filming began with Mass; Gibson claims extraordinarily that the holy spirit was on the set throughout, with Jesus-like incidents of sudden healing. Gibson says he was God's tool. It is a perspective that saturates his film, with a cowled Satan appearing at key moments, rather as a vampire might in a classic Hollywood horror movie.
This perspective also reduces the whole to the level of farce, emotionally distancing the viewer from Christ's horrific last hours that are meant to trigger our rediscovery of what it means to be Christian.
Gibson insists on Christianity without compromise, and literal interpretation of the New Testament texts. Crucifixion was a blood sacrifice to atone for all humanity's sins at which both God and Satan were physically present. The moral message, in particular the transcendent capacity of love to produce mutual understanding and which retains my loyalty, just, to the Christian camp, is subsumed by a perverse insistence that Christian belief means that we have to plunge back into the values and myths of the pre-scientific, pre-Enlightenment, pre-democratic, barbaric and primitive Middle East.
Gibson insists that his film is not anti-Semitic; he dissimulates. We are invited to enter the value and belief system of early Christianity with its unmistakable conclusion: Jews bayed for the death of the son of God, for which Jewry suffered millennial discrimination that ended in the Holocaust. The consequences of this are playing out in the revival of Jewish fundamentalism and its calamitous impact on the Middle East.
There is a tension in religion. It offers a moral compass by which to live -- the world's great religions have a very similar moral message -- and so forms a key underpinning of good behavior. But it also offers the answer to the ontological question: why? Everybody seeks a purpose, to make a difference, to be part of something, to belong.
Purpose within a social context allows us to make sense of being alive. For the secular, that purpose can be building a great society, a great work of art, a great business or a great family, against which religious values may or may not be an important backdrop.
But for the religious, the pursuit of their faith is their purpose, with the ever-present danger that because their religion answers the `why?' question, they are compelled to impose it on others as crucial to their own purpose.
American society, where reformist social and political movements are undermined by its sheer continental scale, along with a deeply felt, faith-based individualism, is particularly prone to throwing up individuals who see no other way to give their lives purpose than by evangelizing others.
For them, it is not enough to live by a religious code. They want others to live by it too, and conversion is part of their purpose.
Gibson is a classic of the genre -- and so we are invited to put the clock back and live as if we were third-century Christians who believe in the reality of spirits and kingdoms of the faithful in paradise.
Evangelism of this type has less fertile soil in Europe, but in ways that also have their dark sides. Secular politics and political ideology have been seen as vehicles through which to express utopian purpose but which dangerously toppled into fascism and communism. Now that political beliefs are reduced in appeal and relevance, most European societies are suffering from a chronic incapacity to express purpose.
Unable to turn to religion, there is an ominous drift to nationalism and tribal identity, hence the reaction to immigration, asylum-seekers and terrorism that everywhere in Europe is sparking atavistic and primitive responses.
In Islam, where many backward autocracies are unable to use politics to express purpose and whose economies and civilization are eclipsed by the West, purpose expresses itself in the mirror image of the US: the assertion of meaning through adherence to religious fundamentalism.
In Iraq, the two unforgiving eye-for-an-eye fundamentalisms -- American and Islamic, informed by the doctrine of blood sacrifice -- confront one another in an arena of escalating violence. Europe looks on helplessly, in danger of succumbing to its own parallel demons.
What is needed is a rediscovery of politics and a belief that purpose is best attempted in a secular guise underpinned by universal values, and that religion is a moral code to live by, rather than a purpose in its own right that gives believers the right to deny rationality and humanity.
This is a tall order, and it won't be helped by following Gibson's interpretation of the Passion. The values we need are inclusion and love, not exclusion and irrationality. There's too much of that around -- enough, if we let it, to usher in a new Dark Age.
Values, yes; religious fundamentalism, no.
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