Religion

Reading and Speaking 1

Pre-reading task

Discuss the following questions in brief.

1. Do you think Europeans still believe in God? Do they go to church?

2. Do you think the number of believers is declining or increasing at present?

3. What layers of the population in Europe are more religious?

11. Read Article 1 quickly and see if the facts described here correspond to your own ideas.

Article 1

FATHER Where Art THOU?

Theologians have lamented secularization of society for centuries. God is not dead, but these days in Europe, He’s not always in the same place. So it’s worth asking: Where has God – and Christian faith – gone?

The institutions of Christianity, of course, have long been in decline, but the consensus is that the pace has been quickening. Church attendance has fallen by more than 30% in Britain since 1980. Over the same period, the percentage of the population claiming membership in a religious denomination has dropped more than 20% in Belgium, 18% in the Netherlands and 16% in France. Christianity remains Europe’s main religion, with about 550 million adherents.

It may sound strange to say, but in some ways Europe’s faith has survived the church. While the continent may be more secular than ever, God hasn’t gone away from everyone. Many Europeans, able to distinguish between the message and its flawed human messengers, still find Him where they always have – in church. And many others who don’t attend say they still believe in God and in the importance of religion, especially at life’s key moments. Faith is more private, more personal, which means it may be harder to find and often more at odds with Christian orthodoxy. But in some places – among immigrants and youth – it is thriving and even growing.

Conventional wisdom holds that people grow in faith as they age, and youth are traditionally seen as the least religious of all. As Europe has grown less religious, you’d expect that its youth would too, and in several countries – Britain, Spain and the Netherlands – they have. But overall, “an increase in religion among youth is very clear,” says French sociologist Yves Lambert. Among Danes, the number of 18-to-29-year-olds who professed belief in God leapt from 30% of youth in 1981 to 49% in 2005. In Italy, the jump was from 75% to 87%. And even in France, which has Europe’s highest proportion of atheists, the figure crept from 44% to 47%.

Many people may be rediscovering spirituality, but they are not necessarily returning to the church or sticking to its tenets. Call it à la carte Christianity. More and more, says Christian Welzel, a political scientist at the International University of Bremen, “people tend to make up their own religion that takes elements from Buddhism, for instance, or aspects of Hinduism that they find interesting, to create their own belief system.”

Such unorthodoxy worries some church leaders, but it satisfies the yearnings of millions of people who prefer to chart their own spiritual course, getting help and guidance along the way from websites or the shelves at the local bookstore. They may be the toughest crowd for the traditional church, which seems to acknowledge the need to adapt to modernity, but just isn’t willing to bend that far. ‘The church needs to enter modern culture and to get to know modern culture,” says Godfried Danneels, Archbishop of Brussels.

“Through the centuries church has found ways of expressing the dogmas of faith that are relevant to changes in society,” says a senior Vatican official. But what does that mean in practice? Should the Catholic Church honour the humanity of its clergy by allowing its priests to marry? What stance should denominations take on divorces or homosexuality or other realities of modern life? “Religion can make the good better and the bad worse,” says Cardinal Danneels. “Religious leaders have tremendous responsibility in guiding their flock.” How do you do it when the flock isn’t even sure it wants to be guided?

(From ‘Time’, abridged)