As the world mourns the destruction of a large part of Notre Dame, we should nonetheless hope and pray that the project of rebuilding it will also inspire the regeneration of faith and religion in a spiritually moribund Western Europe.
For the better part of a decade, thinkers on the Right have warned repeatedly that Western Europe is committing “cultural suicide.” Among the commonly cited indices are the rapid rise in immigration of nonacculturating Muslims, the feeble economic growth (apart from Germany and Great Britain) surely caused in part by welfare-state habits, and the frighteningly declining birth rates of native Europeans.
Underlying all of these, though, is the remarkable decline of both organized religion and of more amorphously defined religious “faith” in the cultural heart of what was known as “Christendom” (or, more broadly, of Judeo-Christian civilization). It is sickeningly ironic, for example, that the same French people who love their cathedral do not find much relevance in the god the cathedral was built to honor.
Only 18% of today’s French describe themselves as “church-attending Christians.” Another 46% say they are nonpracticing Christians, and 36% are “unaffiliated” or “other.” So, for some 82% of the French, not even the glories of their Gothic cathedral can lead them to think Paris is worth a mass.
The percentages of practicing Christians are even worse in six other of the largest 15 nations in Western Europe, and the proportions of those completely unaffiliated or “other” are higher in four of them. Indeed, France’s percentages of faithless or nonpracticing (semi-)believers are almost exactly the median for all of Western Europe.
Faithlessness is growing in the United States, too, but as Pew Research reports, “while secularization is evident on both sides of the Atlantic, unaffiliated Americans are much more likely than their counterparts in Europe to pray and to believe in God, just as U.S. Christians are considerably more religious than Christians across Western Europe. In fact, by some of these standard measures of religious commitment, American ‘nones’ are as religious as — or even more religious than — Christians in several European countries, including France, Germany and the UK.”
This void of faith in Western Europe is an epic tragedy. It makes substantially more likely the scourges of deep unhappiness and of civic disengagement. In turn, civic disengagement leads to decline in civic, economic, and physical health. A polity whose people lack faith is, in the long run, likely to be less stable, less compassionate, and less free.
As the culturally astute Rod Dreher wrote, “Europe has lived through Christianity, and has largely discarded it. … [Europeans] consider themselves virtuous in sending Christianity into history’s dustbin. What they don’t comprehend is that in so doing, they are cutting their own national throats as people who presumably would like to preserve liberal democracy.”
Those are all, in some sense, utilitarian concerns. They are, of course, important. Still, even those considerations pale in comparison to the calamity that is the loss of faith itself. God, as first mover and as caring guide and intervenor in our lives, is the entity greater and more loving than ourselves who, if not recognized and loved in return, leaves us incalculably bereft of meaning, purpose, and perspective.
Notre Dame, for all its wonders, was not a testament to human magnificence. It was an homage to our loving God. In the words of New York Times columnist Pamela Druckerman, “Notre-Dame’s hulking, Gothic presence has long suggested that there is something mysterious and unknowable at the center of it all.”
The horrid fire at Notre Dame draws attention not just to the building but to its purpose. As people around the world rush to donate money for its reconstruction, a task French President Emmanuel Macron promises to complete within five years, they ought to realize that a cathedral’s worth lies not in its physical characteristics but in its other-directed meaning. God is quite literally wonder-full, and worthy of the most grand and beautiful tribute that human ingenuity and artfulness can create.
Rebuilding Notre Dame should not be an act of mere engineering. It should be a renewing, and renewable, act of deepest faith.
