Feb
16
When Religion Dies
“The Left-wing assault on God and religion, specifically Christianity, has left Europe morally weakened and secularism has bred a crushing materialist ennui.” — Dennis Prager
Back in Jan. 2013, I bought Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph
“Europe, with a few exceptions, has lost its sense of purpose, and therefore largely lost its creativity, intellectual excitement, industrial innovation, and risk taking. Europe’s creative energy has been largely sapped. Europeans are marrying less and less and are having so few children that most European countries’ populations are in decline. There are many noble European individuals, but there aren’t many creative, dynamic, or entrepreneurial ones — and many of them have chosen to live in America. The issues that preoccupy most Europeans are overwhelmingly material and self-centered: How many hours per week will I have to work? How much annual vacation time will I have? How many social benefits can I preserve (or increase)? How early can I retire? How can my country avoid fighting against anyone or for anyone?
This happened thanks to secularism, the big and powerful welfare state, and the war against national identity and culture. Any one of them alone is destructive to society. Together they are lethal. Even if one holds that religion is false, only a dogmatic and irrational secularist can deny that it was religion in the Western world that provided the impetus or backdrop for nearly all the great artistic, literary, political, economic, and even scientific advances of the West.
Religion in the West raised all the great questions of life: Why are we here? Is there purpose to existence? Were we deliberately made? Is there something after death? Are morals objective or only a matter of personal preference? Do rights come from the state or from the Creator? And religion gave positive responses: We are here because a benevolent God made us. There is, therefore, ultimate purpose to life. Good and evil are real. Death is not the end. Human rights are inherent since they come from God. And so on.”
Note that Prager speaks of “religion in the West”, so the above Q&A refers primarily to Judaism and Christianity and perhaps a few offshoots.
“Secularism drains all this out of life. No one made us. Death is the end. We are no more significant than any other creatures. We are the result of chance. Make up your own meaning (existentialism) because life has none. Good and evil are ultimately euphemisms for ‘I like’ and ‘I dislike.’
When religion dies, creativity begins to die. Take Russia, for example. Christian Russia was backward in many ways, but it gave the world Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Pushkin, and Tchaikovsky. Once Christianity was suppressed, if not killed, Russia became a cultural wasteland (with few exceptions like Shostakovich and Solzhenitsyn, the latter a devout Christian). This was largely the result of Lenin, Stalin, and Communism, but even where Communism did not take over, the decline of religion in Europe meant a decline in human creativity — except for nihilistic and/or absurd isms, which have greatly increased. As G.K. Chesterton noted at the end of the nineteenth century, when people stop believing in God they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything. One not only thinks of the violent isms — Marxism, Marxism-Leninism, fascism, Maoism, and Nazism — but of all the non-violent isms that have become substitute religions, such as feminism, environmentalism, and socialism.
The state saps creativity and dynamism just as much as secularism does. Why do anything for yourself when the state will do it for you? Why take care of others when the state will do it for you? Why have ambition when the state is there to ensure that few or no individuals are rewarded more than others? America has been the center of energy and creativity in almost every area of life because it has remained far more religious than any other industrialized Western democracy and because enough of its citizens, until recently at least, have rejected the welfare state model and its mentality.
The Left argues that the state is essential to artistic excellence. but if this were the case, we would be living in a golden age of art. We aren’t….
European values affirm secularism and a godless life, while America remains the most religious among the industrialized democracies. That is a major reason that the predominance of America, a religious country that affirms the religion the European elites have rejected, infuriates many Europeans. One consequence of Europeans’ secularism is a disdain for moral absolutes and moral judgments. Whether it was President Reagan calling the Soviet Union an ‘evil empire’ or President Bush labeling North Korea, Iran, and Iraq an ‘axis of evil,’ most Europeans (and the American Left) found such moral labeling contemptible.
Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin suggested that the Great Seal of the United States depict the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt. Just as the Israelites needed to leave Egypt, they and the other Founders knew that America had to separate from Europe. It is truer now than ever.”
Even when I disagree with Prager on a point here or there, I always appreciate his insights and moral clarity on matters like these.
