Bauer Power?

Gary Bauer was on the Today programme to urge votes for McCain, not because of abortion, even he seems to have given up on the Republicans there), but in the rather forlorn-sounding hope of Supreme Court nominees who will resist or reverse a more generic secularisation that Bauer claims is making America "like Europe". Why this widespread but baseless theory that America is more "Christian" than "secular" Europe?

While church attendance figures are much higher in the US than in Western Europe, what does that prove? In itself, nothing at all. What is being inculcated, celebrated and even worshipped is very often a collection of economic, social, cultural and political prejudices that the participants have simply declared to be Christianity (or any specific form of Christianity, including Catholicism), despite their fanatically and even hysterically anti-Christian (and especially anti-Catholic) origins and content, which former is very often denied outright. Those participants have made themselves what Lenin called "Useful Idiots".

Churches complicit in all of this might pack them in, but they are ultimately not very different from, for example, the "Catholic" Patriotic Association in China. Lest this seem an overstatement, look at the level of American churchgoing support for the Iraq War (including by Bauer, a PNAC signatory). And why? To what end? The reversal of Roe v Wade? Believe in that when you see it, and not before. Even Bauer is no longer holding his breath.

Third only to the Catholics and the Southern Baptists are the Mormons, who believe that the Native Americans are descended from the Ancient Israelites, that Jesus actually visited America, that the Church flourished there for centuries before Columbus, and that the Second Coming and subsequent earthly reign will taker place in and from Missouri. Jehovah's Witnesses, Seventh-Day Adventists and others all likewise simply presuppose that that Coming and reign will be in and from the Good Old U S of A, as if it were self-evident. Doubtless, so do many millions more in other communities.

In Western Europe, by contrast, no country has on paper, and few have in practice, the American system of abortion on demand at every stage of pregnancy (for that, one has to look to America's new best friends in Eastern Europe). There are 10 sacral monarchies (11 if one includes the Vatican), monarchy being an institution for which no purely secular argument can ever be constructed. National events are routinely conducted in the form and course of church services. Church schools, maintained at public expense, are normal in many European countries, while at least broadly Christian Religious Education and (although this law is widely flouted) a daily collective act of Christian worship are compulsory in all British schools.

In Germany, the churches are actually the largest employers after the several tiers of government, with hardly anyone opting out of the church tax system, with the churches routinely providing numerous services of the kind that provoke uproar when suggested in the US under the rubric of "compassionate conservatism", and with three tiers of government funding an annual Kirchentag (Catholic and Protestant in alternate years) from which no major political figure from Left to Right would dare be absent.

Staunchly Nonconformist members of the Methodist and United Reformed Churches (each created and governed by an Act of Parliament, as a matter of fact) should consider that it is they, and not members of the Church of England, who have such ties to Germany's main Protestant body that, unless they specifically opt out, the church tax will be deducted automatically from their pay in Germany, just as it is from that of Catholics.

Anglican bishops sit as of right in the British Parliament (where in 2006 they played a key role in blocking physician-assisted suicide); and while the House of Lords might one day be abolished entirely, no one seriously suggests that it might ever remain with only the bishops removed.

And so one could go on.

None of which is to suggest that there is not a great deal of re-evangelisation to be done in Western Europe. However, the last possible way of going about this would be to emulate a country in which the absolute exclusion of religion from public life is written into the founding documents as a first principle (however long it might have taken the courts to come round to enforcing this properly), with those documents then elevated to the status of Holy Writ, and their rationalist and Deist authors to that of Prophets and Apostles, in the national folk-religion.

So complete, uncritical and even unthinking is the American identification of that folk-religion with Christianity that the US, alas, pretty much needs to be evangelised from scratch.