In a widely quoted essay a well-known Catholic writer recently stated "secularism cannot defeat jihad." Silly me. I hadn't known secularism was attempting to defeat jihad. I thought that was the job of the U.S. Armed Forces and the CIA.
The author, Elizabeth Scalia (apparently no relation to the Supreme Court justice), suggests the West is fast becoming a "post-faith society -- disdainful of religion and confident in the primacy of reason alone," thus "rendering itself ineffective and mute" to battle religious extremism.
This seems a popular, if erroneous, notion -- that the West is overrun with bug-eyed atheists, freethinking fanatics, and villainous infidels. Where so many pundits and journalists get the idea that Westerners are largely disciples of Darwin and Dawkins is an utter mystery. Certainly they don't get it from the research. The fact is the United States -- the largest, richest and most culturally significant Western nation -- is one of the most religious societies in history. Only about 10 percent of Americans claim to be neither spiritual nor religious. Another survey finds a mere 6 percent confess to be atheists or agnostics. Sure, that's America for you. What about Europe? Again, few persons in so-called "secular" Europe are genuinely irreligious. The latest European Union poll (pdf) finds a mere 18 percent of Europeans say "they do not believe there is a spirit, God, nor life force." Probably the same percentage as in Muslim countries, though one would be butchered for saying so.
Sweden is often cited as typical of Europe's secularism, though even among the suicidal Swedes a mere 23 percent report that "they do not believe there is any sort of spirit, God, or life force." The skepticism of the backsliding Lutheran Scandinavians is more than offset by Catholic Poland, Ireland, Spain and Italy where the percentage of nonbelievers is minuscule.
France has one of the highest percentages of nonbelievers (19 percent atheist, 16 percent agnostic), but this is hardly a recent trend. The French have had a problem with organized religion going back to the Albigensian Crusade (1209–29) when the Catholic Church dispatched crusaders into southern France to massacre upwards of a million Cathars for their unorthodox beliefs. Hardly a way to win converts. It was in France -- not Spain -- that the Inquisition was born. What's more, it was after the French Revolution -- in part a reaction against church and state entanglement -- that Robespierre, a deist, sought to establish a new state religion, the Cult of the Supreme Being. These revolutionaries were not irreligious radicals. They simply (and violently) opposed the regime-coddling Catholic Church.
For more sinlung
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