I’ve been in Lisbon and, the past few days, Rome presenting translations of my recent book The Martyrs of the New Millennium. It’s encouraging that Christians in Europe are starting to realize the virulence and extent of anti-Christian acts around the world – including their (our) own “developed” nations. But, of course, I’ve also encountered sharp reactions here about the troubled relationship between the United States and Europe – the “Western civilization” that we all worry about – especially given the divisions over the current war in Iran. Despite appearances, the two attitudes are interrelated.
In the media, you get the impression that the war has turned the entire world against America. That may be the consensus in certain journalistic and intellectual circles at home and abroad. And the president’s reckless language about destroying a whole “civilization” in Iran, his ill-informed and bad-tempered rant against Pope Leo, to say nothing of the Truth Social blasphemous image of himself as a kind of savior (now taken down) have not done him – or America – any good, anywhere.
Yet the current conflict has caused some people I’ve met in the past few days to think more deeply about the “West” and the ways in which, as one person put it, we – Europe and America – are unbreakably two sides of a single coin. And will remain so, in the near future, despite current differences.
At a conference in Rome this past weekend on the future of liberty and traditional values, one of the themes that clearly emerged was the gulf between the Western nations (with their Christian-derived concepts of liberty and human dignity) and all the others (China, India, the Middle East, even Russia to a degree) where those values are not present.
That was also the main point of Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s speech in February at the Munich Security Conference:
We are part of one civilization – Western civilization. We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir.
Some Europeans thought Rubio’s speech and, even more so, the earlier (harsher) one by JD Vance were mere scolding of the continent to get in line with American views. But both were in fact a much deeper evocation of something unique to the West on both sides of the Atlantic: the Christian conception of human beings and public affairs.
Unfortunately, even the Vatican in recent years has often seemed interested in “openness” to other cultures and religions, and relatively less willing to affirm the Christian nature of our Western foundations.
You sometimes hear these days that, given the rift with America, Europe now has to think about going its own way and becoming a “superpower” in its own right. But for several people I’ve met in recent days here, this is a utopian illusion. Without America, Europe is not much of a global player. Even internally, the individual nations that make up Europe each have their own interests. Sometimes those overlap, sometimes not. They don’t even have a common language to unite them. Such unity as they have lies elsewhere, deeper, as Marco Rubio reminded them – and us.
The truth about all this is not always easy to see because in “the West” the foundation of our distinctiveness – Christianity – has been in retreat, less in America than in Europe, but to a worrying degree in America, also.
To those of us old enough to have read books – actual words printed on paper running to hundreds of pages or more – and who even may have delved into that esoteric thing called “poetry,” this can’t help but remind us of a once-famous passage from a semi-sage from the Victorian Era, Matthew Arnold. In “Dover Beach,” Arnold described how religion, like a sea, once bathed the whole world, “But now I only hear/ Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.”
Instead of then affirming the necessary truths of faith, however, and urging people to embrace them again, Arnold – like many then and since – hoped that romantic love might offer solace for the cosmic loss. It does. Some. But doesn’t, finally. And other substitutes eventually fail as well.
So Arnold was forced to conclude:
for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
The armies clashing at the moment aren’t exactly ignorant. And the setting isn’t entirely night. But it is confused, and more confusing by the day. Indeed, a “darkling plain.”
Predictions about the immediate future are, just now, impossible. There have been worse periods in the recent past: plagues, World Wars, jihadi terrorism. At present, it feels worse because we’re passing through a period of extreme political polarization such that each side regards the other as intolerable, bordering on evil.
But I sometimes find consolation in the fact that, at the American Founding, the political parties were also at each other’s throats. John Adams, our second president, belonged to the Federalist Party, which disappeared in 1825. Thomas Jefferson, our third president, who passionately fought the Federalists, belonged to the Democratic-Republican Party, which split in two around the same time. The republic survived, and they both died years later, somewhat reconciled, on the same, auspicious day: the Fourth of July 1826.
And in the longer view, in contrast to partisan politics, Christianity made Europe, and preceded America by 1700 years. If you had to bet, the Faith is more likely to be around 1700 years from now than anything else you can point to.
So even as we squabble over policies and personalities, war and peace, or even America and Europe, there’s something far more enduring and salient to attend to, on our darkling plain our only real hope.
