Secularism, Security, and “Civilizational Erasure”

Twenty years ago, I published a small book, The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics Without God. It enjoyed a fair sale, got translated into French, Spanish, Polish, Italian, Portuguese, and Hungarian, and was named a Foreign Affairs bestseller. In it, I argued that Europe was experiencing a crisis of “civilizational morale,” evident in sclerotic governmental bureaucracies, an unwillingness to contribute appropriately to the defense of the West, various forms of what we now call wokery, and collapsing birth rates: a deliberate refusal to create the human future in the most elemental sense, by creating future generations.

I was not the only one noting these problems at the time. In his 2003 apostolic exhortation, Ecclesia in Europa (The Church in Europe), Pope John Paul II raised similar concerns, among which he noted in Europe “a fear of the future . . . [An] inner emptiness that grips many people . . . A widespread existential fragmentation [in which] a feeling of loneliness is prevalent . . . Weakening of the very concept of the family . . . Selfishness that closes groups and individuals in upon themselves . . . A growing lack of concern for ethics and an obsessive concern for personal interest and privileges [leading to] the diminished number of births.”

Neither the pope’s observations nor mine were offered in anger, and still less in contempt. He was a European; I believed then, as now, that America is Europe transplanted. Both of us wrote out of affection and concern.

Which is perhaps the crucial difference between what I wrote in The Cube and the Cathedral, what John Paul wrote in Ecclesia in Europa, and the claim in the recently released National Security Strategy (NSS) of the United States that Europe faces the prospect of “civilizational erasure.”

To be sure, the demographic situation in Europe has gotten even more challenging since the pope and I wrote, with vast numbers of immigrants from another civilizational orbit—many of whom hold the West in contempt even as they seek shelter from their own failed states—filling the vacuum left by Europe’s self-induced mass infertility. However stringent the language, then, it is not a complete exaggeration when the NSS claims that “should present trends continue, [Europe] will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less.” Parts of Europe are, now.

Where I find substantive, rather than tonal, fault with the NSS is its failure to dig deeply enough into the roots of Europe’s twenty-first-century malaise, and its seeming insouciance about the brutal neo-imperialism of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

To borrow from Leon Kass, there is a “God-sized hole” in Europe’s heart, caused by centuries of secularism—and, it must be admitted, much of European Catholicism’s failure to embrace the New Evangelization and get about the reconversion (or, in many instances, conversion) to Christian faith of Christianity’s historic heartland. Catholic Lite, mimicking the secularist zeitgeist, its decadent culture, and its woke politics, cannot be the answer to Europe’s crisis of civilizational morale and its demographic self-immolation. Unless and until a critical mass of Europeans recognizes that woke secularism cannot provide a firm cultural foundation for either self-governing countries or the European Union, Europe will continue to flail about seeking a viable future. Helping build that critical mass is the Church’s primary task in Europe today: not by engaging in partisan politics, but by proclaiming Jesus Christ as the answer to the question that is every human life.

It is past time, then, for Europe to stop bending the knee to French laïcité and its soul-withering effects on individuals, culture, and public life. Breaking free of that unworthy habit, Europe may have a future worthy of its civilizational heritage.

As for Russia, it is not easy to understand what the NSS means by reestablishing “strategic stability” with a country in thrall to Czar Putin. On the verge of the fourth anniversary of Russia’s barbaric invasion of a sovereign European state—a war of conquest conducted in violation of every conceivable international norm of civilized behavior—how can any serious person imagine the possibility of “strategic stability” with a Russia ruled by a man who has made unmistakably clear that he is not interested in “stability,” but in precisely the opposite: the overthrow of history’s verdict in the Cold War and the reestablishment of Stalin’s internal and external empires? 

Finally, the lack of any reference to the defense and promotion of human rights as a concern of U.S. foreign policy renders the new NSS a less-than-persuasive summons to a recovery of moral grip and purpose in the West. It is also a default on our country’s capacity for moral leadership in world affairs.

But that’s what tends to happen when strategy is confused with “business opportunity.”

George Weigel’s column “The Catholic Difference” is syndicated by the Denver Catholic, the official publication of the Archdiocese of Denver.