http://www.claytoncramer.com/weblog/2007_07_15_archive.html#8791230360285898021



The Church in Europe

No, that's not an oxymoron. This article from the July 14, 2007 Wall
Street Journal tells us that after decades of decline, Christianity
seems to be making a modest comeback:

Late last year, a Swedish hotel guest named Stefan Jansson grew
upset when he found a Bible in his room. He fired off an email to the
hotel chain, saying the presence of the Christian scriptures was
"boring and stupefying." This spring, the Scandic chain, Scandinavia's
biggest, ordered the New Testaments removed.

In a country where barely 3% of the population goes to church each
week, the affair seemed just another step in Christian Europe's long
march toward secularism. Then something odd happened: A national furor
erupted. A conservative bishop announced a boycott. A leftist radical
who became a devout Christian and talk-show host denounced the
biblical purge in newspaper columns and on television. A young
evangelical Christian organized an electronic letter-writing campaign,
asking Scandic: Why are you removing Bibles but not pay-porn on your
TVs?

Scandic, which had started keeping its Bibles behind the front
desk, put the New Testament back in guest rooms.

"Sweden is not as secular as we thought," says Christer Sturmark,
head of Sweden's Humanist Association, a noisy assembly of
nonbelievers to which the Bible-protesting hotel guest belongs.

After decades of secularization, religion in Europe has slowed its
slide toward what had seemed inevitable oblivion. There are even
nascent signs of a modest comeback. Most church pews are still empty.
But belief in heaven, hell and concepts such as the soul has risen in
parts of Europe, especially among the young, according to surveys.
Religion, once a dead issue, now figures prominently in public
discourse.

God's tentative return to Europe has scholars and theologians
debating a hot question: Why? Part of the reason, pretty much everyone
agrees, is an influx of devout immigrants. Christian and Muslim
newcomers have revived questions relating to faith that Europe thought
it had banished with the 18th-century Enlightenment. At the same time,
anxiety over immigration, globalization and cutbacks to social-welfare
systems has eroded people's contentment in the here-and-now, prodding
some to seek firmer ground in the spiritual.

The rest of the article suggests that the ending of state
establishments of religion might have something to do with it--which
is consistent with an emerging view among historians of Colonial
America that the dramatic increase in church membership after the
Revolution might have been provoked by the disestablishment of the
Anglican Church.

As it happens, I'm reading a very interesting book at the moment by
Rodney Stark, a sociology professor at the University of Washington:
The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement
Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few
Centuries (Harper San Francisco, 1997). Stark argues that the
traditional view--that Constantine's making Christianity the official
state religion is what caused the Roman Empire to turn Christian--is
backward. He points to data that suggests that Constantine made
Christianity the state religion because Christians had become a
dominant force within the Roman Empire. Why? Because demographics is
destiny.

Stark uses traditional sociological statistical methods and some very
clever use of both data from the classical period, and such things as
archaeological counts of churches in various Roman cities, to argue
that Christianity grew at a rate comparable to the rise of Mormonism
in modern America (about 43% per decade). I'm not sure what the
reaction of sociologists was to his clever use of data from a period
when demographic data in the modern sense really doesn't exist. Did
they react with disgust? Or were they impressed that he managed to
find anything to work with at all, like Mark Twain's comment about a
dog walking on its hind legs? It didn't do it very well, but that it
did it at all was rather impressive.

Stark argues that there were several reasons for this dramatic
increase, and there's no need to look for any miraculous explanations.
In brief (and not doing justice to how Stark uses the data, as well as
primary and secondary sources):

1. Early Christians, because they utterly rejected infanticide,
abortion, birth control, and non-vaginal intercourse, had
extraordinary birth rates--and eventually outreproduced the pagans.
(The parallels to today, where conservatives are outreproducing
liberals in America, and Muslims are outreproducing non-Muslim Europe--
should be obvious.)

* Roman fathers had the right to leave any deformed or weak male
child--and any female--in the wild to die. Females were effectively
worthless, and as a result, adult males outnumbered adult females by
an extraordinary margin.
* Abortion was widespread in the Roman Empire (often at the
insistence of the husband or father of the pregnant woman), and
frequently led to death or sterility.
* Roman birth control, while not spectacularly effective, did
exist.
* The selfishness of pagan society, as well as the widespread use
of anal and oral sex--and of male prostitutes--meant that much of the
reproductive potential of Roman society was not being used to produce
children.

All of these factors meant that Christians were reproducing like
rabbits, while the pagan part of the Empire was actually declining in
population at the time that Christianity appeared.

2. While it may shock a lot of feminists, Christianity attracted women
in very large numbers because of the dramatically higher status that
they held relative to both the pagan Romans, and the Jews. One little
horrifying example of the difference--and how it played a part in
probably increasing Christian birth rates, and the willingness of
Christian women to get pregnant: marriages between adult Roman men and
little girls (under the age of puberty) were not simply contracted,
but consummated--with often significant physical damage to the girls.

By comparison, Christians delayed marriage until about 18. Considering
that puberty probably came later in classical times than today
(because of nutritional deficiencies), this meant that Christian women
were less likely to be damaged by sexual intercourse, and less likely
to be traumatized by it as well.

3. Because Christianity gave women a higher status, it attracted them
in large numbers--and it would appear that a fair number of pagan
Romans became Christians because of their wives.

I haven't finished reading the book, and there's quite a bit there
that I haven't summarized. I wouldn't exactly call it a popular read,
but for a book with tables of Pearson Products, it's not bad.

Let me emphasize that while I am an historian, I really can't tell you
how reliable Stark's history or sociological analysis is. I don't see
anything obviously wrong, but this is way outside my period. As my
Ancient Middle East professor once put it, "Everything after the fall
of Rome to me is current events."

UPDATE: A reader points me to this article about how Roman use of a
relatively rare plant as an abortifacient (a drug that induces
abortion) eventually drove the plant into extinction! And just because
it's "natural" doesn't make it safe. When I lived in the Bay Area,
Marin County's hopelessly New Age crowd was using a variety of similar
drugs as "natural" ways to induce abortions--with occasional deaths
and often quite severe health consequences.

Labels: abortion, religion

http://www.claytoncramer.com/weblog/2007_07_15_archive.html#879123036...

The Church in Europe

No, that's not an oxymoron. This article from the July 14, 2007 Wall
Street Journal tells us that after decades of decline, Christianity
seems to be making a modest comeback: