The following article is from our June 2005 issue.

Europe's Faith Is Still Alive. Perhaps the Old World is not as Godless as is often thought. By Uwe Siemon-Netto

Church membership in Western Europe continues to drop rapidly, and attendance rates at religious services are much lower than in the U.S. But beware of clichés - faith in Europe also shows new signs of life.

On Ascension Day, an elaborate Lutheran Mass in Latin was celebrated in Leipzig's "Thomaskirche" (Thomas Church), Johann Sebastian Bach's place of work for 27 years. This ritual, performed for the first time in many decades, was based on an early 18th-century service. "It was stunning," marveled Matthias Pankau, a 28-year-old vicar. "In this big sanctuary, every seat was taken. Many worshipers were young. They were very moved."

Was this yet another indication of a possible turnaround in "Godless Europe?" One must allow that thanks to its Bach tradition, the "Thomaskirche" is almost always well attended. Still, there is something afoot in Europe - a growing urge to recapture some of the treasures lost to modernity. And among these treasures include faith.

"Is Europe becoming more religious," Boston University's Peter L. Berger asked during a recent Pew Forum luncheon in Washington. "Well, there are a few upturns on some values, studies suggest, but not very dramatic," he answered himself. "I don't expect significant changes." As a social scientist, Berger could not have spoken otherwise. Unlike journalists or clerics, he cannot rely on anecdotal evidence to counter his own findings.

But then, theologically speaking, faith is not bound by the rigors of science. Knowledgeable observers claim that for all the disastrous numbers showing religion's decline in Christianity's former heartland, the Holy Spirit seems at work in Europe. The stirring Latin Mass in a prominent Protestant edifice may have been one tiny piece in the mosaic of a rebound of religion, particularly as it corresponds to the renaissance of Latin in Catholicism that received a boost when the new German pope, Benedict XVI, presided over the magnificent funeral rites for his Polish predecessor, John Paul II.

For some time already, like many things traditional, Latin has been in vogue again among parts of the young elite. True, the reawakened interest in this language does not in itself denote an impending religious awakening. But it does attest to a nostalgic yearning that includes a growing hunger for God, as the Rev. Paul M. Zulehner, dean of Vienna University's Catholic
divinity school, will tell you.
According to Zulehner, spirituality - albeit not necessarily Christian - is significantly on the rise in Europe's urban centers. At the same time, "atheism ... is in decline," said Lutheran theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg. Zulehner added, "In Europe, there are not enough atheists (as apposed to agnostics) around to be used for sociological research."

That said, major Christian denominations do not yet seem to benefit from this revived spirituality. They are, Berger observed, "in very big trouble by any indicator you want to use." In Germany, they currently lose some 300,000 members annually. Weekly religious service attendance is down to 14 percent of registered members; in Germany's state-related Protestant churches, it has even dropped to 3.9 percent, a miniscule figure compared with the whopping 36 percent in the United States.

This is in line with the decline in the number of ordained ministers. In France (population 62 million), there are only 20,000 Catholic priests left, and by 2010 there could be less than 7,000, French sociologist of religion Danièle Hervieu-Léger estimates. At Heidelberg University's famed divinity school, merely 72 young men and women are preparing to be parish pastors, compared with 2,700 a dozen years ago, according to New Testament Professor Klaus Berger.

But do these statistics tell the full story about religion in Europe? What about moral behavior, the "fruits of faith" in theological parlance? There, a different picture emerges. In the "devout" United States, three times as many women of childbearing age have their pregnancies terminated than in Germany, where abortions are only permissible during the first 12 weeks. With its high divorce rate of nearly 50 percent of all marriages, the United States also outdistances France (43 percent) and Germany (41 percent), though not Britain (53 percent). The fact that of all American Christians, Baptists are most susceptible to divorce, according to pollster George Barna, makes some fellow believers in Europe wonder about the depth of their commitment to their religion.

Perhaps these incongruities can be attributed to the "Weberian principle" that internalized religious doctrine continues to affect the comportment of individuals and communities for generations even when the original faith is no longer there. On the other hand, there prevails at least in Western Germany - the formerly Communist East is another matter altogether - a marked chasm between faith and loyalty to the Church. Survey after survey shows that the Church occupies the bottom rung of all major institutions in the estimation of most Germans, even though they acknowledge a high regard for ministers. At the same time, 73 percent of Western Germans affirm their belief in God. Whether that deity is precisely the God of Scripture is a different matter. But then, if you follow Barna, a dearth of orthodoxy marks the faith of many staunchly believing Americans as well.

Then there are the unquantifiable "upturns" Berger mentioned. Increasingly, the children of non-religious parents show up in churches asking to be baptized, the German newsmagazine Focus reported. In the former East Germany, the share of people saying that their faith is "very important" to them has risen from 14 to 23 percent in the last 12 years, according to the news magazine, Der Spiegel.

In many parts of Europe, ministers are observing a renewed fascination with Christianity, most likely in reaction to the rapid growth of Muslim immigration and the fear of Islamic terrorism. In France, adult catechism classes are overflowing as are theology courses in the Catholic "institutes" (universities) attended by students for their own edification, not to qualify them for the ministry. In Germany, Christian values are held in very high regard, a survey conducted by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation showed. An amazing 82 percent of Germans favor the retention of religious instruction at state schools, pollsters say, and 56 percent consider the reference to God in the preamble of the German constitution a good thing.

What makes the mosaic of religious renewal in Europe so difficult to piece together is the eclectic nature of its building stones. Take Britain, where more Muslims worship on Fridays than Anglicans on Sundays. Yet 70 percent of the Church of England's newly ordained declare themselves evangelical, a sign of the demise of the revisionist theologies that have emptied Anglican sanctuaries.

Then take France where the gradual disappearance of the
traditional parish priest has mobilized congregants to such a degree that some 120,000 lay catechists, mainly married women, now perform most pastoral functions - from marriage counseling to burials - giving many Catholic churches a distinctly "evangelical" feel.

And consider the massive Christian youth movement mobilized by John Paul II to whom young people flocked by the hundreds of thousands until his dying day. And then, take the sudden rediscovery of Christianity by intellectuals. "Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization," declared Jürgen Habermas, one of the leaders of the Frankfurt School of philosophy that had played such a decisive role in the deconstruction of traditional religion in the 1960s and 1970s.

Suddenly in France, Régis Debray, once a leftwing revolutionary, pleads for religious instruction in school. Suddenly, British philosopher Anthony Flew, once a hardnosed atheist, embraced the concept of intelligent design, suggesting the hand of God in shaping the universe.

A quarter-century ago, one of contemporary Catholicism's wisest men, Jewish-born Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, advised John Paul II that re-evangelization
of France must focus on two groups - the young and the intellectuals. Now, as the newspaper Le Monde noted, a superlative intellectual is pope and pointedly named himself after St. Benedict, the patron saint of Europe.

Hold tight. Most likely the future will show that, to paraphrase Mark Twain, the rumors of Christianity's death in Europe were indeed exaggerated.

- Uwe Siemon-Netto is a Washington-based columnist and university lecturer.