I learnt a very important lesson on the role of faith from my two-week working vacation across Britain and the European continent that should be shared with readers of this column.
By this I mean not only the exercise of faith in the public square, but also privately in a way that can provide comfort, stability and certainty in an ever-changing world.
It’s no secret that Americans are a faithful lot of people.
We live in a country that despite some popular notions isn’t secular. Though America was founded in the Judeo-Christian tradition, we adhere to the ideals of religious tolerance and liberty. Americans need no established state church to come together in houses of worship that span the religious spectrum.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for much of Europe, where many of the great churches are today seen more as museums — a living history exhibit for the curious minds into the lost faith of Christianity — than a vibrant house of worship.
There are a variety of explanations for Europe’s loss of faith.
Some of it can be blamed on a long history of central governments and established state churches oppressing religious dissenters. However, the biggest culprits are the leading voices of the modern age, who champion an atheistic culture that stresses moral relativism and at the same time ignores what has made Western civilization the greatest in the history of mankind.
These misguided voices view faith as a relic of an unenlightened time that is incompatible with modernity.
It’s deeply unsettling to see Europe’s great churches, which were built as a testament to God’s magnificence and sovereignty over mankind, become nothing more than a cheap tourist attraction.
The full column will be posted once the newspaper publishes.
— Dennis Lennox
1 comment:
"We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion... Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."
John Adams
Putin, although an atheist, knows this and for this reason supports the Russian Orthodox Church.
Western Europe seems to have forgotten it - the Constitution of the European Union is stuffed with pages of verbose platitudes without once paying tribute to its glorious millenia of Christian heritage and the results are showing.
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