Table Of ContentIS EUROPE CHRISTIAN?
MICHEL ELTCHANINOFF
Is Europe Christian?
Inside the Mind of
OLIVIER ROY
Marine Le Pen
Translated by
CYNTHIA SCHOCH
3
HURST & COMPANY, LONDON
3
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by
publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and in certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison
Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
© Olivier Roy, 2019
English language translation © Cynthia Schoch, 2019
First published in French by Editions du Seuil, January 2019, as
L'Europe est-elle chrétienne ?
This English language edition first published in the United
Kingdom in 2019 by C. Hurst & Co. (Publishers) Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of Publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in
writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or
under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries
concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights
Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above.
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
A copy of this book’s Cataloging-in-Publication Data
is on fi le with the Library of Congress.
ISBN 9780190099930
Contents
Introduction 1
1 Europe’s Christian Heritage 7
2 Does Secularization Mean Dechristianization? 27
3 Another Source of Morality? 43
The Church Versus Modernism (1864–1964)
4 The Self-Secularization of Religion 57
5 The Turning Point of the 1960s 71
6 The Religious Secession: 81
The Encyclical Humanæ vitæ (July 1968)
7 Identity and Values: Europe and the Other 103
8 The End of Christian Europe or the End 125
of Religion?
Conclusion 151
Notes 155
Index 171
Introduction
Three of the founding fathers of what is now the European
Union—Robert Schuman of France, Alcide De Gasperi of
Italy, and Konrad Adenauer of Germany—were devout
Catholics. The first two are even shrouded in sanctity. To
these men, it was obvious that Christianity was at the core
of European identity, the soul at the centre of the huge
bureaucratic body being constructed by politicians. And yet
Christianity was never enshrined in the Treaty of Rome,
which created the European Economic Community (EEC)
in 1957. Perhaps it was considered better for Europe to be
Christian not in letter but in spirit. Or maybe this pillar of
European identity was so obvious that there was no need to
carve it in stone.
The question arose fifty years later, in 2004, as the
preamble was being written for the draft treaty for
establishing a constitution for Europe. Backed by Pope
Benedict XVI, some—mostly Catholics—urged that the
document make mention of Europe’s ‘Christian roots’. Here
1
IS EUROPE CHRISTIAN?
it is worth mentioning that even to talk about ‘roots’
indicates a reluctance to state simply that ‘Europe is
Christian’. Moreover, if a reminder of such roots is deemed
necessary in the text of a constitution, it is precisely because
they cannot be taken for granted.
What exactly had happened in those fifty years? Since the
Treaty of Rome, there have been two significant
developments for Christianity in Europe. First, secularization
has given way to the large-scale dechristianization of
European societies in both religious and cultural terms,
especially from the protests of 1968 onwards. Second, Islam
has arrived in Europe, through immigration and, with
Turkey’s application for membership of the EU, the
proposed expansion of the continent’s borders. While
populist movements since the 1990s have mainly mobilized
against Islam, the Catholic Church has focused for much
longer on the threat to Christian values represented by
secularization, seen as a new form of paganism. In July 1968,
Pope Paul VI issued the Humanæ vitæ papal encyclical
condemning the erosion of traditional sexual morality and
the tide of sexual liberation sweeping the West. John Paul II
later doubled down on the Church’s rejection of Europe’s
cultural secularization. He saw a return to faith as the
solution, as he expressed in 1980 during a visit to France
when he exclaimed, ‘France, have you been faithful to the
promises of your baptism?’ According to John Paul II, the
baptism of the first king of France, Clovis, enshrined
2
INTROdUCTION
France’s enduring loyalty to the Church; it was not a matter
of mere cultural tradition. Later, when Benedict XVI
campaigned for a reference to Europe’s Christian roots, it
was not Islam he had in mind. Rather, his concern was
secular culture, which his predecessor had called a ‘culture
of death’, and which he himself believed had led Christian
Europe to convert to a new form of paganism in the space of
a few decades.
In response to this encroachment, an entire Catholic
revival movement was born, its primary aim being to fight
the values of secularism. In France, for instance, La Manif
Pour Tous (Demonstration for All) blamed same-sex
marriage, and thus the collapse of the Christian West, on the
new secular culture and its endorsement by complacent
elites. Islam was not the main scapegoat; in fact, the
movement made a huge effort to encourage Jews and
Muslims to participate in its early marches. Naturally, Sens
Commun, a political offshoot of La Manif Pour Tous,
instantly made clear its hostility to immigration as well, yet
the fact remains that the issues of abortion and same-sex
marriage were more central to conservative Catholic
mobilization. Meanwhile, Evangelical Protestants arrived on
the scene of religious revivalism in the 1980s. They also
vigorously criticized the dominance of cultural paganism,
but without harking back to the Christian roots of Europe,
which they do not consider the centre of the world.
Evangelical Protestantism is uninterested in the past and
3
