The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics Without God

The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics Without God by George Weigel (Basic, 202 pp., $23) George Weigel, the biographer of Pope John Paul II, has written a finely honed reflection on post-Christian Europe--how it got that way, why it matters, and what it might portend. The backdrop is Europe's startling demographic decline, which Muslim immigrants are more than willing to reverse. The event around which Weigel's argument crystallizes is the deliberate exclusion from the new European constitution of any acknowledgment of the continent's Christian heritage.

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Why this flight from historical truth? How is it that the present generation of European statesmen came to see their project in aggressively secular terms? In this, they are unlike the founding fathers of the E.U. itself--Konrad Adenauer, Alcide de Gasperi, Robert Schumann, Jean Monnet, serious Catholics all.

Weigel contemplates the sheer oddness of it: Modern Europeans have made a religion of anti-fascism; revulsion at the Holocaust drives their commitment to tolerance, human rights, and peaceful negotiation. Yet they see Christianity as threatening--though the Holocaust and the Gulag, like the Terror of the French Revolution, were the product of godless ideologies, while the biblical religions teach the dignity of persons made in the image of God.

Weigel digs back to the 19th century antecedents of contemporary "Christophobia" (a provocative usage he adopts from the Jewish scholar Joseph Weiler) and finds--who else?--Nietzsche, glorifying violence and the will to power. And he digs much further, to reconstruct in broad strokes the Christian contribution to the emergence of polities respectful of citizens' rights. He starts at the beginning, when Christians denied that Caesar was God, and "an antitotalitarian vaccine was injected into Europe's civilizational bloodstream."

Christians have often failed to live up to their creed, and Weigel concedes that Rome was slow to articulate, from within its own premises, "a persuasive, compelling case for democracy." But with Vatican II and the papacy of John Paul II, it has now done so. Whether the generation inspired by John Paul will spur a Christian revival or witness the progressive Islamicization of Western Europe may be the question on which hangs the future of liberty in Europe.

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