By Timea Hajdu for The Mandiner
The post-Christian Western world is going through an identity crisis: while it is ashamed of its Christian past and identity, it is trying to elevate the religions of foreign cultures. European Christians have to live in such a cultural headwind. This was one of the topics discussed at the Danube Institute’s event, entitled “The Place of Christianity in the Survival of the West.” The two main characters of the discussion were American author Raymond Ibrahim and former ambassador Eduárd Habsburg, both of whom are Danube Institute staff.
The discussion was led by Dániel Farkas, a researcher at the Danube Institute, who first asked the two guests to describe how they see the state of the West. Raymond Ibrahim, who has been a guest on several well-known American podcasts recently and who has written several best-selling books about the historical struggle between Islam and Christianity, answered first. The author said that in fact, every person worships a god even if they do not know it, if they do not follow the God of the Bible, then money, power, beauty, etc.
“There is no such thing as a ‘secular’ or ‘secular’ society.
And while the West claims to be secular, we are really just turning our backs on one god to worship another. He may not even have a name, or he may not even be a real deity. He is the god we turn our attention to. Because what you love is what really controls you. And if you love other things that are finite, unlike God, they lead you astray,” said Raymond Ibrahim.
Edward of Habsburg spoke of the fact that European Christianity was now marked only by ruins.
“It’s like in The Lord of the Rings, when you’re one of the hobbits at the beginning of the first book, and you’re wandering around Middle-earth in your world, and you find the remains of little castles and fortresses along the way. And that’s how you know there was once a king here. And there were great kingdoms here. Everything’s gone.
I see the West today as a place like a desert, where there used to be gardens, water, rivers, and life. Now we have a desert, and we are told that this is a good thing.
We were told that it was good that politicians did not show their faith, that they had no faith. The more balanced and neutral they were, the better. It was good that religion was not present in public spaces... But that did not correspond to human nature. Even Aristotle said more or less that we are helplessly transcendent beings. We are created for faith.”
But what led to this? Eduárd Habsburg said: the process of pushing Christianity into the background was a process that took several centuries. “Just to mention the main stages: the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution. The sixties played a surprisingly large role. If we look at the world before the sixties, it was still largely a Christian world.” The former ambassador said: at that time the position became that the churches must firmly accept the modern world, support it and enter into dialogue with it.
“Previously, the church believed that the Christian’s task was to fight the world, that is, the devil and the flesh. This was the very simple catechism for every Christian: fight against these. Somewhere in the 60s, they decided that the world was good and that we had to accept that the devil did not exist, and therefore the sinful nature did not exist, and man was not corrupt. And when it came to the flesh, the church suddenly became permissive and said that we were no longer prudish,” the author explained.
Raymond Ibrahim added that one of the reasons for the decline of Christianity is the mixing of Christianity and individualism.
“Christianity has become an individual thing that exists in the mind of the individual.
It became an abstract concept, a theory. (...) I think this oversimplified theology has done a lot of harm because it suggests – and I see this all the time with Christians who think this way – that Christianity only begins and ends with the personal relationship that I have with Jesus Christ. That’s it. I’m saved. I’m going to heaven. And you don’t find that in any historical text before the modern era. No Christian thought that way. So it’s definitely a new phenomenon,” the author said.
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The conversation turned to the relationship between the historical churches and the world. Eduárd Habsburg said that today the churches are trying to adapt to the world.
“By adapting to the world, the church is essentially committing suicide.
(...) I worked for five years as a spokesperson for an Austrian Catholic bishop. I learned the current mindset among Western church representatives: the one thing that should never happen is a media scandal. That is the worst thing that can happen,” he said. But how could one talk about religion without scandal? he asked.
He added: today, people often return to religion in defiance of the church, primarily through examples, because of their family, or because the original message of Christianity reaches them through the internet.
Ibrahim also expressed harsh criticism of church representatives:
“The people, the church leaders, who represent Christianity, they are part of the problem themselves. And frankly, the kind of Christianity that they represent is repulsive to most people. Because it is essentially just secular humanism dressed up in a theological garb.”
As he said: throughout Christian history, Christians were not characterized by what has now become common: not accepting conflict, allowing everyone to run over them….
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Watch Raymond Ibrahim interview Eduard Habsburg below:
The Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the Sixties. Excellent concise summary of the path that brought us to today.
The sixties were the first generation in the world born so rich comfy and well off that they could be who they were, brats mostly. This generation had and still just has no idea of how the real world always worked through the centuries and how brutal life was till then. Easy to be a nihilist when your well fed and well-off relatively speaking.