The history of a Christian Europe may have just begun.

Nietzsche and the Vitality of 

a Post-Secular Europe

By Ryan Shinkel

The late Christopher Hitchens remarked that there was more morality in one novel by George Eliot than all of the books of scripture combined. That remark came to mind when I began rereading Friedrich Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols, in which the prophetic atheist discusses biblical morality and Eliot, the 19th-century British author. Eliot was evangelical in her youth. After leaving the faith, she continued to affirm Christian virtues such as duty and love by believing that we know these moral truths self-evidently rather than by anything revealed.

Nietzsche contends that Eliot is shortsighted to continue upholding the content of beliefs while rejecting what inspired them: One does not have a right to have Christian morality without Christianity. He argues that if, like Eliot, the “English really do believe they know by themselves, ‘intuitively’, what is good and evil,” without

Christianity as a guarantee of morality, then this is itself merely the consequence of the dominance of Christian value judgements and an expression of the strength and depth of this dominance: with the result that the origin of English morality has been forgotten, and the highly qualified nature of its right to exist is no longer felt.

I momentarily believed that I was reading some book in response to the late Hitchens, such as David Bentley Hart’sAtheist Delusions. Rather, Nietzsche was diagnosing the cultural environment that made possible the self-satisfied moral proclamations of European and other modern skeptics.

If Nietzsche’s criticism still stands today, it has only extended as a criticism of the European community. The continent from which an orthodox Christianity emerged into this epoch has largely abandoned the faith. While Hilaire Belloc penned a century ago that “Europe is the Church, and the Church is Europe,” the Church has increased almost everywhere else and decreased in Europe so much that as Tom Phillips of The Telegraph observes, “more Chinese are thought to attend Sunday services each week than do Christians across the whole of Europe.” The Catholic Church is more global in perspective and number, but that it is forsaken by the very descendants of its artists, saints, and philosophers shows a decadency in a continent shrinking culturally, economically, and politically.

Many Europeans may believe that they can preserve their cultural vitality while rejecting the source of their identity as a collective group.

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