This chapter deals with some problems of representation. At one time I planned to inscribe the distribution of European religion (and by extension North American religion) in the past, and now, in terms of social and regional geography and geopolitical pressure points. That is part of the current interest in ‘materialising’ religion and it takes for granted that religion, like every other ideological form, is closely implicated in power and place, dominance and territory, and in the dynamic of their expansion and contraction over centuries. I eventually scaled this project down to the distribution of religion in terms of architectural symbolism, in cities of the national centre and cities of the periphery. The symbolism of buildings served as a synecdoche of wider patterns of power and place and of the relation of religion to political power and social hierarchy.
The chapters which follow are part of the torso of my attempt to sculpt basic patterns of religion in architectural symbolism. They are problematic because the focus on different patterns of religion and its ecology throws up problems about how far I include architectural forms that alter mentality, like the great railway stations built from the mid-nineteenth century on, that compressed, rationalised and universalised time, or forms that either take over from religion – like hospitals, art galleries and concert halls – or acquire an analogous centrality, like shopping centres, television headquarters and stadia.
Yet this supposed ‘plan’ was originally not a plan at all, only an implicit mental map derived from my own social experience of the conjunction of Protestant Nonconformity and Liberal politics, especially in parts of the west of England like North Devon, where my maternal grandfather came from. Methodism and political Liberalism together motivated my interest in peace movements and provided me with a mental map useful for envisaging the distribution of peace movements in my initial studies of pacifism. They also provided me with a closely related mental map of the distribution of religious bodies I labelled denominational, following a well-known usage in the sociology of religion. I simply envisioned that peace movements flourished on the north-east seaboard of North America and the north-west seaboard of Europe, and that denominational religion – by which I meant the various movements emerging in the wake of Puritanism, Evangelicalism and Pietism – flourished in the same environment. In my sociological imagination the ecology of the one overlapped the ecology of the other: where you have Congregationalists, Unitarians, Quakers and Methodists you probably have peace societies. I had another closely related map based on the distribution of amateur choral societies singing oratorios, but to include that in what follows would introduce intolerable complications. I think it no accident that Boston was home to early peace societies and at the very same time home to the Handel and Haydn Society.
I begin with my implicit map of peace movements precisely because, in common with most of our personal equipment for moral guidance, it was naive and unsystematic. Such maps configure the contemporary cultural scene for us and organise the past; and, like the old Mercator projections of childhood, they retain something of their original power even as we revise them in the light of later knowledge and experience. For the purposes of this discussion they raise fundamental problems about how to represent changing patterns of religion, politics and culture over time as well as across cultural and geographical space. There is an inherent difficulty about representing changes over cultural space and changes over cultural time simultaneously, especially when the timescale extends back many centuries, as it has to when considering the origins of the peace sentiment or the emergence of denominations like the Congregationalists and the Methodists (or amateur choral societies). My interests might be focussed on peace movements and denominational religion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries but the roots lay initially in the Reformation, and ultimately they lay in the eighth century BC. That may look like a rather startling extension of the time scale but it is entirely consonant with the argument that Marx was the last of the Hebrew prophets. Modern political eschatology, notably Marxism but also some forms of apocalyptic nationalism, has roots that reach as far back in time as pacifism – initially to people like Thomas Müntzer in the Reformation period, but ultimately to anticipations in the Hebrew Scriptures.
I hypothesised that pacifism and revolution were closely linked over nearly three millennia. Groups engaged in pacifist withdrawal anticipated a new and revolutionary order with a fluctuating mixture of chiliastic hope and despair, or else the seeds of defeated and disappointed revolution were retained in a sectarian capsule until they found opportunity to flower in more favourable social circumstances. The Quakers withdrew from ‘the world’ once the Puritan revolution had failed in 1660 and the monarchy had returned, but they emerged again in Philadelphia, one of the seats of the American Revolution. Over the centuries Quakers exercised a vastly disproportionate influence on movements for social amelioration in England and indeed all over the western world. Pacifism in the Hebrew Scriptures was originally associated with radical visions of a peaceable kingdom focussed on Jerusalem which emerged on the apparently insignificant margins of ancient empires in Israel and Judah in the first millennium BC. Then, and crucially, in the New Testament period, pacifism derived authoritative inspiration from the preaching of the non-violent kingdom of God by Jesus, beginning on the Galilean periphery of Palestine but coming to a climax in Jerusalem.
The ‘primitive’ Gospel created a template for a radical tradition which is conventionally labelled ‘sectarian’ by sociologists by way of contrast with the tradition of negotiated compromise with ‘the world’ located in the ‘church’. That meant my geographical map of radical Christianity had to incorporate a timescale of two to three millennia, taking the temporal perspective back to the period of what Jaspers called The Axial Age, when profound reservations about the world, its corruption and its violence, appeared in several different cultural centres, both east and west, along the lines indicated by Weber as well as Jaspers.1 Christian reservations about the world – understanding both nature and man as a good creation but ruined and in need of redemption, restoration and recreation – generated the dichotomy between ‘churches’ which negotiated with things as they were by inserting ‘signs’ of a better world and ‘sects’ which sought a new order representing the rule of God. Of course, at different times these Christian anticipations might combine with other visions of change: the hope of a New Jerusalem might combine with the heavenly city of the philosophers; and eschatology might combine with the classical idea of a novus ordo seclorum. All this is necessary background to mapping the ecology of radical ‘sectarian’ and ‘churchly’ traditions over the cultural area affected by Christianity.
These radical traditions were quite widespread up the time of the Reformation, and they included a radical dualism derived from Manichaeism at odds with the Christian belief in the goodness of creation, as well as a potentially heretical Neoplatonism. Tensions were built into the fabric of Christian cultures that emerged from time to time, given favourable conditions, which questioned the structures of hierarchy and priestly mediation, which rejected infant baptism and the real presence in the Eucharistic sacrament of the altar and condemned the idolatry of images of the divine, and all outward shows and external forms militating against the inward sacrifice of a pure and humble heart. Christianity was infiltrated by a double entendre whereby the eternal and heavenly king was glimpsed in a vulnerable child and a hanged man, and the Queen of Heaven identified in a maid ‘of low degree’. Its symbolism reversed the hierarchy of values in the world and placed the innocent child at the centre of its kingdom. Inward and outward peace might be established by the pure in heart through withdrawal from the temptations of the world, its erotic and aesthetic enchantments, its worldly wealth and pride of place and power, the better to seek salvation and obey the law of love for God and neighbour.
Alternatively, and much more rarely, peace might be established by revolutionary action to bring the longed-for kingdom violently to birth. Meanwhile the Church negotiated with mundane reality by infiltrating into its iconography images of radical change when ‘all things should be made new’ at the end of ordinary time, even as it also assumed the panoply of wealth and power and experienced the corruptions that always travel in the wake of wealth and power. Standard Christian iconography embodied a tension between the legitimation and the delegitimation of the powerful. The Church acquired wealth and built imposing basilicas, while recognising it was more difficult for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God than for a camel to pass through the ‘eye of a needle’. This tension remained evident long after Christianity was established in the fourth century. The idea of the city of man and the city of God and the institutions of monasticism symbolised a perpetual tension between ‘the world’ as it is and the world as it might be, between a good but imperfect creation and a more perfect re-creation in the future. The heavenly city as contrasted with the earthly city is part of the double entendre, and the monasteries were often seen as intimations of the New Jerusalem even when they grew prosperous and powerful.
Sometimes the radical impulse was united with a reverence for the holy meal of the Eucharist understood as the equal participation of all Christians in a sacrifice of thanks and praise, as among the followers of Jan Hus in Prague. At other times all fixed worship was rejected as contaminated by the exercise of clerical power, as with many of the English Puritans, including John Milton. In any case the radical tradition had its own symbolic resources, refusing all forms of deference in the interests of the equality of all the redeemed before God. During the Reformation the reforming impulse bifurcated into two versions, magisterial and radical. The magisterial reformers devised their own varied understandings of the relationship between the city of man and the city of God, and between the kingdoms of ‘this world’ and the kingdom of Christ. They created yet more versions of the double structure built into Christian culture. The radical reformers devised varied understandings of how to make God’s kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.
All this is a necessary historical prolegomenon to any exploration of the spatial distribution of Christianity in its numerous variants and the instantiation of their different symbolic repertoires. In charting this history some half a century ago I merely noted that the radical traditions found distinctive spatial locations, such as the Albigensians of southern France (to the extent that they really existed outside the minds of their persecutors), the Waldensians of Piedmont, the Quakers of Cumbria, the Bogomils of the interstitial area between western and eastern Christendom in Bosnia, and the Anabaptists of Münster. However, underground movements do not as a rule generate spatial monuments above ground. After all, they have been subject to persecution. In The War on Heresy, R.I. Moore has convincingly argued that accusations of religious deviance provided the common currency of social solidarity and of conflicts over place and power by rival potentates and patrons.2 Later this common religious currency was converted by nationalism into treason and by secular ideology into political deviation. Radical sectarian movements flare up, sometimes in iconoclastic fire storms that leave no icons behind apart from hacked and eloquent remains or ‘bare ruined choirs’, even though Alexandra Walsham has identified the permanent marks left on the landscape of England by the Reformation.3 The names of cities like Philadelphia, Providence and Bethlehem bear mute witness to an earlier radical presence. The severity of Dutch post-Reformation churches witnesses to a new aesthetic rejecting imagery, vivid colour and festival.
For various reasons, including the influence of the painter and publisher Lucas Cranach, the Lutheran Reformation retained a far greater continuity with the iconography, ceremony and music of the Catholic Church.4 Beyond that, radical sects after the sixteenth century created religious and utopian communities partially or wholly segregated from the wider society on a model not unlike the monasteries before the Reformation, especially once they were able to expand in the relatively open spaces of North America. The monastic communities associated with the severities of Cîteaux can be seen as recreated in the Anabaptist communities of Canada. The same radical Christian impulse achieved spatial realisations in the monasteries and in utopian communities, and in both instances the poor in spirit were sometimes corrupted by ‘the world’ and even inherited the earth. It was said at the time of the Reformation that the Abbott of Glastonbury and the Abbess of Shaftesbury owned a sizeable slice of England: collective wealth and power is still wealth and power.
The radical sects and utopian communities, from Cistercian monasteries to attempts to build Jerusalem in ‘England’s green and pleasant land’ in the nineteenth century, like the Quaker Ebenezer Howard’s ‘Garden Cities of tomorrow’, are only one part of the story. Spatially they remain part of the townscape in places like Letchworth, Welwyn Garden City, Bournville and Port Sunlight. But there are also the fruits of Huguenot, Dutch and Quaker enterprise in the banks and enterprises of the City of London: the Bank of England, Lloyds, Barclays. A culture emerged in eighteenth-century London that shifted from the court to the ‘chattering classes’ in the coffee houses, and from Whitehall to the West End and Mayfair. That signalled a shift from radical sectarian protest to a commercial ethos that eventually rejected mercantilism in favour of free trade and believed that trade was the harbinger of peace and prosperity for all. Free Trade was the quasi-providential invisible hand bearing peace to the nations.
The peace movements founded in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars combined Enlightenment hopes of Universal Peace with the hopes of a rational Christianity, some of it Unitarian in inspiration, and impulses from the older sectarian traditions of Mennonites and Quakers. As the nineteenth century progressed the representatives of the Nonconformist conscience found it easy to distinguish between a priestly religion linked to older social formations, including the military, and a religion of preachers linked to peaceful commerce; and by the end of the century this had morphed again into the politics of the secular conscience and an aestheticism profoundly hostile to war and to the moral severities of Puritanism. The spatial realisations of the commercial pacific spirit were concentrated in north-eastern North America and north-western Europe, especially in Protestant countries, but also in France. The idea of conscience gained maximum purchase in Northern Protestant Europe: conscientious objection to war found little purchase in Catholicism.
So far I have concentrated on providing a background for the spatial realisations and social geography of religion in relatively recent times, first with regard to the tension between sect and church and then with regard to the tension between Christian and Enlightenment hopes of progress in defeating war and establishing perpetual peace. At this point I need to expand the dichotomy of sect and church by introducing the sociological concept of ‘the denomination’ and the history of the ‘Free Churches’. My characterisation of the Denomination in relation to Church and Sect was a key step in my formulation of a sociology of sectarian pacifism and denominational (and commercial) ‘pacificism’.5 So far I have only provided generalised and implicit notions of the social geography of sectarian pacifism and commercial ‘pacificism’. I have now to outline the social geography of the Denomination because the presence or absence of denominational religion separated from the state and prone to pluralism and schism seems to me to provide a diacritical marker of major cultural importance, and an obvious link with Halévy’s theory of the role of Evangelical religion in preventing revolution in Britain.6 On the map of Europe England and France were not only rival imperial powers but profoundly different, both in their susceptibility to revolution and in matters of religion: France had one dominant Church, whereas Britain had a relatively weak established Church and numerous ‘denominations’.
That was the precisely the difference which my general theory of secularisation took as its point of departure. In the USA the denomination was the dominant form of religious organisation, and the USA arguably became the one country where the pluralistic implications of the Protestant principle of the perspicuity of the Gospel to individual scrutiny were fully realised. In England in the latter part of the nineteenth century Methodism and the other Free Churches were closely associated with the Liberal Party, and in the twentieth century helped provide leadership for the nascent Labour Party, along with Catholics, likewise excluded from the partial alliance between the established Anglican Church and the Conservative Party. Religion existed on both sides of the political divide and was also associated with geographical divides, not only the very different religious complexions of the four or five nations of the British Isles but also a north–south religious divide.
In my mind I entertained a model of difference between the two rival countries (and empires) of Britain and France, which turned on the presence of Methodism and denominationalism more generally in Britain and America, and its absence in France. More than that, the denomination as a form of Christianity was linked to relatively modest institutional claims, to pluralism and a certain pragmatism about institutional forms and ceremonies. The spatial distribution of the denomination demarcated America and Britain from all of continental Europe, while the existence of a state church in England linked England to the Protestant state churches of Northern Europe. Taken together, the total pluralism of the USA, the partial pluralism of Britain and the state churches of Northern Protestant Europe provided my main categories for mapping the religion of the North Atlantic area and offered a major contrast both with Southern European Catholicism and with Eastern Orthodoxy. There was also a central zone where countries were divided between rival territorial churches, Protestant in the north of a country and Catholic in the south.
These half dozen or so categories, starting from the key difference between Catholic France and Protestant England, and the absence or presence of Methodism provided the diacritical markers for my general theory of secularisation. They were supplemented by one other category made up of countries where nation and religion were together united against foreign rule by a country of a different religion, like Poland and Ireland. There was a high degree of overlap between the map of the North Atlantic distribution of pacifism and ‘pacificism’ and the map of religion. I hope I have by now indicated just how my studies of pacifism led on quite naturally to the distribution of religion according to the categories just outlined in my general theory of secularisation. Each category generated a different trajectory of secularisation reflecting quite varied relationships between romantic nationalism and religion, between enlightenment and religion, and between revolutionary political theology and religion. For example, Northern Ireland combined Protestant nationhood and the Enlightenment, while Catholicism in the rest of Ireland ignored the Enlightenment in favour of romantic nationalism. France embraced Enlightenment and nationalism against religion, while the USA embraced Protestant nationhood and Enlightenment together.
There remained only the tension between centre and periphery. I first became aware of the difference between centre and periphery by looking at the contrast between Strasbourg and Alsace with Paris and the Paris basin, although I did not encounter the concept until I read Edward Shils.7 Strasbourg exemplified a limited pluralism unaffected by the confrontation between religious and secular you find in Paris. But there are numerous other peripheries in Europe, some of them like Strasbourg at cultural junctions. It was above all the difference between Strasbourg and Paris, and the way the urban ecology in the two cities mirrored very different constellations of symbolic power, that led me to see cities of the centre like London and Paris as architectural documents expressing very different politico-religious constellations. The same difference helped me imagine a religious map of Europe and North America based on regional cultures like Catholic Bavaria centred on Munich and the Catholic Rhineland centred on Cologne, contrasted with the Protestant north centred on Hamburg and the Protestant east centred on Berlin. It was regional constellations of this kind with their distinctive histories that governed the flow and character of secularisation.
We are now better able to construct a modern map of religion and secularisation in Europe in historical depth. We do so keeping in mind the categories set out earlier and the different relationships between religion and nationalism, religion and Enlightenment, and alert to the presence or absence of revolutionary political ideology as well as the related presence or absence of denominational religion along the lines of the Halévy thesis. All that amounts to formidable complication. However, to achieve a comprehensive picture one has to build in even more historical background. Once again one has to step back a long way historically because today’s map reflects many centuries of history, most obviously so in the local religious majorities reflecting the redistributions of population after the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. For example, after 1648 Protestants belonging to minority confessions moved into areas where Protestants were in the majority, just as much later after the First World War Orthodox Greeks were expelled from Turkey and Muslim Turks from Greece; and after the Second World War minority ethnic groups and minority ethno-religious groups were redistributed across the map of Europe. That is why Königsberg with its old Lutheran cathedral is now Kaliningrad with its new Orthodox cathedral of Christ the Saviour completed in 2006 and overlooking Victory Square: an obvious gesture in stone back to the cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow. When Königsberg became Kaliningrad it was only the most recent act in a very long historical play of the tensions between Germans and Slavs discussed in Chapter 15. Maps of religion reflect the migrations, voluntary or forced, of peoples and faiths and peoples with faiths, like the Huguenots who left France after 1685 for Germany, Britain and North America.
The broadest possible historical context for the geographical distribution of religion today is provided by the folk wanderings and the rise and fall of empires over the last two millennia. The contemporary map of religion in Europe and North America reminds us that religion reflects successive folk-wanderings and invasions into the heart of Europe, from the arrival of the Avars in what is now Hungary to the crossing of the Strait of Gibraltar by Muslim armies in the seventh century and the arrival of Muslim armies in front of Vienna in the late seventeenth century. As the Muslim kingdoms of Spain and the Ottoman Empire in South-Eastern Europe weakened, that movement was reversed, above all as the Russian Empire pushed southwards and eastwards. We need to see religion as travelling with peoples as they migrate as well as associated with the expansions of empires and with long-term resistance to empires in a constant movement back and forth. The map of the past is in front of our eyes now, and how people and peoples mentally construct that map creates yet more history here and now.
The Russians first resisted the Polish Empire and the Poles later resisted the Russian Empire. The Romanian and Bulgarian peoples resisted the Ottomans, and the Muslim peoples of southern Russia and the Caucasus resisted Russian expansion. And just as there were migrations into Europe, there were migrations out of Europe propelled by a mixture of economic, political and religious motives: for example, the Catholic Germans who left Germany on account of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf against Catholicism; the Jews who left Russia for Germany, Britain and the USA to escape the pogroms. Today there are once more migrations into Europe following the drastic declines in European fertility, most frequently from Muslim majority countries once colonised by European empires but also from ex-colonies now mostly Christian, like Ghana and the West Indies. Europe once exported people: Scottish Presbyterians to Western Canada and to the South Island of New Zealand, Catholic Italians to North (and South) America. Now it is an importing continent. Flows of migrants run in every direction: Middle Eastern Christians to the USA, Christians from numerous places all over the globe to the Muslim states of the Gulf.
We can now examine the social geography of religion (and of secularity) in Europe and North America with a proper sense of long-term continuities and constant flows and counter-flows over centuries, and also with some awareness of the distribution of different types of religion. These types run all the way from the Byzantine traditions of a unity of peoples and a symphonia of Church and state to the individualised religion of Northern Europe and the denominational pluralism of the Anglo-Saxon world. We can most usefully begin with the ‘collectivistic religions’ of South-Eastern Europe. All over the Orthodox world, and in most of the Catholic world immediately adjacent, religion is embedded as culturally taken for granted and as part of the narrative of national survival and continuity. It is manifested in gestures, in folk practices like the veneration of icons in the icon corner, and in festivals like All Souls when people gather in graveyards to commemorate the dead.
Buildings are erected and tended because they provide markers both of national and religious histories. By implication sites of pilgrimage, like the church of Christ’s Resurrection in Lithuania, may also celebrate the resurrection of the nation. The cathedral of Saint Sava in Belgrade, an immense monument started in 1935, recollects both the medieval Serbian kingdom and the traditions of Byzantium. At one time or other these various ‘ethno-religious’ monuments were forcibly secularised or profaned by Nazis or communists and then resacralised or rebuilt as symbols of national renaissance. By the same token, sentiments of national solidarity create absences as well as presences ‘on the ground’ because landscapes and townscapes simultaneously embody and exclude identities. The Swiss may well be tolerant and religiously lax, but they voted against minarets. Minarets are picturesque on holiday but at home they puncture a familiar sense of the relation between Swiss history and Swiss geography. Swiss mountains are guarantors of freedom and protect the integrity of Switzerland as another Eden. Similar sentiments were mobilised to prevent a Muslim structure being erected in New York close to the site of 9/11. The height and salience of buildings matters, which is why Orthodox structures in Bulgaria erected in the Ottoman period do not stand out too obviously. (In Melbourne the Catholic cathedral was erected 4 feet higher than the Anglican cathedral by an Irish-born ecclesiastic.)
The pressures of disputed borders and the consequent sense of threatened identities embodied in rival national narratives and myths, reinforced by memories of past greatness and historic expropriations, have over the past century ensured a far greater homogeneity than was once the case. There are parts of the Balkans where territory has to some extent been shared and sanctuaries and pilgrimage sites adapted for use by different ethnic and religious groups. There has been an appalling history of ethnic cleansing altering the ethno-religious map of multicultural emporia like Beirut, Istanbul, Sarajevo, Cracow, Vilnius, Salonika and L’viv. Salonika is now overwhelmingly Greek and L’viv overwhelmingly Ukrainian. Vilnius was at one time host to a large Jewish population; and Poland was far from being homogeneously Catholic. All this has changed over the last century and feeds into anxieties about the erection of mosques in Athens and fears of Pakistani migrants all over Greece. Greece and Cyprus both lie at major borders between civilisations where the sense of collective identity is heightened by the presence of ‘the Other’.
A dangerous and contested border still runs through the Balkans between Rome, Byzantium and the Ottoman Empire. The recent hyper-nationalism of Serbia and its Church reflected more than the fact that Serbia lost a larger percentage of its population than any other country in the First World War; more than the sufferings of Serbs at the hands of Croat right-wing militias in the 1940s; and more than the transition in the 1990s from communism to nationalism as the main ideological pillar of the power of the sometime communist elite. Serbia has picked up geopolitical pressures over half a millennium and more, emanating from the Catholic centre of Europe to the north-west and the Ottoman Turks to the south-east. The dualistic Bogomil heresy took root along the fault line, as did subsequent conversions to Islam. There is a vortex surrounding the fault line through the Balkans that reinforces identities and memories of triumph and victimhood. Serbian religiosity is at one and the same time a marker of identity and an amalgam of folk practices.
In the case of Romania the relation between national identity and the Romanian Orthodox Church, manifest in relatively high levels of belief and practice, reflects a rather different concatenation of pressures: a long-term resistance to Ottoman domination, and tensions with Hungary to the west and Russia to the north-east. For a long time Hungarian-speakers in Romania, mostly Catholic and Calvinist, were suspected of forming a fifth column, while Germans, mostly Lutheran, were likewise suspect, and the majority of Germans found it politic to leave the country. As for Uniate Catholics, they were perceived as rival claimants for the role of Romanian national church, and subject to the same degree of persecution they suffered in Ukraine under the Soviets. Uniate Catholics were perceived in Romania and Ukraine alike as a fifth column of the Catholic West, and also subject to Polonisation in Poland.
If one wanted testimony to ethnic homogenisation all the way from Zagreb to Odessa one could find it in the changing distribution of confessional loyalties in the ancient city of Sibiu, (Hermannstadt in German and Nagyszeben in Hungarian). Since 1910 the Hungarians, Germans and Jews have mostly gone. In terms of religious statistics the Romanian Orthodox are now over 90 per cent where they were only 20 per cent; the Uniate Catholics and Calvinists 1 per cent where they were 8 per cent; the Roman Catholics 2 per cent where they were 20 per cent; and the Lutherans 2 per cent where they were 42 per cent. The Orthodox cathedral was finished in 1904, the Lutheran cathedral built in the fourteenth century, the Roman Catholic cathedral built around 1730 and the Reformed (Calvinist) church built in 1783–86 following the declaration of tolerance by Joseph the Second. Architecturally the city witnesses to an historic diversity, with the tiny German remnant worshipping in the oldest and most central building. Demographically the city witnesses to a contemporary monoculturalism. While the European West has shifted in a multicultural direction through migration, the East has become monocultural through extrusion and the redrawing of borders.
If we shift the focus to Central Europe the geopolitical base line extends back as far as the border between the Roman Empire and the ‘barbarians’ and raises such questions as to how far the northern border of the cult of the Dea Mater corresponds to the border of Catholicism after the Reformation. The Holy Roman Empire was centred in Germany at the heart of Europe, and under the Hohenstaufens extended to Italy. The geopolitical strategies of Charles the Fifth as Holy Roman Emperor were crucial to the substantial defeat of the Reformation in Central Europe, and so to its current borders. Later geopolitical theorists argued that whoever controlled the heartland secured overall hegemony, and in the long run the struggle for the heartland was fought out between Catholic Austria and Protestant Germany. The religious dispositions of all the peripheries of these two power centres reflected their partial assimilation and their resistance. For example, Czech secularity and Estonian secularity reflect resistance to one or other version of German-speaking cultural and political hegemony. Estonia and the Czech Republic are today among the most secular areas in Europe: in Estonia and the Czech Republic believers in God number some 15 per cent. Self-identified Catholics in the Czech Republic have now declined to about 10 per cent. East Germany, the former DDR, is also extremely secular on account of the fatal association of German nationalism with Nazism in the Second World War. That association inhibited the ability of Lutheranism to resist forcible secularisation by calling on the resources of a historic religious national identity, even though the eventual movement to bring down the communist government utilised the symbolic space of churches, like the Nikolaikirche in Leipzig and Stettin Cathedral.
The varied distribution of religious belief and practice in the Baltic Republics reflects the fact that they lie at a border constantly contested between rival hegemons, including Sweden and Poland as well as Russia and Germany. The vitality of religion, at least in this area, depends more on geopolitical history than on factors like degrees of ‘existential security’ sometimes cited as crucial. Tallinn as the capital of Estonia can be seen as part of a post-Protestant northern plain stretching from Birmingham to Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Hamburg and Berlin, and to Latvia and Estonia. Religion in this northern plain is individualised and secularised, especially in the major cities and capitals: a dramatic contrast with the collective and embedded religion of the southeast. The exception is Catholic Lithuania where the Catholic Church has long retained a positive identification with Lithuanian identity in spite of a history of forced Christianisation by Germans in the late fourteenth century and the promotion of paganism as the original faith of Lithuania by some contemporary intellectuals.
Russian attempts to replace Polish Catholic influence with Orthodoxy in the nineteenth century reinforced Lithuanian self-consciousness and Catholic identification; and discrimination against Lithuanian Catholics in secular employment stimulated the recruitment of talented priests who challenged the influence of secular nationalism in the intelligentsia and adopted programmes of social justice that pre-empted some of the appeal of socialism. After independence in 1918 the Catholic Democratic Party dominated politics up to 1926 and ethnic Germans were tolerated, along with Jews, who in Vilnius made up close to half of the population. After 1926 a new left-wing government tried to reduce Catholic influence. Once forcibly reincorporated in Russia in 1940 (and again reincorporated in 1944 after three years of German occupation) clergy were immediate targets of repression and the church developed a fortress mentality it still retains. Eventually believers agitated for human rights and created an underground church possessed of some genuine popular authority. Soon after independence was regained the reformed communists came to power and some of the moral prestige gained by the Church under occupation evaporated. When a socially conservative government was elected in 2008 people suspected the social ambitions of the Church, and a growing urban middle class open to media influence found the Church a rather ambiguous presence. Nevertheless some 80 per cent of the population identify with Catholicism, some 30 per cent claim to attend church on holy days and another 30 per cent claim to attend at least once a month. Lithuania and Poland were once united and have a common history of resistance to Russia, which in the second half of the twentieth century became resistance to enforced secularisation.8 Today the two countries are among the most practising in Europe: in Poland 80–90 per cent of the population believes in God, and 50–70 per cent regularly attends church.
Amsterdam represents the secularity of northwest Europe and can be regarded as the capital of religious indifference. It provides a major hub linking the secular Northern European plain and the secular world of Britain and Scandinavia. Though the religious indifference of Amsterdam on the contemporary scale dates from the 1960s and the collapses of the separately integrated social and religious ‘pillars’ of Dutch society, the story properly begins with the Eighty Years’ War of independence against Catholic Spain and the iconoclastic fury that accompanied it. Out of the carnage there arose a burger society interested in trade and commerce and inclined to a degree of tolerance, rather than a society of kings and priests. This was the great period of Dutch sea power and of creative achievement in the arts; and the modern representation of identity might well be the Rijksmuseum, both in its original and highly controversial form as the Gothic creation of a Catholic architect in a society cherishing a Protestant founding narrative and in its renovated form as a statement of an identity now based on certain values, in particular artistic creativity. Whereas in Sicily they might haul an icon of the Virgin through the streets in procession, in Holland in 2013 they hauled Rembrandt’s The Night Watch to the Rijksmuseum as a representation of the public face of Dutch society. Holland is an example, with Germany and Switzerland, of a bi-confessional society, and all three show a decline in religion, most obviously in the Protestant sector. In what was, during the mid-twentieth century a strongly practising society, the Dutch have become highly individualised religious consumers: about one in four speaks of belief in God and one in three of belief in ‘a higher power’. The proportion of the spiritually unaffiliated increases, in particular among young educated urban dwellers: these people conceive of a transcendent dimension quite apart from institutional attachment and seek a harmonious relation to the environment. Among those aged under 30 in 2010 religious affiliation was as low as 30 per cent; and the Catholic proportion of the population has dropped from 40 per cent to 25 per cent, with only about 1 per cent present at mass on any given Sunday.
The United Kingdom and the northern countries of Scandinavia are as secular and individualised as the European northern plain, though they differ in not having historic territorial emplacements of Catholicism. Scandinavia has long been characterised by formal identification with the majority churches, so that even now most young people are confirmed, but levels of active participation on Sundays are less than 5 per cent. The United Kingdom has seen declines in belief and practice since the 1960s following a brief post-war stabilisation, and also a secular transition in the peripheries: Scotland and Wales have both drawn closer to the dominant pattern of religiosity in England.
France and Belgium are very different and quite exceptional in their degree of explicit secularism rather than mere secularity. Both countries have experienced outright conflict between Catholicism and secular liberalism and socialism, and splits over religion running through the whole society, as well as serious religious revivals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Ideals of laïcité focussed on curbing the influence of the Catholic Church go back to the time of the French Revolution when peasants were finally converted into Frenchmen. In both France and Belgium identification with Catholicism has dropped to around half the population and practice to around 5 per cent on any given Sunday.9 Spain and Italy have also experienced major splits between Catholicism and secular liberalism and socialism, but have considerably higher reserves of Catholic identification and belief and higher levels of mass attendance. In Italy regular mass attendance may be as high as 20+ per cent, perhaps reflecting the fact that the political memory of collusion with Fascism is more distant than in Spain as well as reflecting the post-war influence of Christian Democracy. There is also a lurking memory of an earlier tension between the Church and Italian liberalism and nationalism: the statues to Arnold of Brescia in Brescia and of Giordano Bruno in Rome that were put up in the late nineteenth century memorialised heretics in order to further the cause of the Risorgimento. The younger generations in both Spain and Italy are little influenced by Catholic moral teaching and there are major problems of recruitment to the priesthood. Birth rates indicate that Catholic moral teaching on contraception is utterly null and void for most Catholics. Italy legalised divorce in the 1970s and Spain legalised same-sex marriage in 2005. Even Malta, a country where there is still majority practice, legalised divorce in 2012. The most obvious popular expressions of religion are in pilgrimages and festivals, including pilgrimage centres rooted in a strong local identity, such as Montserrat in Catalonia, El Pilar in Aragon and Santiago in Galicia.
If one were to try to summarise the situation in Western Europe one might say that with economic security and urbanisation there has been a demobilisation of identities, whether these are religious, national or political. The national centres become precarious and local identities assert themselves, as in Scotland and Catalonia. Ireland has long been dominated by nationalism, by Catholicism and by a nationalistic Catholicism nurtured in the Protestant Ascendancy and maintained against the nationalistic Protestantism of Ulster. With prosperity and the easing of the situation in the north of the island, including the amelioration of practices of exclusion and discrimination, as well as the increasing influence of liberal professionals and a liberal media, there has been a degree of demobilisation and what Roy Foster has called the ‘Protestantisation’ of Ireland. Foster notes a shift to individual moral choice and a rejection of laws imposed by ecclesiastical fiat that now extends throughout Western Europe.10 In Spain same-sex marriage and abortion might be opposed by the Church but they attract the support of the majority.
The decline of Social Democracy in Northern Europe and of Christian Democracy in Southern Europe provides another indicator of demobilisation. The decline of Social Democracy is related to the achievement of most social democratic goals and the rising costs of welfare, and the decline of Christian Democracy to a diminishing Catholic base and the demise of communism in the East and the West alike. Practising Catholics, for example in all the countries of ‘Latin’ Europe, tend to the centre right but they are a diminishing and ageing constituency; and at the same time the fortress mentality of communist electorates in France and Italy with their associated union power has dissipated. The politics of commitment based on mass institutions has given way to a search for the centre ground based on pragmatic calculations of electoral advantage in an atmosphere of scepticism about politics and politicians. In successive years of recession electorates simply opt for whichever party is not responsible for current austerity. Populist parties of the right express frustration with austerity, and in Britain and France as well as Austria and Greece they pick up lower-class anxieties about migration.
The rise of ‘spirituality’ expresses an individualistic resistance to institutions and finds expression in technologies of the self and concern for the environment, even though spirituality still retains major links with organised religion. The areas that were once religiously distinct, especially in the peripheries, have assimilated more to the centre, and there are now substantial religious and ethnic minorities where once there was a religious monopoly. Migration has resulted in Muslim minorities of over a million in Spain and Italy, and in the rest of Western Europe the proportion of Muslims edges towards 5 per cent or even 6 per cent, mostly concentrated in the major cities: Vienna may cease to be a Catholic city within a generation or so even though its architectural profile is dominated by churches. Prejudice against minorities, in particular Muslims, is declining, as is prejudice against sexual deviation, though more so in Western than in Eastern Europe. The major secular icons in public space are clusters of banks as in London and Frankfurt, sports stadia, media headquarters, art galleries, universities and hospitals. That is why revolutionaries first seek to take control of media headquarters and terrorists attack the architectural symbols of contemporary financial and military power. Perhaps the centre of industrial Milan, built on the car industry and the fashion industry, symbolises the rivalrous and complementary sources of contemporary social power: the cathedral, the Brera Art Gallery and the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, built between 1865 and 1877, looking back to London’s Burlington Arcade, and linking the cathedral with La Scala Opera House.
The four maritime nations of Western Europe laid down the social geography of religion in North America, and topographical names are the most eloquent testimony to the past (including a Native American presence even in places where Native Americans are scarce on the ground, like Manhattan and Massachusetts). New York was New Amsterdam up to 1664, with a Jewish as well as a Dutch presence, and in the immediate vicinity of New York you can follow a trail of place names with a Dutch provenance like Flushing, Harlem and the Bronx. Here one needs first to keep in mind the conflicts between the English and the Dutch for maritime supremacy, initially settled in favour of the Dutch, and then to remember the religious and political affinity between the two Protestant nations. When William of Orange became king of England in 1688, his advent was immediately followed in 1689 by a Bill of Rights that provided something like a first version of the American Bill of Rights roughly a century later. The Civil War in England that ended in the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 ended in America with the deposition of the monarchy in 1776.
The hinterlands of Boston, Plymouth and Jamestown in Virginia are scrambled maps of England and the influence of these maps fans out southward to Charleston, westward to Philadelphia and northward to Portland and Bangor. All these areas reproduce something of the varied ecclesiastical ecology of England, Scotland, Wales and Ulster: classical looking churches and meeting houses on an English eighteenth-century model, often rebuilt, that may be Episcopal, Congregational, Unitarian, Baptist, Methodist or some Protestant Church founded much later. As far south as Savannah in Georgia you find the characteristic emplacements of towns founded on an eighteenth-century model but with a wider representation of denominations than you might expect in England, and Episcopal churches no more central than the others.
Classical architecture, domestic and ecclesiastical, extends all over the South, as well as throughout the middle states and New England: much of it in an early nineteenth-century Greek style that reflected Jefferson’s idea of America as the new Athens, as exemplified in the building of the University of Virginia.11 Later one finds the emplacements of a nineteenth-century Gothic continuous with English neo-Gothic and neo-Romanesque, such as Andrew Jackson Downing’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York and Henry Hobson Richardson’s Episcopal Trinity Church in Boston. American universities and their chapels reflect the expansion of different denominations: Baptist foundations at Brown and Chicago; Congregational foundations at Harvard and Yale; Scottish Presbyterian foundations at Princeton; Methodist foundations at Boston, Duke and Emory. Sometimes these universities are associated with some form of industrial enterprise, for example, tobacco at Duke, Coca-Cola at Emory; and they alternate between the eighteenth-century classical model and the nineteenth-century Gothic model, in particular Gothic university chapels on the scale of an English cathedral like those in Duke and Princeton.
Place names are just as eloquent of an expansive and ambitious French presence only really brought to a halt at the conclusion of the first world war of 1756–63. From Maine and Vermont in the north to New Orleans and Louisiana in the south, the French presence sought to contain the westward expansion of the English, Scottish and Scots Irish in an arc that includes the massive Catholic emplacements on the heights of Québec and Montreal, as well as Detroit and Des Moines. The Catholic Cathedral-Basilica of Saint Louis, King of France, overlooking Jackson Square in New Orleans, retains the same centrality it would have in Europe. Place names also provide potent reminders of the Spanish presence. Today the most striking traces of the Spanish imperium are found in missions set up by Spaniards from the late seventeenth century onward up to the 1820s, such as San Juan Capistrano in California and San Antonio de Valero (the Alamo) in Texas. Spanish influence can be picked up all over what is now the southern border of the USA: from St. Augustine in Florida, to the western coast of California, and northwards beyond the San Francisco Bay area. Proceeding further north you encounter a Scottish influence with massive emplacements all over western Canada as well as in the western Maritimes.
These foundations represent a redistribution of the patterns and architectural styles of Europe ultimately meeting, mingling and competing on a basis of near equality. There is hardly anywhere in Europe where Methodists and Catholics compete on equal terms, but they do in Kansas. The cities of Eastern and Central North America, above all Chicago – as well as cities like Toronto in Canada – are multicultural emporia that in their churches simultaneously witness to a pullulating Protestant pluralism and to wave after wave of migrants. The migrants come from Ireland, Italy, Greece, Poland, Russia and Ukraine; and they include blacks from the American South, the West Indies and West Africa, as well as Hispanics from Mexico, Central and South America, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and Haiti. All the cities of the American South, traditionally dominated by Baptists and other Protestant denominations, now have vast sectors, including the suburbs, occupied by blacks and by Hispanic migrants. The cities of the West Coast from San Diego to Vancouver have Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Philippine populations, and these have fanned out all over the land mass of North America. Every city has major mega-churches, like the Crystal Cathedral or Saddleback Valley Church, Lake Forest, California, or Lakewood and Second Baptist in Houston: like shopping malls, churches have grown vastly in size and in the range of their facilities.12 One finds a Chinese Presbyterian church in Toronto and a Korean Presbyterian church in Boston, and they may easily share a block with a Brazilian or Nigerian Evangelical or Pentecostal church. This social geography of religion intersects with the political map of North America: ‘white conservative Protestants’ in the South voting Republican; Hispanics, blacks, Liberal Protestants, Jews and ‘seculars’ voting Democrat; Catholics shifting from their old Democrat allegiances to a more evenly split allegiance.13
The ecology of American religion splits fairly easily into the North-East, which is relatively secular (for example Vermont), with a very strong Catholic presence in the major cities; the West, also relatively secular (for example Oregon); the South which is still white conservative and Protestant, with expanding sectors of Hispanic migrants; and the Midwest, which remains disproportionately German and Scandinavian Lutheran, often of a conservative complexion. The proportion of Americans identifying themselves as Christian may be much the same as in Europe, at about 80 per cent; but the proportion regularly attending church is more than twice as high, and belief in God very much higher. Even those who in increasing numbers (among young men up to 20 per cent) identify themselves as having ‘no religion’ often believe in God, pray and accept the label ‘spiritual’. Given the Hispanic and Irish backgrounds of many in the ‘no religion’ category the figures may pick up disillusion with the Catholic Church after recent scandals.
In this chapter I have tried to provide the broadest possible context for the attempt in the next two chapters to inscribe my general theory of secularisation in terms of the dispositions of religious power in cities of the centre and cities of the periphery. In the initial sections I have sketched the fundamental dynamic of cultures influenced by Christianity and the types of organisation to which that dynamic gives rise. I have then broadened out from implicit mental maps of the distribution of different kinds of Christianity to trace in outline the categories set out in the general theory, such as the Protestant state churches of Northern Europe, the areas of mixed confession in north-central Europe and the areas of major political conflict over religion in southern Catholic Europe, as well as the embedded collective religion of Eastern Europe, the partial pluralism of the UK and the total pluralism of North America. I have not attempted to build in the process of functional differentiation, mainly because that is dealt with in the chapter following.
1 Bellah and Joas, The Axial Age and Its Consequences.
2 Moore, The War on Heresy.
3 Alexandra Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
4 Steven Ozment, The Serpent and the Lamb: Cranach, Luther and the Making of the Reformation (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011).
5 David Martin, ‘The Denomination’, British Journal of Sociology (13, March 1962, pp. 1–14).
6 Halévy, A History of the English People.
7 Shils, Center and Periphery.
8 Ališauskienė and Schröder, Religious Diversity in Post-Soviet Society.
9 Institut Français d’Opinion Publique (IFOP), Analyse: Le Catholicisme en France en 2009 (www.ifop.com).
10 Roy Foster, Luck and the Irish: A Brief History of Change since 1970 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
11 Margaret Malamud, Ancient Rome and Modern America (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).
12 Scott Thumma and Dave Travis, Beyond the Myth: What We Can Learn from America’s Largest Churches (San Francisco: Wiley/Jossey-Bass, 2007).
13 Corwin E. Smidt, American Evangelicals Today (London and New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2013).