Notre Dame Burns; France Secularizes.

16 April 2019.

I was shocked, but not really surprised, to see, today, that Notre Dame Cathedral had gone up in flames. I have spent two years resident (between 1965 and 1968) in the Paris area and understand the iconic place Notre Dame has in the Paris physical and cultural landscape.

But, in a way, Notre Dame's destruction was inevitable. Christian churches have been suffering damage throughout Europe recently... a real time metaphor of Christianity's decline in Europe in the face of overpowering radical secularism, and, to a lesser extent, radical secularism's ally, resurgent Islam. It was only a matter of time that august Notre Dame would be tarnished.

Notwithstanding the waning influence of Catholicism in France today, a number of French billionaires have announced their intent to finance a reconstruction of Notre Dame.

The question is why?

France is a radically secular nation today. Very few French practice Catholicism. In fact, what remains of Catholic France is under assault. Paris' number two cathedral, St. Suplice, was torched by an arsonist a couple of weeks ago. Some eighty odd French churches have been vandalized in the last six months. Are the billionaires going to fund reparations for all of the damaged churches?

Likely, reenergizing France's religious sensibilities is not the motive of the billionaires. Rather the French moguls see Notre Dame as a secular symbol of the modern French state.... kind of like Tour Eifel, or Pont Neuf, or Les Halles… Like these other secular, cultural symbols, Notre Dame is emblazoned into Paris imagery. Notre Dame attracts tourists. To let it go would have adverse economic impact. Therefore, for practical, economic, if not religious, reasons, Notre Dame must be rebuilt.

Secular Europe has waning cultural energy. Notre Dame's reconstruction as a Catholic cathedral has little chance of arresting secular Europe's ongoing cultural and economic decline. France had cultural energy when its national identity was inextricably intertwined, like a double helix, with the Catholic Church. The Church is now a paper tiger, having little cultural impact on things French.

Secular Europe, today, including secular France, stands, culturally, for nothing more than untrammeled right of individual self-expression within the broader context of growing, centralized, faceless bureaucratic control from the European Union of means of production and consumption. The result, among secular Europeans, is hopelessness about the future, a resultant decline in family formation, and falling birthrates.... "Frog in the pot" cultural suicide over time.

In today's cultural miasma, dispirited Europeans resort to self-centered carpe diem. Eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die. I recently read an article in the Economist, where the author was puzzled that notwithstanding apparent economic prosperity, Germans, crying in their beer, seemed unmoored... unhappy. It has to do with secularism's displacing old culture... with... a vacuum... and nothing uplifting or uniting more than freedom of self-expression and submission to the growing, faceless, anodyne, administrative state. Is that all there is?

Islamic immigrants to France, and other parts of secular Europe, look at this growing, appalling cultural vacuum and say "no thanks, we'll stay true to our own cultural traditions even as we benefit from host country economic opportunity.

With its cultural energy and high birth rate, it's only a matter of a generation before Islam becomes the dominant culture of Western Europe. Not that there's anything wrong with that!

Are the five pillars of Islam so bad? 1. Honor God. 2. One haaj to Mecca in a lifetime. 3. Alms to the poor. 4. Five times daily prayer. 5. Ramadan fast. Discipline emanating from religious belief correlates to cultural energy. Some culture is better than no culture, right? Christianity in Europe has run out of gas. Christianity's resurrection does not seem imminent. Maybe, culturally energetic Islam can pick up the slack.

Think, say, Abu Dhabi, where capitalistic prosperity and energized Islamic culture co-exist. A clone of Abu Dhabi's magnificent Sheikh El Zayad Mosque, in fact, would be a fitting replacement for the destroyed Notre Dame cathedral, the recent destruction of which is more a symbol of Western cultural decay than it is of an aspirational future.

Istanbul, remember, was once Constantinople.

The more things change, the more things stay the same.