The Crisis of Western Education (The Works of Christopher Dawson)

XIII. The Religious Vaccum in Modern Culture

xiii The Religious Vaccum in Modern Culture The predicament in which the world finds itself today is due essentially to two factors: first to the acute secularization of Western culture and secondly to the revolt of the rest of the world against it. for more than two centuries Western civilization has been losing contact with the religious traditions on which it was originally founded and devoting all its energies to the conquest and organization of the world by economic and scientific techniques; and for the last fifty years there has been a growing resistance to this exploitation by the rest of the world—a resistance which has now culminated in a revolt which threatens the very existence of Western society. nevertheless this revolt is not directed against the process of secularization itself. it is not a question of a conflict between Western materialism and oriental spirituality. on the contrary, the east is following the example of the West in its revolt against religious tradition and is going even farther in the direction of the total secularization of culture. it may attack the West as the embodiment of economic exploitation, but it cannot object to its materialism, since the basis of its protest rests on the doctrine of economic materialism which it has borrowed from the West. Where, then, does Catholicism stand in relation to this situation? in so far as both parties represent rival forms of secularism, it might seem as though Catholicism was not concerned with either of them, so that it could look upon the conflict in the same spirit as the hebrew prophets regarded the mutual destruction of the world empires in the age of nebuchadnezzar. 129 But this is far too simplified a view of the situation. Catholicism has been so deeply involved in the history of Western civilization for the last fifteen hundred years that Catholics can not regard europe in the same ways as the Jews regarded the Gentile world. even today after the reformation and the revolution and the secularization of the modern state and modern culture, our society remains in a certain sense Christian. But we cannot afford to be optimistic. during the last fifty years the new forces that have arisen in the modern world have been openly antiChristian ones, and the creation of the totalitarian state in nazi Germany and in Communist russia produced a new type of religious persecution which is more subtle and far-reaching than anything that the Church has had to face in the past. it is true that the Communist threat is directed against Western culture as a whole as well as against Christianity . But that does not mean that Western culture has become the conscious defender of the Christian faith and of Christian moral values. on the contrary, there has been a serious slump in the practice of religion during the last fifty years in england, and perhaps in Western europe as a whole. for in order to understand the religious state of the modern world, we must recognize the existence of two contrary tendencies. on the one hand the standards of the religious minority have been steadily rising, while at the same time the general level of religious practice among the majority of nominal Christians or semi-Christians has been rapidly sinking. Therefore the general over-all tendency is for modern Western society to become increasingly pagan, while at the same time Christianity considered as a minority religion retains and perhaps even increases its vitality and its internal strength. The situation in england is well illustrated in the survey of English Life and Leisure which was published in 1951 by B. s. rowntree and G. r. Lavers. it devotes a good deal of attention to the religious question and makes the first serious attempt to estimate by methods of social survey what influence Christianity exerts in the lives of people today. The more detailed individual studies and case histories in the survey give the impression that the real cause of modern irreligion is not intellectual , nor is it due to the influence of Communism and dogmatic 130 The Crisis of Western Education anti-Christianity. it is sheer indifference: the practical paganism of people who have never thought deeply on this subject, or perhaps on any subject, and who cannot see that Christianity has any relevance to their actual lives. here are a few typical extracts from the two hundred case histories...