In one of his final essays, First Things editor-in-chief Richard John Neuhaus discusses the varieties of secularization in America and Europe:
The new thinking about secularization does not reduce everything to an analysis of class or ethnic struggles, power rivalries, or economic dynamics. In her 2004 book The Roads to Modernity, for instance, the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb examines how the Enlightenment meant very different things in Europe and America. In America it was understood to be religion friendly, indeed religiously grounded, whereas in most of Europe it was a battle against the ancien régime, very much including the religious establishments. As Himmelfarb puts it, the Enlightenment in America took the form of “the politics of liberty” while in Europe it followed the French “ideology of reason.” This is a persuasive analysis, to which it needs to be added that in the last half century the American intellectual class has turned decidedly toward the French understanding of the Enlightenment, a turn that is, underlying specific policies in dispute, a driving force in what are aptly called the “culture wars” in this country.
A great difference between Europeans and Americans is that Europeans are generally disposed to see religion more as a problem than as a solution. There are important caveats, to be sure, but the generalization holds. This is made evident in a number of ways. To take an obvious instance, there is the dramatic disparity between church attendance in Europe and the United States. In recent years, a number of scholars have challenged the claim, based on survey research of almost a century, that 40-plus percent of Americans go to church each week. Perhaps the statistics, gathered in various ways, are inflated, but the interesting question is why Americans who don’t go to church regularly claim that they do. They think they should. For most Americans, it is the normal and approved thing to do. People are sometimes better understood by what they think they should do than by what they do. In Europe, going to church is to be in a self-understood minority; it is to take a stand, even to be countercultural.
Read the entire essay here.