Should God get a name check? -Dec 8, 2003

In recent months a section of the churches has become very interested in the apparently arcane matter of the emerging European Union Constitution.

The question exercising EU-focussed policy wonks allied to the Vatican and to some of the historic Protestant denominations is not sovereignty, that famous preoccupation of British politicians. It is, rather, the role and status of religion in the framework for a 'common home' being formulated in Brussels and Strasbourg.

God, you see, is not name-checked in the proposed Constitution or its preamble. Nor is there any direct reference to Christianity as a foundational force in the new Europe, alongside Greek and Roman civilizations (which are mentioned).

For those still clinging to an attenuated version of Christendom – the belief that Christian institutions and values should have a privileged, acknowledged or reserved place in governance – this is a serious matter. They want Europe to be seen as a 'Christian continent.'

But is this a healthy Christian aspiration? Can God adequately be named in a territorial document where God cannot, in fact, be worshipped with equanimity?

Is a particular claim on the history of a region a good way to help people identify God's domination-free realm in the personhood of Jesus? Do we really want to locate Christianity (or God) as a specific part of the fabric of one bit of one continent?

These are serious theological questions. And there are social and political issues at stake, too.

The fault lines between religion, culture and society are among the most delicate and difficult in Europe today. Those responsible for drawing up the Constitution for the enlarging EU have the unenviable task of holding together a commitment to freedom of belief on the one hand, and the post-Enlightenment tradition of secularity in public life on the other.

Turkey and the Holy See pull in different directions on this one.

Two further complexities flow from this basic issue. First, the religious face of Europe has changed greatly since 1945. Islam and other minority traditions have been growing; non-doctrinal humanism has established itself in public thought; non-institutional spirituality has emerged; and the majority Christian churches have mostly declined decisively in size and influence.

Second, two distinct poles of what gets labelled 'secularity' have been making their voices heard. One advocates maintaining public space and democratic life as neutral ground free from the dominance of any one belief or ideology; the other assumes a more 'anti-clerical' or 'non-religious' stance which wishes to exclude faith from everything but its own, private arena.

France has always been seen as exemplifying the second tendency, which takes freedom from religion as the basis of freedom for religion. The ban on religious symbols and dress in schools and other public places is one example of what this means in practice.

Similarly, the participation of religious bodies in social service and community provision is still largely unthinkable within French society.

But things are changing. Sensitised by the implications of the presence of Islam, in particular, a small but growing number of policy-makers (those raised on anti-clericalism) are coming to recognise that it is neither right nor healthy to suppress public expressions of mainstream belief. To do so produces marginalization and resentment. It creates ghettos. Secularity has to mean space for all with all. And that is something most Christians should strongly affirm.

As for expressing ‘Christianity at the heart of Europe’ (John Paul II), that is our job, not the Constitution’s.

Similarly, in the debate on the human rights framework of the new Europe, it is now dawning on some of the key protagonists that 'communities of obligation' (such as the Catholics and the Orthodox) will often see rights and responsibilities differently from 'liberal individualists'.

The implications of true pluralism are not that we simply try to find ways to impose our values on one another, but that we learn to understand, live with and negotiate such differences – while recognising that traditions develop and change, and that public policy therefore has to allow for variance as well as even-handedness in its formulation.

In the meantime, politics rules. And the politics of the present European Constitution is not a Jacobin plot. Rather it is a conundrum revolving around the reality of religious and ideological differences; differences that have propelled the people drafting the texts towards emphasising things that Europeans hold in common (such as our scientific and cultural inheritances) rather than things that divide us.

Of course it is painful for Christians to hear that their faith is a source of division as well as of unity. But it would be untruthful not to acknowledge it. Similarly, it is unfair for those of other convictions to deny that Christian faith has played a very significant part in shaping many of the goods that Europeans hold in common. But, by the same token, it would surely be dishonest to claim that post-modern Europe owes allegiance to a common God; or to say that Christianity is wished by the majority of its peoples to be a determining factor in their shared identity; or to deny the experience of other religious groups (such as Anabaptists) who have struggled against the hegemony of civil religion.

All this suggests that the European Constitution is not the best place to enshrine the quality of truth we meet in Jesus Christ – which is about invitation into a new community of shalom, not a means to impose Christian labels on a great number of people who have not owned them and who do not wish to be restricted by them. This is surely an appropriate time for Christians to rediscover their nonconformist consciences, not to bury them.

For there is, indeed, a very strong and genuine Christian vocation within Europe. It is based not in documents but on deeds. It involves healing the wounds and fractures that have often trapped different Christian communities in enmity towards one another. It involves working for justice through peace, and seeking to model these commitments in the way we exist as churches, as well as in the quality and character of our engagement with public life. It calls on us to offer an authentic witness to Jesus’ 'road less travelled', while distinguishing this from the manipulations of proselytism and religious hegemony. It invites us into dialogue and cooperation with those of other (and no) religious conviction.

'Christian Europe' is a dream of the past. From the perspective of public policy, it cannot offer space for the kind of wider co-existence we need today.

And from the viewpoint of the Gospel it risks deforming Christian mission into an enterprise of worldly dominion, rather than the kind of transformative action that can only take shape through communities of hope built from the ground up.

The project of the European Union is surely to move beyond economism at the macro level, towards the conditions for a home that will be spacious and generous enough to encompass a whole range of previously divided people. Perhaps it might also offer a C21st ‘bloc’ model rather different to (say) the neo-conservative US imperium or the free-market authoritarianism of China?

Followers of Jesus located in Europe need, like others, space to express themselves. And they will surely want to find echoes and intimations of the commonwealth of God in the best of Europeanism. But they would also be wise to avoid confusing these destinies, making overarching territorial and historical claims, or restricting Christian citizenship by writing it into a political document. For their particular creative role is not to be mere settlers, but to be experimental discoverers of those fresh possibilities of 'life together' (Dietrich Bonhoeffer) which are opened up for us through God's abiding homelessness in the world. That is, the strange alternative polity made visible in the mysterious pattern of the death and resurrection of Christ.

Simon Barrow (www.simonbarrow.net) works for Churches Together in Britain and Ireland, but is writing in a personal capacity. His background is in journalism, adult learning, politics and theology.