I had to come to America to realize I’m Christian. Until a couple of years ago, when I moved to New York, I had always embraced my atheism as a given. Even though Spain is largely a Christian country by many standards, I was never baptized, I can count with one hand the times I’ve been to church and I wouldn’t know how to say grace. At home, even if I would not describe my parents as radical atheists, I was born and raised in a religion-free environment — or so I thought. [...]
Most European countries have long embraced universal liberalism — the implicit belief in moral equality for all races and religions — and are proud of what some call “European values.” What that means exactly is largely unclear, but the idea of secularization — or the French laïcité — seems to be a central tenet: In Europe, politics and society are meant to operate without any religious influence. [...]
Philosopher Mark C. Taylor points out in “After God” that “secularism is a religious phenomenon, which grows directly out of the Judeo-Christian tradition.” He argues that secularism is associated with Modernization, but both phenomena are highly rooted in Western religion. The fallacy lies in the fact that Modernization, and especially the Enlightenment, made us think of values such as laïcité as universal. But those values were actually born in Christian societies. And even as religion retreats to the private sphere, centuries of tradition cannot be extirpated from culture — nor am I arguing they should be. [...]
Failing to understand how present Christianity still is in our cultures will only create more tensions with the rising influx of immigrants from non-Christian backgrounds. We need to stop pretending that we live in religiously devoid spaces, and that the issue is that those immigrants of Muslim background need to keep their religion a private matter, because that’s what European Christians do. The immigrants coming in see themselves as coming into a Christian culture — often one that is much more intolerant of their culture than they had expected.
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