European / American: it's all the same?

When I have described to American evangelicals the intellectual and emotional resistance that one faces when sharing the gospel in France, I have on a number of occasions gotten the response, “Yes, isn’t it terrible. It is like that here in the States too.” Well, is it really?

My wife was in the courtyard of our apartment complex talking to the daughter of a neighbor. The seven-year-old exclaimed, “But in light of the suffering in the world, how can you say that God exists?!” Now how many American seven year-olds do you know who would respond this way at the mere mention of the name of God?

That neighbor has now become a believer but her daughter continues to wrestle with questions and doubts concerning a relationship with God through faith

As I mentioned in the earlier blog entries “RELIGIOUS SMOKE”, the Crusades and the Inquisition irreparably marred the European psyche. At about the same time that the United States was experiencing a tremendous spiritual revival, C.S. Lewis stated:

“Certainly I feel that very grave dangers hang over us. This results from the apostasy of the great part of Europe from the Christian faith. Hence a worse state than the one we were in before we received the Faith. For no one returns from Christianity to the same state he was in before Christianity, but into a worse state; the difference between a pagan and an apostate is the difference between an unmarried woman and an adulteress.”(“Letters,” 89)

C.S. Lewis' "Letters"

In the 16th through 18th centuries Protestant believers fled to North America to escape European politico-religious persecution. In 1776 on the New Continent, the United States consequently inaugurated religious freedom and separation of Church and State as founding principles to protect people from the tyranny of the power of the monarchy wedded with the authority of the Church.

In 1789 on the Old Continent, France inaugurated state secularism to protect people from the tyranny of the power of the monarchy wedded to the authority of the Church. Seeing no other way to uncouple the authority of the Church from the power of the Monarchy, the French revolutionaries overthrew both, and promoted secularism as the remedy to the problem of Christendom that had been plaguing the Continent for centuries.

The Rights of Man

So France and the United States arrived at two opposing prescriptions to the common menace of Christendom (the majority Church wielding domineering political power). To protect people the United States promoted freedom of religion, Europe promoted philosophical secularism.

The United States is admittedly pragmatic, while Europe is hubristically philosophical. Take for example the American philosopher Benjamin Franklin’s aphorisms: “a penny saved is a penny earned,” and “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

Now compare the tenor of Franklin’s sayings to some European philosophers:

“God is dead” (Nietzsche).
“God’s only excuse is that he does not exist” (Camus).
And “even if God did exist, it would change nothing” (Sartre).

Friedrich Nietzsche

Albert Camus was the second youngest-ever recipient of Nobel Prize for literature in 1957

Jean-Paul Sartre received the Nobel Prize for literature, but refused it.

Just as Jesus and his apostles formed the foundation of Christianity, just as the Founding Fathers formed the foundation of the United States, the Enlightenment philosophers formed the foundation of today’s Europe. And much of Europe's intellectual foundation was resolutely anti-religious, laid to protect people from suffering and death at the hands of Church authorities empowered by the monarchy.

So what? Pragmatically speaking concerning evangelism "one size does not fit all" cultures and in diverse contexts “different strokes for different folks” are in order.

As we all know, one faces obstacles when sharing the good news of Christ even in the United States where 35% of the population is evangelical, where laws were designed to promote religious freedom, where the mindset is pragmatic, where there is a favorable religious past—Christians made significant contributions to societal wellbeing.

How much more then does one encounter obstacles when sharing the good news of Christ in France where only 0.5% of the population is evangelical, where laws were designed to protect people from religion, where the mindset is philosophically anti-religious, where the atrocious religious past has marred Christ's reputation.
In light of these stark differences, it simply makes sense that one might use quicker, more direct approaches when sharing the gospel with an American, than with a European; it takes time for the European to overcome the visceral reaction against Christianity, to work through the intellectual questions, to discover who Jesus really is and what life with Him might truly be like.
C. S. Lewis captured the heart of these differences by simply saying that one does not woo a divorcée as one does a virgin.

Plausibility and prayer

A few years back… I had turned on the 8 P.M. news desperately wanting to get the latest on the reaction of the Muslim world to the Danish cartoons depicting Mohammed with a bomb-shaped turban. “R-r-r-ring!” went the phone. “Gr-r-r-r” went I.

Things degenerated from there. The telemarketer was from France Télécom, the phone company touting its new service. “No thank you.” “But this will only take two or three minutes.” “No. Thank you!” “But it is for our premium service.” “I am not interested. Thank you for the offer. Good bye!” “Sigh!” “Click.”

Can you relate to this sort of exchange with telemarketers? Do you “just say no” before you even hear what they have to say? I mean, this was the French equivalent of “Ma Bell” ! Why did I react this way when this was my phone company offering me a way to save money?
Because in 2003, France Télécom was fined 40 million euros over a phone book dispute.
Because in November 2005, France Télécom was fined 80 million euros for obstructing DSL competition.
Because in December 2005, France Télécom’s mobile division “Orange” was fined 256 million euros having conspired with two other companies to hinder competition. (Source: Libération, Nov. 9 and Dec. 1, 2005)
So I just said “no!” because I could not imagine France Télécom offering me anything that was not overpriced, because I did not like the thought that the excess that I had been paying them was paying the fines levied against them, and because they had been hindering me from getting better, less expensive service elsewhere.

In comparison, this animosity is just a smidgen of the visceral reaction that many Europeans have toward the Church.

Due to the Crusades (killing others in the name of Christ) and the Inquisitions (killing Europeans in the name of the Church), Europeans often just say “No!” to any offer to discuss Christianity, Jesus or the gospel.

This refusal to even listen to potentially advantageous information, whether it be less expensive telephone service or the Good News of salvation, is due to the reigning plausibility structure.

Plausibility structure is a grid of unquestioned assumptions through which new beliefs and ideas are filtered.

Plausibility structure is society-wide group-think, the unquestioned, preconceived “givens” in that particular culture. Implausible, unfamiliar ideas, i.e. unbelievable according to that culture’s grid, are filtered out and rejected a priori. Those that are plausible—that agree with the grid—may be kept for further consideration.
For example, the evangelical movement in the United States asks the question, “Why, if there is so much evidence contrary to the theory of evolution, is it still accepted by many as a virtual fact?”

Australian microbiologist Michael Denton, in a book that shook the evolutionary world, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (1985: 75), opines that it is because of the reigning plausibility structure. He explains:

The fact that every journal, academic debate and popular discussion assumes the truth of Darwinian theory tends to reinforce its credibility. This is bound to be so because, as sociologists of knowledge are at pains to point out… the plausibility of any theory or world view is largely dependent upon the social support it receives rather than its empirical content or rational consistency. Thus the all pervasive affirmation of the validity of Darwinian theory has had the inevitable effect of raising its status into an impregnable axiom which could not even conceivably be wrong.

Evolution became the infallible, accrediting grid through which passed any scientific theory and empirical data prior to consideration. It is the active plausibility structure within science, that which is taken for granted without argument. Results and theories, therefore, are inevitably skewed and colored in favor of evolution.

I have often shared reasons for why evangelism and church planting is difficult in France and Western Europe only to receive the response, “Yes, it’s like that here (in the U.S.) too.”

No, it is not.

The United States did not initiate and, after two centuries of spent gold and spilt blood, lose the Crusade wars. The Church in the United States did not subject its own people, for 650 years, to the fear of torture and death to insure doctrinal purity. Europe has close to a millennium of Christian history riddled with the blood of its own people and carnage instigated by the Church. This affects Europeans in a way that those outside of the old continent can never comprehend.

Today, Europeans freely cite the atrocities of the Crusades (and the ostensibly religious wars in Belfast and the Balkans) and express their disgust at the Inquisitions as reasons to not even consider Christianity; it is no longer plausible.

John Robb, Unreached Peoples Program Director with World Vision, says:

“Satan works… by trapping a people in society-wide presumptions about reality.” In settings where “Christ is not obeyed… such strongholds go unchallenged, sometimes for centuries, gaining strength with every passing generation” (see Perspectives, 145-151).

But God has not left believers without resources to evangelize and plant churches within the European plausibility structure. Prayer is divinely powerful. As the Apostle Paul said:
The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God. (2 Corinthians 10:4-5 NIV).

I believe that in part, what Robb and the Apostle Paul called “strongholds,” sociologists call plausibility structure. John Robb observes:

Bold, determined spiritual warfare is required to weaken and dislodge these fortresses of presumption which are blockading “the knowledge of God” and denying “the obedience of Christ” (2 Cor. 10:3-5). No amount of persuasion can liberate an entire people from such darkness. Prayer is utterly essential.

Would you please consider praying for a missionary in Europe, monthly, weekly or daily? I am deeply grateful to the many faithful pray-ers involved in the spiritual warfare here in Europe and to the intercessory teams that have participated in evangelism and church planting through prayer.

For example, Mary Ellen has been praying for Europe for over 30 years. She wrote:

“Dear Paul, I am thankful that all went well. I woke early Sunday (think I was to pray)…”

Another pray-er wrote:
“Dear Paul, We have been praying…. I still think of our prayers on the Eiffel Tower…you are working with a good team. Tell them that we are praying for their desires to be realized.”

I am convinced that “prayer is utterly essential” and that the good things that are happening in Europe today result as much from the ministry of intercession, as from the faithful efforts of the Christian workers in Europe. So thanks to all of you who faithfully pray for Europe!

RELIGIOUS SMOKE (part2): The Inquisitions

If the Crusades were a European Vietnam (that lasted almost as long as the United States has been in existence), the Inquisition was the McCarthy era to the 10th power.
During the “red scare” of the 1940s, Americans of various stripes and stations were accused “of political disloyalty or subversion with insufficient regard to evidence and the use of unfair investigatory or accusatory methods in order to suppress opposition;” “those accused during the McCarthy trials had nearly no (sic) chance of proving their innocence.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_McCarthy

Aaron Copeland, my wife’s favorite composer, Charlie Chaplin and others, were victims of McCarthyism.

The McCarthy trials have been called “witch-hunts,” an “American Inquisition.” This inquisition essentially lasted from 1950-1956, and those six long years profoundly impacted the way Americans view government and personal freedom.

The Catholic Inquisitions lasted 650 years and profoundly impacted the way Europeans view Christianity and the Church. There were four distinct though related Inquisitions: Medieval (begun by the Pope in 1184 to control heresy in Southern France), Spanish, Portuguese and Roman.

The Roman Inquisition (begun in 1542) blacklisted all of Galileo’s works condemning him for "grave suspicion of heresy" due to the influence of Copernicus. Thus in many Europeans’ minds today, Christianity remains associated with self-preserving obscurantism.

Galileo's trial

The Spanish Inquisition was notoriously grisly (and fertile as it gave birth to the Peruvian and Mexican Inquisitions). In 1478 under King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, subsequent to the Christian recapture of Spain (see previous blog: the Crusades), the Inquisition was mandated to convert Muslims and Jews to Christian faith; torture was a legitimate means to gain information and lead heretics to repentance (though at times they were thus persuaded to confess, but not permitted to recant).

Disembowelment

A Catholic encyclopedia unreassuringly attempts to debunk Inquisition fiction by presenting the facts:

“Curiously enough torture was not regarded as a mode of punishment, but purely as a means of eliciting the truth.… The general rule ran that torture was to be resorted to only once. But this was sometimes circumvented -- first, by assuming that with every new piece of evidence the rack could be utilized afresh, and secondly, by imposing fresh torments on the poor victim (often on different days), not by way of repetition, but as a continuation.” http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08026a.htm

The Wheel

Now to be pragmatically cynical about this, if the Inquisition had only condemned Europe’s enemies, I doubt that it would have become the pejorative term that it is today. “All’s fair in… war.” But the Roman Church also unleashed the Inquisition on its own people, the Europeans, in order to ferret out religious unorthodoxy through a “reign of violence, terror and torture” (Monty Python).

The Judas Chair

As under McCarthyism, Europeans could be turned in on hearsay. But unlike McCarthyism, the Inquisition was permitted to employ torture to extract confessions, utilizing methods such as the Judas chair, the head vice, the pear, the wheel, the stake, burning at the stake, sawing, disembowelment. (I’ll let you do the research on these techniques, but be warned that they carry an R-rating.) The Inquisition was a religious Gestapo, the mere mention of which struck terror in Europeans’ hearts.

(I can sense a bit of the revulsion that today's Europeans might feel about the Inquisition. Do you remember the old Vincent Price movie, “the Pit and the Pendulum”? That was set in the Inquisition years. I saw it as a kid. Just last year I was reading “Ten Great Mysteries” by Edgar Allan Poe. Well, I only read nine and left “Pit and the Pendulum” for stronger stomachs.)

When a person was found to be a heretic, the Church turned the apostate over to secular authorities for punishment because “the Church does not shed blood.” Thus in many Europeans’ minds, the Church is viewed as the worse kind of hypocrite, having coerced secular authorities to act as its executioner.

(found on www.northernsun.com)

The following is an authorized (with imprimatur) Catholic Encyclopedia's attempt to put the Inquisitions in their context so that the 21st century reader might better understand how such things could have happened:

“Moderns experience difficulty in understanding this institution, because they have, to no small extent, lost sight of two facts.
On the one hand they have ceased to grasp religious belief as something objective, as the gift of God, and therefore outside the realm of free private judgment; on the other they no longer see in the Church a society perfect and sovereign, based substantially on a pure and authentic Revelation, whose first most important duty must naturally be to retain unsullied this original deposit of faith. Before the religious revolution of the sixteenth century these views were still common to all Christians; that orthodoxy should be maintained at any cost seemed self-evident.”
“The dogmatic teaching of the Church is in no way affected by the question as to whether the Inquisition was justified in its scope, or wise in its methods, or extreme in its practice. The Church established by Christ, as a perfect society, is empowered to make laws and inflict penalties for their violation. Heresy not only violates her law but strikes at her very life, unity of belief; and from the beginning the heretic had incurred all the penalties of the ecclesiastical courts.” http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08026a.htm

I will allow you to draw your own conclusions from the above text, but I know absolutely no European who views the Church as “a perfect society” due in part to the obscurantism, hypocrisy, abuse of unbridled power, torture and carnage of the Inquisition.

In the 16th century, believers were burned at the stake in Dijon were I live. This sort of religious smoke clouds people's understanding of the gospel even today.

If just six years of McCarthyism imprinted political paranoia upon the American psyche, try to imagine this...

Imagine, if you dare, that an evangelical doctrinal police force had existed since the birth of the United States until now, and that this evangelical gestapo will float from California to Texas to Florida to New York over the next 400 years. In order to keep the faith pure, and based upon allegations of doctrinal deviation by anonymous witnesses, they will continue to arrest, torture and turn people over to the civil authorities for capital punishment.

Now in the year 2410, what sort of thoughts and feelings might your descendants have concerning the Church and Christianity?

That might be how the Spaniards felt about the Church and Christianity by 1834 when the Inquisition finally came to an end. And so the Inquisition explains in part why today, Spaniards and other Europeans appear to be so resistant to the gospel in a way that is inconceivable to Americans.

So would you pray right now?
Pray that the light of the Good News would blow through the religious smoke of the Crusades and Inquisitions; pray that these people who have suffered under the heavy hand of Religion would nonetheless be drawn to Jesus Christ.

RELIGIOUS SMOKE (part one): The Crusades

When I ask my friend Jay for Vietnam stories his countenance changes. Jay always smiles (except for when he is laughing), but mention Vietnam and his face drops, his eyes lose focus. This man who is always ready to tell a story avoids the subject.

Vietnam was a grueling 25-year ideological war that undid men, demoralized a nation, changed the American psyche and altered political views concerning future international intervention.

"I love the smell of napalm in the morning," exclaims Lt. Col. Kilgore
(Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now)

In a sense, the Crusades (1095-1291 A.D.) were a European “Vietnam” lasting not 25-years, but 196 years! These religious wars set the stage for the current European allergic reaction to religion.
As you saw in my previous blog (and possibly on Jan. 13, 2006 when I originally posted this entry), three factors—religious carnage, atheistic philosophy, high civilization—form a triple-thick, all-but-impervious, full-body armor worn by a vast majority of Europeans. This armor forms a plausibility structure—the unquestioned set of preconceived “givens”—in the European culture that act as an irrational, unconscious filter through which all ideas about God and religion pass.

For example, years ago I was helping my son prepare for a 4th grade history test. He faithfully copied down the teacher’s notes about the Crusades which stated,

“INFIDELS: for the Christians the infidels were the Muslims.
INFIDELS: for the Muslims the infidels were the Christians.”

The valid conclusion is that religious war is absurd and bloody.
A second invalid conclusion that most Europeans adopt, however, is that one is best off keeping one’s distance both from religion (since both Islam and Christendom* committed atrocities) and from the Christian God who, in their imagination, somewhat resembles Mars, the god of war, capricious and gory.

*(Here I use "Christendom" as the Church wedded with political power and as a doppelganger of Christianity—the community of believers who have entered into a loving, obedient relationship with Christ through faith.)

But what were the Crusades all about?
Was it sort of like Indiana Jones’ quest for the Holy Grail?!

Europe was Christendom and Christendom was Europe. So when the Muslims seized the Church of the Holy Sepulcher it was up to the Europeans to retaliate because, well, Deus volt (“God wills it”); it was unequivocally assumed that God was on Europe’s side. The nine Crusades, therefore, were led by French, English, Austro-Hungarian kings and Holy Roman Emperors to retake Jerusalem from Muslims (see the film Kingdom of Heaven).

In Monty Python and the Holy Grail, do you remember the bit about the “Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch”? It goes like this:

King Arthur: How does it... um... how does it work?
Sir Lancelot: I know not, my liege.
King Arthur: Consult the Book of Armaments.
Brother Maynard: Armaments, chapter two, verses nine through twenty-one.
Cleric: [reading] And Saint Attila raised the hand grenade up on high, saying, "O [god], bless this thy hand grenade, that with it thou mayst blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy." And the [god] did grin. And the people did feast upon the lambs and sloths, and carp and anchovies, and orangutans and breakfast cereals, and fruit-bats and large chu...
Brother Maynard: Amen.
All: Amen.

"Once the number three, being the third number, be reached, then lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch towards thy foe, who, being naughty in my sight, shall snuff it." (from The Holy Grail)

We chuckle and even belly laugh at Monty Python’s Holy Grail because we take it as a fictitious comedy. But Europeans know that this is parody based on the historical Crusades, the cynicism having deep roots in the European mind.

For example, St. Bernard who initiated the Second Crusade, supported by the theological inference of the day, stated, "The Christian glories in the death of a pagan, because thereby Christ himself is glorified." And thus under the banner of “God wills it” coffers were emptied, multitudes were slaughtered and in the end Jerusalem was lost to the Muslims anyway. As I said, a 196-year European Vietnam.

St. Bernard of Clairvaux was, by the way, born in Dijon (where I live)

Today there is a resurgence of interest in spirituality especially among European youth. And though I believe many Europeans would like to believe in the Christian God, the triple whammy of the futility of religious war, carnage in the name of the Christian God, and a fear of once again being duped by religion, hinders these Europeans from knowing Jesus in the present, Jesus who preached, “Love the Lord your God…. Love your neighbor….” And “by this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one for another.”

The smoke of the Crusades obscures the spiritual sight of many Europeans; Christendom’s bloodshed hinders them from seeing the true light of Christ who warned of atrocities like the Crusades. Jesus predicted that there would be killing done in his name and that the perpetrators would claim to be “offering a service to God. They will do such thing because they have not known the Father or me. I have told you this, so that when the time comes you will remember that I warned you” (John 16:2-4).

But Europeans having been deprived of Jesus’ words by the Roman Church for centuries and do not remember his warning.

Unfortunately next time things will grow bleaker for the cause of the Christian religion. So stay tuned for: RELIGIOUS SMOKE (part two) — the Inquisition.