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Christian Network

Recent statistics tell us that continental Europe has, by percentage, the lowest population of Evangelicals in the non-Islamic world. In fact most of the European Union (EU) nations also have the lowest percentage of church-goers of any theological stripe; with those saying they regularly go to a house of worship in the low single digits. The profound secularization of what was once the cradle of Christianity has caused some missions organizations to target Europe as an area for "re-evangelization". In an ironic twist Christians from nations that were brought the Gospel by Europeans during the 18^th and 19^th Centuries are now sending missionaries to the EU. As these efforts go forward it might be wise to ask the question: Who Lost Europe?

The most common reply to that question has been to blame the Continent for introducing theological liberalism. It is true that the trend started there, with the lion’s share of "Higher Criticism" and the "New Theology" coming out of German universities from teachers such as Adolph Harnack, Paul Tillich and Rudolf Bultmann. But to only blame the decline of Christianity in Europe on such men is to grossly over simplify the deeper reason.

What if the mass falling away from faith in Europe actually has more to do with the corporate memories of it’s people? Throughout almost all of the time that has passed since the Emperor Constantine made Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire in the 4^th Century there has been a cancer eating away at the health of the Faith in this part of the world. That cancer was spawned by the mutual co-option of the Church and the State. Today public opinion in the United States has made the separation of church and state a "hot-button" issue to say the least. In America the fear mostly seems to be that the church will unduly influence the state but the Founding Fathers acted at least as much from the opposite fear; that the state would contaminate the purity of the Church. There is a reason for this. They had seen the results of the religiously charged politics of their continent of origin.

Religious wars of various kinds were almost continuous in Europe from the bloody "Holy Crusades" of the Early Medieval period through to what is probably the longest recorded war in human history, the Thirty Years War of the 17^th Century. This was just one of many wars involving the conflict between Protestantism and Catholicism, both of which were completely identified with the opposing nation-states of the time. Another blight on the Christian history of Europe came from the infamous Inquisition which unjustly slaughtered thousands of genuine believers between 1300 and 1600 in the name of a Roman Catholicism that was entwined with the civil authorities of the time. But whether by Protestant or Catholic the name of Christ was far too often invoked to justify the slaughter of innocents.

Could it be that modern Europe is haunted by these ghosts of religious extremism? Perhaps that history has more to do with the dismal state of the Faith in the EU today than any school of liberal theology ever could. If this is true mission efforts on the Continent must reckon with these corporate memories if they are ever to succeed. At the very least Evangelicals need to consciously separate the true Gospel from the corrupted "State Christianity" of centuries gone by. Only the original purity of the early Church reborn and recaptured in the present day will liberate Europe once more from darkness. Part of that will mean facing the hard truth that Europe was "lost" by the Church itself.