Where faith still exists it is either wholly uninformed – as in the evangelical communities – or it is wounded and weak. In very few places does it retain the confidence it had in former times, and none of the trends favour these outposts. The tide has flowed in only one direction and there are no significant currents running the other way. Even Ireland, which in recent decades still had some of the most devout and religiously doctrinaire politics of anywhere in Europe, has become – partly because of one major scandal within the priesthood – in a little over a decade a country in which opposition to faith has become the dominant national trend.

THE DREAMS WE DREAM

Yet despite having lost our story we are still here. And we still live among the actual debris of that faith. Few people among the crowds flowing through Paris flock to Notre-Dame to pray, but yet it is there. Westminster Abbey and Cologne Cathedral may still dominate the places in which they stand, and though they have ceased to be places of pilgrimage they still signify something, though we do not know exactly what. We are able to be tourists or scholars, to study the history of these monuments as amateurs or professionals. But their meaning has been lost or mislaid. And of course the glorious debris we live among is not only physical but also moral and imaginative. The English atheist theologian Don Cupitt wrote in 2008 of the fact that ‘Nobody in the West can be wholly non-Christian. You may call yourself non-Christian, but the dreams you dream are still Christian dreams.’5

Nowhere is the fear about the consequences of this more clearly felt than the fear of what – in lieu of faith – stand as the foundations of what are called ‘European values’. It may be, as Cupitt has also said, that ‘the modern Western secular world is itself a Christian creation’.6 After a period of often gleeful rejection of any such notion, in recent years a significant number of philosophers and historians have returned to accepting this idea. If so, then the implications of this fact remain deeply unsettling. The post-war culture of human rights that insists upon itself and is talked of by its devotees as though it were a faith does itself appear to be an attempt to implement a secular version of the Christian conscience. It may be partially successful in doing so. But it is a religion that must necessarily be ill at ease with itself because it is uncertain of its moorings. The language is a giveaway. As the language of human rights becomes grander and grander, and its claims for itself become more and more insistent, so the system’s inability to do what it aspires to do becomes plainer for all to see.