The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas addressed an aspect of this in 2007 when he led a discussion at the Jesuit School of Philosophy in Munich titled ‘An Awareness of what is Missing’. There he attempted to identify a gap at the centre of our ‘post-secular age’. He related how, in 1991, he had attended a memorial service for a friend at a church in Zürich. The friend had left instructions for the event that were closely followed. The coffin was present and there were speeches by two friends. But there was no priest and no blessing. The ashes were to be ‘strewn somewhere’ and there was to be no ‘amen’. The friend – who had been an agnostic – had both rejected the religious tradition and was also publicly demonstrating that the non-religious view had failed. As Habermas interpreted his friend, ‘The enlightened modern age has failed to find a suitable replacement for a religious way of coping with the final rîte de passage which brings life to a close.’1

The challenge that Habermas’s friend posed can be quietly heard around us in contemporary Europe, as can the results of the questions going unanswered. Perhaps we are wary of this discussion simply because we no longer believe in the answers and have decided on some variant of the old adage that if we have nothing nice to say then it is better to say nothing at all. Or it is possible that we are aware of the existential nihilism which underlies our society but find it embarrassing. Whatever the explanation, the changes that have happened to Europe in recent decades and sped up exponentially in recent years mean that these questions can no longer go unaddressed. The arrival of large numbers of people with wholly different – indeed competing – attitudes towards life and its purpose means that there is a new urgency about these questions. This urgency is motivated not least by the certainty that societies, like nature, abhor a vacuum.

Occasionally, a mainstream politician seems to acknowledge some of the fears that have begun to bubble up beneath the surface, giving all these questions some urgency. But these acknowledgements come in the form of a terrible, exhausted fatalism. For instance, on 25 April 2016, a month after the attacks in Brussels, the Belgian Minister of Justice, Koen Geens, told the European Parliament that Muslims would ‘very soon’ outnumber Christians in Europe. ‘Europe does not realise this, but this is the reality,’ he told the Parliament’s Justice and Home Affairs Select Committee. His cabinet colleague Jan Jambon, Minister of the Interior, added that although in his estimation the ‘overwhelming majority’ of Belgium’s 700,000-strong Muslim community shared the values of Belgium, ‘I’ve said a thousand times, the worst thing we can do is to make an enemy of Islam. That is the very worst thing we could do.’