Somewhere underneath all this is the sense that unlike other societies – including for the time being the United States – this could all very easily change in Europe. Having been for some years, as the English philosopher Roger Scruton has put it, downstream from Christianity, there is every possibility that our societies will either become unmoored entirely or be hauled onto a very different shore. At any rate, very unsettling questions lay dormant beneath the surface of our societies even before they began to change as rapidly as they are now doing.

There is, for instance, the dilemma that Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde posed in the 1960s: ‘Does the free, secularised state exist on the basis of normative presuppositions that it itself cannot guarantee?’2 It is rare to hear this question even raised in our societies. Perhaps we sense the answer is ‘yes’, but we do not know what to do if this is the case. If our freedoms and liberties are unusual and do in fact arise from beliefs that we have left behind, what do we do about it? One answer – which dominated in Europe for the final years of the last century – was to deny this history, to insist that what we have is normal and to forget the tragic facts of civilisation as well as life. Intelligent and cultured people appeared to see it as their duty not to shore up and protect the culture in which they had grown up, but rather to deny it, assail it, or otherwise bring it low. All the time a new orientalism grew up around us: ‘We may think badly of ourselves but we are willing to think exceptionally well of absolutely anyone else.’