A faith vacuum haunts Europe

The writer G.K. Chesterton once suggested that atheists were "balanced on the very edge of belief -- of belief in almost anything." I was reminded of this critique last week by a report of a conversation between one of the would-be London bombers, Muktar Said Ibrahim, and a former neighbor of his in Stanmore, the suburb of North London where he grew up.

Americans tend to assume that what is going on in Europe today is a struggle between Islamic extremism and Western -- or Judeo-Christian, if you will -- tolerance. But this is only half right.

"He asked me," Sarah Scott said, "if I was Catholic because I have Irish family, and I said I didn't believe in anything. And he said I should. He told me he was going to have all these virgins when he got to heaven if he praises Allah. He said if you pray to Allah and if you have been loyal to Allah, you would get 80 virgins, or something like that."

Now, it is the easiest thing in the world to make fun of the notion, apparently a commonplace among jihadists, that a suicide bomber who successfully blows up a decent number of infidels is rewarded in heaven with 80 virgins. (Wouldn't you prefer, say, two desperate housewives?) But is it, I wonder, significantly stranger to believe, like Sarah Scott, in nothing at all?

Scott's recollected conversation with Said is fascinating because it illuminates the gulf that now exists in Britain between a minority of fanatics and a majority of atheists. "He said," Scott recalled last week, "people were afraid of religion, and people should not be afraid."

I am not sure British people are necessarily afraid of religion, but they are certainly not much interested in it these days. Indeed, the decline of Christianity -- not just in Britain but across Europe -- stands out as one of the most remarkable phenomena of our times.

There was a time when Europe would justly refer to itself as "Christendom." Europeans built the Continent's loveliest edifices to accommodate their acts of worship. They quarreled bitterly over the distinction between transubstantiation and consubstantiation. As pilgrims, missionaries and conquistadors, they sailed to the four corners of the Earth, intent on converting the heathen to the true faith.