A recent obsession in the drawing rooms and salons of Europe is the fact that a plurality of Americans (22%) cited "moral values" as their main reason for going to the polls. To civilized Europeans, the culture wars -- God, gays and guns -- are the most risible bit of American politics.
Ever since 1945, European elites have preferred their politics to be technocratic -- mainly managing capitalism for the common good, rather than tackling private issues of faith and morality. This is partly because Europeans are less passionate about religion. Only one in 10 French people says religion plays an important role in his or her life. But lately, cultural issues have begun to force their way back into the mainstream of European politics, stoked by three things.
The first is the willingness of politicians to ride roughshod over ancient traditions -- and the growing willingness of what Edmund Burke called the "little platoons" to fight back.
The Labor government's bill banning fox hunting in England and Wales, for instance, delighted metrosexual Islington, where people are less exercised by the rights of foxes than the wrongs of the upper classes. But it has created a furor in rural England -- and not just among toffs.
Four hundred thousand hunt supporters have marched in London to protest the law. A group of hunt supporters (including the son of rock star Bryan Ferry) stormed Parliament, which has spent a grand total of 275 hours debating the subject. The countryside will continue with civil disobedience until the hated ban is defeated.
The second factor is the revival of religion -- or at least its refusal to die. Europe has long been the world's most secular continent -- fittingly so given that the great prophets of secularization such as Emile Durkheim and Max Weber were European. But now religion is again entangling itself with politics.
The most obvious example is the resurgence of radical Islam. Muslim immigrants have not lost their religion in their new home, as most liberals imagined they would, but instead reaffirmed it -- and caused dilemmas for secular technocrats. Should they be allowed to send their children to Muslim-only schools, as they are in Holland? Should schoolchildren be banned from wearing religious head scarves, as they are in secular France? In Holland, in particular, such tensions have grown especially strong since the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh by an Islamic extremist.
