For there to be a successful turnaround in confronting these two external threats [Islamic extremism and a revival of hostility with Russia], however, there must also be a rebirth of national sentiment and local attachments. So far, the foundationless ideology of rights has wiped away the emotions that would be needed if people are to be resolute in defense of their shared assets. We see at every level the retreat from confrontation, the embarrassed refusal to affirm our patrimony or its legitimate claim for sacrifice.

Here’s a lecture Roger Scruton gave to the Heritage Foundation in October, called “The Future of European Civilization: Lessons For America.” The link will take you to both video of the lecture, and a transcript. Most of it I agree with, some of it not. All of it is interesting. I’m going to excerpt parts that particularly stood out to me.

In the lecture, Scruton makes much of the de-Christianization of Europe. Excerpts:

The big questions in my mind are these: To what extent is the loss of our traditional religion and the culture that grew from it responsible for our weakness in the face of these threats, and what could we conceivably do now to remedy the defect?

Those questions are difficult even to discuss. The EU institutions have made a point of removing all references to the Christian religion and its moral legacy from official documents, on the view that such things will constitute discrimination in favor of one group of Europeans over another. Cases brought before the European Court of Human Rights and also the European Court of Justice (the court charged with the application and enforcement of the treaties) are pushing for continent-wide laws permitting gay marriage, easy divorce, and abortion on demand, as well as laws banning the crucifix from public places and curtailing the teaching of the Christian religion in schools.

These initiatives have their parallels here in America, and in the same way that liberal activists have used the Supreme Court to overrule the religion-based decisions of state legislatures, secularists and Islamists are using the European courts to impose their vision on the nation-states of Europe.

More:

This de-Christianizing of Europe is being pursued also through the European Parliament and its Fundamental Rights Agency, charged with the advocacy of human rights at all legislative levels. The Fundamental Rights Agency is led by activists in the cause of “gender equality” and LGBT rights and is inherently hostile to the traditional family and to the religion-based morality that shaped it. It is now pressing for the recognition of abortion as a human right—presumably a right of the mother rather than the child. It is active in promoting the “gender agenda” wherever this can be brought into play and is staffed largely by people who have spent their lives as busybodies and who have never done what my parents would have called an honest job of work.

It is true, of course, that activists gather always at the top and try to push society in the direction that they favor, but their getting to the top is not independent of the fact that they are allowed to get to the top, and the people who allow them are those whom they wish to control. In any case, whatever the cause, there is no doubt as to the effect. Europe is rapidly jettisoning its Christian heritage and has found nothing to put in the place of it save the religion of “human rights.”

I call this a religion because it is designed expressly to fill the hole in people’s worldview that is left when religion is taken away. The notion of a human right purports to offer the ground for moral opinions, for legal precepts, for policies designed to establish order in places where people are in competition and conflict. However, it is itself without foundations. If you ask what religion commands or forbids, you usually get a clear answer in terms of God’s revealed law or the Magisterium of the church. If you ask what rights are human or natural or fundamental, you get a different answer depending on whom you ask, and nobody seems to agree with anyone else regarding the procedure for resolving conflicts.

Consider the dispute over marriage. Is it a right or not? If so, what does it permit? Does it grant a right to marry a partner of the same sex? And if yes, does it therefore permit incestuous marriage too? The arguments are endless, and nobody knows how to settle them.

Things are made more complex still by the inclusion, in all European provisions, of “non-discrimination” as a human right. When offering a benefit, a contract of employment, a place in a college, or a bed in a hospital, you are commanded not to discriminate on grounds of…there then follows a list derived from the victims of recent history: race, ethnic group, religion, gender, sexual orientation, and whatever is next to be discovered. But all coherent societies are based on discrimination: A society is an “in-group,” however large and however hospitable to newcomers.

The result is a society that cannot, in the end, be coherent:

We are witnessing, in effect, the removal of the old religion that provided foundations to the moral and legal inheritance of Europe and its replacement with a quasi-religion that is inherently foundationless. Nobody knows how to settle the question whether this or that privilege, freedom, or claim is a “human right,” and the European Court of Human Rights is now overwhelmed by a backlog of cases in which just about every piece of legislation passed by national parliaments in recent times is at stake.

Scruton indicates that there may be a kind of Benedict Option emerging in Europe:

This development has led, however, to a sudden burst of Christian nostalgia—not only among the older generation, but among young people too. There are evangelical movements in the cities which reach out to the young and attempt to include them in a purified Christian vision. This new evangelism is not opposed to the official “rights” culture but carves out a private space within it—a space where, taking advantage of the permissions granted by the secular order, the old discipline can be adopted as a personal cross.

This privatized Christianity can be found in surprising places. One of them is worth mentioning, since it concerns the art form that more than any other expresses the “Faustian” spirit of Europe as Spengler discerned it: namely, music.

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