Another article, this one at the WSJ, about a spiritual awakening in Europe. Some observers, the article notes, are using economic language to explain what’s happening:
Some scholars and Christian activists, however, are pushing a more controversial explanation: the laws of economics. As centuries-old churches long favored by the state lose their monopoly grip, Europe’s highly regulated market for religion is opening up to leaner, more-aggressive religious “firms.” The result, they say, is a supply-side stimulus to faith.“Monopoly churches get lazy,” says Eva Hamberg, a professor at Lund University’s Centre for Theology and Religious Studies and co-author of academic articles that, based on Swedish data, suggest a correlation between an increase in religious competition and a rise in church-going. Europeans are deserting established churches, she says, “but this does not mean they are not religious.”
Upstarts are now plugging new spiritual services across Europe, from U.S.-influenced evangelical churches to a Christian sect that uses a hallucinogenic herbal brew as a stand-in for sacramental wine.
Interesting times, as they say.
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July 20, 2007 at 17:52
Consider the source: the WSJ is bound to speak of it in economic terms, thus making it seem as though this nascent religious resurgence is just economics. Ascribing such a strong social position to economics almost evokes images of Karl Marx’s reductionism. (Of this, the WSJ would not approve).
No, it’s not an economic thing. The economic phenomena of competition vs. monopoly and the resurgance of European Christianity are related, if Rodney Stark and other are right. But it is not that the churches are playing out an economic game. It’s that the church movement and economic principles are both products of something else entirely. They represent the Biblical principles of sowing and reaping.
God intended reaping to be a fruit of the work of sowing. The state church system in Europe allowed churches to reap—salaries, sinecures, property, and so on—without having to do the hard work of sowing. It was bound to fail, slowly but surely, and it did. Free churches (i.e., non-state churches) never had reason to think they could survive without putting in their own hard work, so they did that work. It has paid off, in ways that are completely in accord with Biblical truth.