By Robert Royal
I’ve been in Lisbon and, in the last few days, in Rome presenting the translations of my recent book Martyrs of the New Millennium. It’s encouraging that European Christians are starting to realize the virulence and scope of anti-Christian acts around the world, including in their (our) own «developed» nations. But, of course, I’ve also encountered sharp reactions here about the problematic relationship between the United States and Europe—that «Western civilization» that concerns us all—especially given the divisions over the current war in Iran. Despite appearances, both attitudes are interrelated.
In the media, there’s the impression that the war has turned the whole world against the United States. That may be the consensus in certain journalistic and intellectual circles, both at home and abroad. And the president’s reckless language about the destruction of an entire «civilization» in Iran, his ill-informed and ill-tempered diatribe against Pope Leo, not to mention the blasphemous image on Truth Social of himself as a kind of savior (now removed), has done him no favors—nor the United States—anywhere.
However, the current conflict has led some of the people I’ve met in the last few days to think more deeply about «the West» and the ways in which, as one person put it, we—Europe and America—are inseparably the two sides of the same coin. And so we will remain, in the near future, despite current differences.
At a conference held in Rome last weekend on the future of freedom and traditional values, one of the themes that emerged clearly was the chasm separating Western nations (with their concepts of freedom and human dignity derived from Christianity) from all others (China, India, the Middle East, even Russia to some extent), where those values are not present.
That was also the main point of Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s speech in February at the Munich Security Conference:
«We are part of a single civilization: Western civilization. We are bound to each other by the deepest ties that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our ancestors made together for the common civilization of which we are heirs.»
Some Europeans thought Rubio’s speech and, even more so, the earlier (harsher) one by JD Vance, were mere reprimands to the continent to align with American views. But both were, in fact, a much deeper evocation of something unique to the West on both sides of the Atlantic: the Christian conception of the human person and public affairs.
Unfortunately, even the Vatican in recent years has often seemed interested in «opening» to other cultures and religions, and relatively less willing to affirm the Christian nature of our Western foundations.
These days, one sometimes hears that, in the face of the break with the United States, Europe now has to think about going its own way and becoming a «superpower» in its own right. But for several people I’ve met here these days, this is a utopian illusion. Without the United States, Europe is not a global player of weight. Even internally, the individual nations that make up Europe each have their own interests. Sometimes they coincide, sometimes not. They don’t even have a common language to unite them. The unity they possess lies elsewhere, in something deeper, as Marco Rubio reminded them—and us.
The truth about all this is not always easy to see because in «the West» the foundation of our particularity—Christianity—has been in retreat, less so in the United States than in Europe, but also to a worrying degree in the United States.
For those of us old enough to have read books—real words printed on paper that reach hundreds of pages or more—and who have even delved into that esoteric thing called «poetry,» this cannot but remind us of a once-famous passage from a semi-wise man of the Victorian era, Matthew Arnold. In Dover Beach, Arnold described how religion, like a sea, once bathed the whole world, «but now I only hear / Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.»
However, instead of affirming the necessary truths of the faith and urging people to embrace them again, Arnold—like many then and since—hoped that romantic love would offer consolation for the cosmic loss. It does. In part. But it doesn’t, ultimately. And other substitutes fail as well.
So Arnold was forced to conclude:
for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
The armies clashing at this moment are not exactly ignorant. And the scene is not entirely nocturnal. But it is confused, and more so every day. Indeed, a «darkling plain.»
Predictions about the immediate future are, right now, impossible. There have been worse periods in the recent past: plagues, world wars, jihadist terrorism. Today, the feeling is worse because we are going through a period of extreme political polarization, in which each side considers the other intolerable, almost evil.
But sometimes I find consolation in the fact that, at the founding of the United States, political parties were also at each other’s throats. John Adams, our second president, belonged to the Federalist Party, which disappeared in 1825. Thomas Jefferson, our third president, who passionately fought the Federalists, belonged to the Democratic-Republican Party, which split in two around the same time. The republic survived, and both died years later, somewhat reconciled, on the same auspicious day: July 4, 1826.
And on a broader view, unlike partisan politics, Christianity made Europe and preceded the United States by 1700 years. If one had to bet, the faith is more likely to still exist in 1700 years than anything else one can point to.
So, while we argue over policies and personalities, over war and peace, or even over the United States and Europe, there is something much more enduring and relevant to attend to: in our darkling plain, our only real hope.
About the author
Robert Royal is editor-in-chief of The Catholic Thing and president of the Faith & Reason Institute in Washington, D.C. His most recent books are The Martyrs of the New Millennium: The Global Persecution of Christians in the Twenty-First Century, Columbus and the Crisis of the West and A Deeper Vision: The Catholic Intellectual Tradition in the Twentieth Century.