Some Thoughts On Enduring Religious Divisions in Europe

The Dutch-Belgian border near Maastricht; a cultural frontier?

Until recently, I thought the Protestant-Catholic divide in mainland Europe was no longer very important.

Of course, southern Europe is poorer and less advanced than northern Europe and this divide roughly coincides with religion, but surely anomalies such as the economically advanced conditions found in Catholic Belgium and Austria negate the utility of such generalisations?

Not according to the Ronald Inglehart and Marita Carballo, authors of "Does Latin America Exist", a 1997 article that appeared in the journal Political Science and Politics. In their attitudes to matters such as the level to which the state should intervene in the economy and deference to authority, Belgians and Austrians are very much part of Catholic Europe, the authors say. So the Netherlands, despite sharing a border with Belgium and a language with more than half of its inhabitants "is culturally much closer to the Nordic countries than to Belgium. Historically, The Netherlands has been shaped by Protestantism; even the Dutch Catholics today are remarkably Calvinist."

This is not just a result of Protestant countries liberalising faster due to secularization and having more permissive attitudes on issues such as homosexuality and abortion. Church attendance has also collapsed in Belgium and Austria and attitudes on social matters have developed in the same way as in Protestant Europe, but on economic and other issues, Protestant countries in Europe apparently have more in common with still-religious America than with their Catholic neighbours.

These conclusions are slightly surprising to me given that I had assumed, for example, that Flemish Belgians were likely to have more in common with their Dutch neighbours than with their French-speaking co-nationals, let alone than with Spaniards and Italians. I also note that the findings appear to be based on questionnaires, and wonder if such methods can really give us a fully-rounded portrayal of a country's national character.

Nor does Professor Inglehart’s thinking on the enduring religious divide apply just to Protestant and Catholic countries. His "Sacred and Secular: Religions and Politics Worldwide (Second Edition, 2011)", co-authored with Pippa Norris, approvingly quotes an Estonian colleague who thinks different worldviews of Estonians and Russians are rooted in religious heritage: "We are all atheists; but I am a Lutheran atheist, and they are Orthodox atheists." Presumably Catholic-Orthodox divisions are similarly enduring.

Although I have many reservations about Professor Inglehart’s claims, I am reluctant to dismiss them too lightly. The violence that plagued Europe following the Reformation was not the result of obscure theological disputes over transubstantiation and other matters, but the product of fundamental disputes in areas such as personal morality and social stratification. The Reformation took nearly 200 years to properly establish itself in some countries. Maybe secularization will take just as long to negate the Catholic-Protestant divide and the split between these two religious traditions and the Orthodox east.

But are religious-based divisions a useful prism through which to view recent and future conflicts in Europe? The most recent conflicts, in Georgia in 2008 and in Ukraine in 2014 (and probably beyond), have occurred within the Orthodox sphere, suggesting the answer is no. Then again, maybe these conflicts would have been more bitter and violent, if, like the Croat-Serb conflict in the 1990s, they had pitted against each other peoples with different religious backgrounds. Any conflicts involving ethnic Russians living in the Baltic states and their indigenous populations would, at least in terms of the belligerents’ religious heritage, more closely resemble the Croat-Serb conflict than the more recent ones. They would also severely test the idea that Europe’s old religious divisions no longer have any relevance.