“Where are the firefighters? Is the union on strike? What are the French authorities doing? Can’t they stop this?” yelled a distraught Paul Kengor in frustration, as he watched the slow response to the burning of Notre Dame Cathedral, allowing people a chance to get out.
“It was a feeling of helplessness,” he laments in the American Spectator today, and “in that sense, it was a frustration similar to what many of us have felt toward the French authorities for a long time, as they’ve eagerly embraced secularism and rejected the very Christian patrimony represented by the Cathedral of Notre Dame.”
The cultural contrast within France couldn’t be drawn more sharply: a Christian cathedral that once represented the flowering of faith and cultural strength in Europe, had become little more than a cash cow for the French tourist economy. In fact, “The Christian faith is in worse shape in Europe than at any time since the first stones of Notre Dame were laid eight-and-a-half centuries ago.”
The socialist, welfare-style government still retains the mindset of the French Revolution, when Wikipedia reports that in 1793 “the cathedral was rededicated to the Cult of Reason, and then to the Cult of the Supreme Being. During this time, many of the treasures of the cathedral were either destroyed or plundered. The twenty-eight statues of biblical kings located at the west façade, mistaken for statues of French kings, were beheaded.” Sound familiar today? This is where it came from.
Kengor says that “France has led the way in the aggressive secularization. Numerous glorious Parisian churches today stand mainly as tourist attractions.” Of course, this same liberal sentiment has been exported throughout Western Europe and North America—and is entrenched here today. Christians watch on the sidelines, meekly and silently, in a media-dominated world of anarchic and perverse values.
It won’t be reported by our liberal television broadcasters, so Kengor asks us to “Recall a defining moment at the turn of this new century. In the early 2000s, a battle raged within the European Union over whether to include a reference to God in the EU constitution. It was a natural acknowledgment, a critical reminder to Europeans of where their rights come from.”
Those running the EU then, run it now: “The God opponents were the predictable European progressives: leftist Eurocrats in Brussels, Labor Party atheists in Britain, German socialists, Scandinavian pagans, and, of course, the French leadership,” he says.
The Borgund Stave church in Norway began in 1180, just a couple of decades after the founding of Notre Dame. A replica of this church has been built in Rapid City, South Dakota, by the Evangelical Lutherans. Like Notre Dame, it too seems to play down a strong Christian mission in deference to an include-all-creeds universality.
Now billed the Chapel in the Hills, it “is a quiet retreat open to all visitors. Visitors from all around the world find the chapel to be a place of beauty and inspiration.” No sense in making any tourist uncomfortable.
The Stave churches flourished across northern Europe during the centuries right before the Protestant Reformation, but history sources (even Wikipedia) seem to have expunged references to religion, as if the “Chapel of the Hills” emphasis on pure, unattached spirituality has always characterized them. Notice how architecture is exclusively the only perspective allowed, pursued out-of-context of religion itself, the real reason the churches were built.
Look long enough, and you’ll see the word Christian mentioned, but not the other “C” word Catholic, which were the only churches of note existing at the time. This anti-Catholic bias is still with us in many Protestant churches which immerse themselves in Biblical times, then leapfrog ahead to the Reformation as if the intervening Catholic-based “dark ages” weren’t part and parcel of Judeo-Christianity itself.