Religion persists at the center of world concerns. Sunni Muslims and Shiite Muslims battle in Iraq. Religious divisions fuel ethnic conflicts around the world. The European Union was recently riven over a proposal to appoint Rocco Buttiglione, an Italian who holds orthodox Catholic views on homosexuality, as its commissioner for justice, freedom and security. We've witnessed a US presidential election in which, according to the polls, moral issues - interpreted by some to mean "Christian values" - were at the top of voters' concerns, outweighing the economy, terrorism, and the war in Iraq.
All this is hard for a European, particularly a Northern European, to understand. The reason is that we're heirs to a highly singular history whose origins lie in more than a century of religious and political warfare between Catholics and Protestants that began with the Reformation in 1517 and the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. The memory of those wars drove the intellectual and political history of Europe for more than 300 years, leading to the rise of science, the nation-state, the growing independence of universities, the de-sacralization of culture, and the retreat of religion from its former citadels of temporal power.
![]("http://www.christiansciencemonitor.com/images/dotLine55.gif"){kind=small}
![]("http://www.christiansciencemonitor.com/images/emailThis.gif"){kind=small}