Hour is late as faith fades

Western culture, metaphorically speaking, seems on the verge of casting itself off one of its gleaming skyscrapers.

And the world is watching with bated breath. Afterward? That will be that.

The swoon will perhaps take place as Bach’s Mass in B Minor or Beethoven’s “Missa Solemnis” generate enthusiastic response in a concert hall near you. But the sacred oratorios will be devoid of meaning. Cravenness, not holiness, will be their contribution.

For those who may have failed to notice, the secular West has become a stronghold of insolence and self-indulgence.

Late British writer Malcolm Muggeridge, a deep thinker and Christian apologist, groused three decades ago that the West was lost.

He expressed this opinion during a BBC interview. With considerable water having since flowed beneath the bridge, his admonition carries even more weight today.

“I firmly believe that our civilization began with the Christian religion,” Muggeridge said, “and has been sustained and fortified by the values of the Christian religion, by which admittedly most men have not lived, but to which they have assented, and by which the greatest of them have tried to live.

“The Christian religion and those values no longer prevail; they no longer mean anything at all to ordinary people. Some suppose that you can have a Christian civilization without Christian values. I disbelieve this.

“I think that the basis of order is a moral order; if there is no moral order there will be no political or social order, and we see this happening. This is how civilizations end.”

How civilizations … E-N-D? Have we impulsively and recklessly arrived at our Gotterdammerung — our destruction?

Have you visited Europe lately? Precious few examples of vital Christianity there exist. Churches — in the main — are nearly empty on Sunday mornings. Not so those 21st century temples of adulation: Premier League, La Liga and Bundesliga soccer stadiums.

Euros may no longer get emotional over the existence of Agnus Dei, but football — the European style, that is — stirs them. Massive stadiums that resemble flights of grounded E.T. spaceships have replaced Chartres, Notre Dame and Cologne as centers of worship.

I was in Paris in 2000 when the French won the UEFA European Championship. Everyone went bananas. No one slept.

So, passion still exists at some level. Europeans set their hair on fire each time a World Cup is contested.

My wife, Hedy, and I have relatives in Europe whom we regularly visit.

As acknowledged above, European society is resolutely secular. A Christian believer such as myself is marked as hopelessly naïve … or deluded.

Exhausted by two world wars producing more than 50 million deaths on the continent, Europe is a haven to cynicism. The continent that produced St. Francis of Assisi, Blaise Pascal, Soren Kierkegaard, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and C.S. Lewis is in a ditch.

Lest we Americans feel smug, we travel a similar path, albeit some distance behind.

The former Roman Catholic Church of St. Joseph in Arnhem, Netherlands — a city where my wife briefly lived as a child — was closed a number of years ago and turned into a skateboard park. A Lutheran church in Edinburgh, Scotland, has become a pub. St. Paul’s Church in Bristol, England, is a circus training school. Many Russian churches are now museums.

Numerous quaint parishes have been converted to B&Bs.

According to the Pew Research Center, 42% of Holland’s citizenry report no religious affiliation. In France, that number is 28% ; in Germany 24%.

Between 1990 and 2010 the Evangelical Church of Germany closed 340 churches.

Is there no hope for our European kin?

Well, the great God himself provides the remedy in holy writ: “If my people, who are called by my name will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and will heal their land.”

If Muggeridge is correct, time is short. How short? No one knows but God, and he’s not telling.

Did you hear that, Europe? America?

The hour seems late.

JIM CARNETT, who lives in Costa Mesa, worked for Orange Coast College for 37 years.