Why the despair? Shouldn't these signs of life, however small, however late in the game, be celebrated? Or have we invested too much in the decline of Europe thesis to even come to their aid?

It's looking like 1689 all over again, with Poland riding to the rescue of the West from the Muslim horde and its allies. Except this time, the battle is at Bruxelles not Vienna.

It's also 1871 all over again, with the fun-loving Germans launching the Kampf of cultures to purge away Unvolkish, Jewish-inspired Catholocism and get themselves los-vom-Rom.

Also notice how this pagan throwback likes to call itself "progressive."

Louis is wrong about the Kulturkampf being against "Jewish" Catholicism. I have not seen anything that indicates that monarchist Lutheran Prussia was opposed to Catholicism because it was inspired by Judaism. His comment seems to be anachronistic. The phrase "I will not go to Canossa" shows the real context of the Kulturkampf.

I saw a bumpersticker on a car a couple of days ago:

I love (underlined and bold) God,

It's His fans I hate(underlined and bold).

Chris: Take a look at German anti-Catholic literature, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, for example, writing a little bit later, baldly asserts that Judaism isn't too bad in its place, the problem being that Catholicism has imposed its Unvolkish God-concept of the Jews of the peoples of Europe. The Nazis took this further. Alfred Rosenberg's Mythus of the Twentieth Century is mostly an anti-Catholic tract, for the same reason.

Bismarck was definitely anti-Catholic, but mostly on political grounds, the Confessional Church being firmly in his pocket, but Catholics less so. Lutheranism after all was a surrender of the Catholic separation of church and state to the Caesaropapism of Cujus regio, ejus religio.

Catholic separation of church and state, eh?

That would explain the demand of the Catholic party in Germany (I am thinking particularly but not only of Bavaria) to control education.

In France, the same.

Or, going a bit further back, to Henry of Guise's manifesto to Henry III to institute the Inquisition in France against the Huguenots. Backed by monks in arms (coup of May 1588).

The only people murdering other people for religious motives in Europe today are Muslims.

Some of us would call that progress.

Harry: Exactly. Education is not a properly a state function. The state should not be in the business of transmitting values. It has an interest in subsidizing education, to insure that people can read street signs and FM's, but it should not be in the business to reaching into the people's hearts and minds. That's what the church is for.

The teaching of the Coin of Tribute cuts both ways. This kind of separation of church and state has served the West very well over the centuries. We have worked out an almost ideal balance of or ordered liberty which gives us enough freedom to be innovative and adaptive with enough control to get away with the liberty.

Let me be blunt here. Junking the real separation of church and state is much too high a price to pay to succor the tender sensibilities of this or that minority.

Lou:

I think that's a bit strong. Surely there are some values the State is justified in supporting?

But I agree that I can scarcely imagine a more destructive government program than socialized religion.

Socialized religion is exactly what you get after the state has used the taxing power to reel in the resources which society is prepared to devote to education. As Ronald Reagan used to say, "It's not their money!"

This is not a new idea: William F. Buckley made this point in Up from Liberalism. Every single dollar the state takes in is an expropriation of individual choice. Nowhere is this more than in the field of education. Soviets of students, self-criticism sessions

It is difficult to avoid vehemence when one is trying to express weighty matters in the space of a few, spare words. Of course schools are in the values business, and if the values taught are those of the mos maiorem there would not be a problem. But that is not what is happening.

The method of contemporary public education is right out of the Marxist playbook: the intelligencia seizes control of the organs of state coercion and wields them to transform society. Stalinist educational theories are bandied about--have you ever heard of Vygotsky? Soviets of students, self-criticism sessions, collaborative effort, of course, brutal repression of the individual.

Perhaps a literary image will help: we have returned from the War of the Ring, Sauron is fallen, and we find Mordor in the heart of our Shire. [If the allusion is unrecognizable, then you saw the movie but didn't read the book.]

Lou, I'll buy that prior to widespread systems of state schools, values were passed on without spending any tax money, though I'm not a fan of what many of those values were.

But eduation -- apart from values -- was not passed on. Your use of the USSR is particularly inapt. Hardly anybody in Russia could read a street sign -- if in fact there were any street signs, which generally there were not -- when 'education' was left to private/religious sectors.

Alexander Werth, trying to explain why so many Russians supported the Stalinist regime despite its crimes, said that parents were grateful to the regime for teaching their children to read.

Before Orrin scoffs, exactly the same story is told of the Micronesians. The older people today express a considerable fondness and respect for the Japanese, despite the great hardships they endured during the Japanese colonial period, because the Japanese government had their children go to school.

Neither the Germans nor the Spaniards, despite their militant Christianity, bothered.

However bad a job governments do teaching children, history says churches did worse.

Let me see if I got this right, before I go looking for my Smith & Wesson Bodyguard.* The Russian people supported Stalin because he improved the public schools? Somehow that idea never made it into any of the 900 or so pages of The Gulag Archipelago. Golly gee, we all used to think that the Communists killed 20 million or so of their own people, and that if you criticized the party you got a "tenner" for counter-revolutionary activity, and THAT was why Stalin got all that support.

*S&W Bodyguard, Model 49 in steel and Model 38 in aluminium--made famous by that photo of Gen. Loan whacking the Commie terrorist. I really couldn't shoot anybody right now--I'm laughing too hard.

Let me see if I got this right, before I go looking for my Smith & Wesson Bodyguard.* The Russian people supported Stalin because he improved the public schools? Somehow that idea never made it into any of the 900 or so pages of The Gulag Archipelago. Golly gee, we all used to think that the Communists killed 20 million or so of their own people, and that if you criticized the party you got a "tenner" for counter-revolutionary activity, and THAT was why Stalin got all that support.

*S&W Bodyguard, Model 49 in steel and Model 38 in aluminium--made famous by that photo of Gen. Loan whacking the Commie terrorist. I really couldn't shoot anybody right now--I'm laughing too hard.

Lou,

One of the oddities in Russia is when you go there and meet their Archie Bunkers, they are full of fond memories under Stalin.

The fact is that well over 90 percent of Russians were illiterate prior to the Revolution, and that well under 1% are today. That change occured under the Communists. Now, you may want to argue why the Communists did that, but you cannot argue the reality that it was in fact done.

Harry, I would not accuse the Orthodox Church of the same malfeasance as the Catholic Church in this matter, and my maternal grandparents would tell me first-hand stories about the pogroms around Mogilev. The relationship between Church and State is very different under Orthodoxy. It supports the people in power without question while acting as an ombudsman between the rulers and the ruled. OTOH, the Catholic Church is essentially a totalitarian entity, sticking its claws into every part of society regardless of whether they have even the merest clue as to what they are doing. Salazar's Portugal, which was 40% illiterate in 1973, is a good example. The temerity of the USCCB in opining about Reaganomics is another. The governance of the Papal States, into the 1860s is a particularly damning note. The Line of Demarcation in 1500 is a just one of a zillion instances of Church arrogance. The Catholic Church has always preferred its flock to be poor, dumb, superstitious and easily led.

The position of Orthodoxy is best described as 'G-d is the Tsar's junior partner.'