Abstract

My title is deliberately provocative. It is intended to give pause to all those - quite a few, I imagine - who are convinced that they owe nothing at all to religion in any shape or form and who, as a result, think they have lost nothing in the recent difficulties that have stripped the Christian churches of most of the hold they still retained over European society. Because it goes without saying, in today's thinking, that religion is a question of personal choice, individual participation and private belief. This is not the kind of religion I am talking about. The thesis I should like to advance is that, whatever our beliefs, church or degree of involvement, until quite recently all of us used to owe something to religion, and that we have all lost something in the enormous change which has carried us with it over the last thirty years and which, among other things, is currently completing its liquidation of the vestiges of religious organisation that remained among us. This something is directly related to the ‘dehumanisation of the world’ with which we are now so preoccupied.