In Denmark, a controversy has erupted over a congregation of the state Lutheran church’s requirement for its new pastor: that he affirm belief in God as a condition of employment. This has never before happened in Denmark.

It has come to this.

Here’s an article in Danish about it, though it’s firewalled from non-subscribers. Because I gave a comment to the reporter, I received a PDF copy, which I ran through Google translate. Here are my remarks, which appear in Danish, but which I’ve retranslated thanks to Google, and recalling what I told the reporter:

“Europeans have become accustomed to the idea that the church is a public service in line with your telephone company or power plant. As Soren Kierkegaard said: If all perceived as Christians, simply because they are born as Danes, Christianity to exist. The absurd Danish controversy is just the end result of the dynamic that Kierkegaard identified. A Christianity that does not require faith is not Christianity. If a priest does not believe in God, he is useless, and the whole thing is an empty ritual, a charade,” says Rod Dreher.

I added later:

“Christianity in Europe is ending not with a bang but with a pitifully small whimper. If congregations in Denmark have to ask if their potential pastor really believes in God and Jesus, it’s all over. At least a vacuum cleaner seller believes in the product he sells. And even if he does not, the product speaks for itself. Religion is, by contrast, a subjective truth, and a priest who does not believe sincerely can not preach with authority. Christianity is more than just a social welfare philosophy,” he says.

In the story, there’s a quote from a United Protestant minister in France, who says the situation in Denmark sounds familiar to him:

￼”We find Protestant French priests who believe more in Christ than in God, or vice versa. Some do not believe in the resurrection, although many do not believe in the Trinity. The priest is the one who opens the proposition of God and the possibility of faith. Personally, I prefer a good agnostic theologian rather than a fundamentalist who believe the Bible to fit all human aspects of life,” he says.

Think about that. This church official would rather have a theologian who believed not at all than one who believed too strongly. The un-christening of the West continues. C.S. Lewis said in 1954:

The christening of Europe seemed to all our ancestors, whether they welcomed it themselves as Christians, or, like Gibbon, deplored it as humanistic unbelievers, a unique, irreversible event. But we have seen the opposite process. Of course the un-christening of Europe in our time is not quite complete; neither was her christening in the Dark Ages. But roughly speaking we may say that whereas all history was for our ancestors divided into two periods, the pre-Christian and the Christian, and two only, for us it falls into three-the pre-Christian, the Christian, and what may reasonably be called the post-Christian. This surely must make a momentous difference. I am not here considering either the christening or the un-christening from a theological point of view. I am considering them simply as cultural changes. When I do that, it appears to me that the second change is even more radical than the first. Christians and Pagans had much more in common with each other than either has with a post-Christian. The gap between those who worship different gods is not so wide as that between those who worship and those who do not. The Pagan and Christian ages alike are ages of what Pausanias would call the Spcojievov, the externalised and enacted idea; the sacrifice, the games, the triumph, the ritual drama, the Mass, the tournament, the masque, the pageant, the epithalamium, and with them ritual and symbolic costumes, trabea and laticlave, crown of wild olive, royal crown, coronet, judge’s robes, knight’s spurs, herald’s tabard, coat-armour, priestly vestment, religious habit — for every rank, trade, or occasion its visible sign. But even if we look away from that into the temper of men’s minds, I seem to see the same. Surely the gap between Professor Ryle and Thomas Browne is far wider than that between Gregory the Great and Virgil. Surely Seneca and Dr. Johnson are closer together than Burton and Freud?

And now, in Denmark, what few churchgoing Lutheran Christians there are left are reduced to having to ask that the Church send them a pastor who actually believes in God — and this is controversial! The vicars’ association (!) issued a protest against the congregation, saying “who can decide if a person has the correct beliefs?”

Lewis, by the way, made those remarks in his inaugural lecture upon receiving a chair at Cambridge in Medieval and Renaissance Literature. Here is how he concluded: