Death of the spirit

Two things I read this morning reminded me of my theme of aliveness from the other day. The first was a review of Christopher Hitchens' book "God is not Great," by another well-known atheist, Richard Dawkins. There is quite a crew of these evangelistic atheists trying to whip up a bit of religious bigotry among the anti Christian crowd. The other item is in today's First Things blog, a posting by Peter Leithart called "The Pagan West." The arguments of Hitchens and Dawkins are old and tiresome. But Leithart has noticed something interesting.
It's a well known fact that in Europe and countries of European extraction, the force of traditional Christian faith is moribund. This is especially true of the mainstream protestant denominations, as well as the 'progressive' wing of the Catholic Church where the core doctrines of Christanity have been largely abandoned. Not coincidentally, as the 'progressive' clergy abandons the core beliefs, the congregations abandon the churches. Away from Europe and the American 'blue states,'- what Dawkins calls the cerebral cortex of America, as opposed to the reptilian brain of southern and middle America- notably in Africa, Christianity is vibrant, growing, and alive.
Leithart informs us that Christianity is growing fastest in those parts of Africa where traditional African religion is still strong and suggests that this is not mere accident. "Like primal African religion, Christianity displays a strong sense of human finitude and sin, believes in a spiritual world that interacts with the human world, teaches the reality of life after death, and cultivates the sacramental sense that physical objects are carriers of spiritual power. Christianity catches on there because it gives names to the realities they already know and experience."
In other words Africans are attuned to the aliveness of existence and so the idea that a creator god animates this aliveness is only common sense. Unlike Dawkins whose seething hatred of everything religious blinds him to the beauties of both religious tradition and the aliveness of the world. This can't be too good for science, either.
Sometimes I wonder if this deadness of spirit is a product of urban living. The traditional Paganism of the Greeks and Romans lost credence among the educated as their civilization matured and was only retained as a set of rituals used to cement loyalty to the city. Our educated class has even lost this remnant of belief, and maybe this is why patriotism in Europe is pretty much a thing of the past, and only survives as a hatred of America. It's as if all the ecclesiastical architecture that crowds the European landscape is occupied by twittering mice- as the shades of the dead were imagined in Homeric Greece.