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From: email@BelowThe.Text

March 25, 2005, 7:59 a.m.
What’s God Got to Do with It?
Terri Schiavo makes a place for religion in politics.
EuroPress Review
By Denis Boyles

Religion - that is to say "popular" religion, old time religion, the
kind of thing that will drive huge numbers of men and women into
American churches this Sunday to sing out loud and be glad - is not
practiced well in Europe. Church attendance is low, headed south, and
a revival of any kind is out of the question. In France especially
religion simply has no place in public life.
	
France considers itself a secular republic. This means that in France,
Catholicism is just another cultural ornament - a collection of old
music and pleasant buildings and the provenance of long holiday
weekends, like this one. Practically speaking, modern secularism in
Europe is forced de-Christianization in favor of humanism's new
convictions. Meanwhile, the most avid followers of faith on the
continent these days are all those imported Muslims, many of whom
zealously follow their beliefs outside the mainstream of daily life -
forever destined to be Muslims first and Frenchmen second. In the 21st
century, a "devout Frenchman" for example, is either a Muslim or an
oddity, if not an outright oxymoron. Religion is for children and
Yanks. If Americans didn't exist, Europeans would have to invent them,
because otherwise, they'd never talk about God at all.

To our traditional allies - them perfidious, unbelieving Frenchies and
their Euro-kin - the controversy swirling around poor Terri Schiavo is
yet another example of dumb American over-simplification grown fat, an
outbreak of lunacy inspired by Upper Room Baptists and the like. The
attempts by the Congress and the president to limit the damage done by
a judiciary that is unresponsive, elitist, arrogant, dictatorial,
self-protecting - something very much like the government of France,
come to think of it - looks, to Eric Fottorino, writing in Le Monde,
like proof that Bush will do anything, including rushing to the
"bedside of an almost-dead person" in a "coma," to cement his
relationship with the Bible-thumping, gel-haired, tele-mullahs of the
right. To the Süddeutsche Zeitung, the congressional intervention was
a drama of "Life, Death and Power" with a grandstanding U.S. president
bestirring himself from his Crawford ranch, something the paper claims
he'd never do for a crisis or a mere war. In the leftwing Independent,
the slow starvation of Terri Schiavo is how the paper's correspondent
describes a death with "dignity," something Americans can't get right
- no doubt because of what Tony Blair described to the Daily Telegraph
as the "unhealthy" American penchant for giving religion a prominent
role in election campaigns. For Libération, the whole save-Schiavo
spectacle was enough to merit a sneering headline on a piece or two,
but nothing more.

Not that this kind of coverage is particularly surprising, of course.
It reflects the general sentiment of the left toward muscular
Christianity, something they find almost as appalling as actual
muscles. Despite the fact that the New York Times has been in a
persistent vegetative state for a lot longer than 15 years, the
struggle to save Terri Schiavo was laughed off by one longtime
columnist as part of the "God racket" - a "circus" of
"religio-hucksterism." Times writers routinely ridicule the concerns
of Americans for things like the life of Terri Schiavo as a
predictable byproduct of a surplus of stupid red voters held hostage
by Bible-thumping extremists. That America is where all Republican
policies are spun to accommodate right-wing Christian nuts, where the
poor all starve and where religious fervor sweeps the land like a
great, darkening storm, blocking the sun of French-style reason and
the grand traditions of that enlightenment thing.

This Easter weekend, let's pray to God they're right. If you ask me,
the widespread grieving for Terri Schiavo is not only an indicator of
the political significance of moral values but also a barometer of the
nation's spiritual health. Did people go too far to try to
pretzel-twist the judicial process and cheek-slap states' right? Maybe
- but I don't think so, and anyway that's not the point. The
alternative to being passionately engaged with the terrible fate of
Terri Schiavo is to mutter a few words about how "sad and tragic" it
all is and just move on. That's certainly what the New York Times and
most Europeans would like to see. However, in the grim arc of two
lifetimes, we've seen very often what happens when you shrug off one
death, let alone many, many more. In fact, we saw it in France, where
all those enlightened rationalists live, less than two years ago when
15,000 weak and elderly men and women were left to die in a summer
heat wave while government services shut down and their families all
went on holiday.

By the end of August 2003, 15,000 French people had died of simple
neglect. That's the equivalent of five 9/11s in four months. One such
event is all it took to transform America. In France, massive death
received a massive shrug. I've reported this before, of course, but I
still can't get over it: As a result of what happened during those
awful weeks, nothing changed. The French press ignored the story
almost entirely as it unfolded and only began reporting it in detail
well after the fact. Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, at his villa
in the south of France, held a casual, poolside press conference as
the bodies piled up - and denounced "partisan politics." Chirac
remained on holiday through the disaster, but addressed the nation and
promised sweeping changes. Meanwhile, jammed funeral homes began
turning bodies away. Many of them went unclaimed. Chirac's grand plan?
If you are old and infirm and at the edge of death and French, do not
go to an understaffed, overheated hospital. Instead, go to the movies,
where it's air conditioned. The last I read, more than a year and a
half after the event there are still unidentified bodies of
grandmothers and grandfathers stuffed into the morgues of Paris.

I didn't mean to produce a homily for the holiday, but it does seem to
merit mentioning that Terri Schiavo's plight has been caricatured by
the French and European press for a reason other than just to make
droll. France despises America because we display, rather
ostentatiously at times, all the marks of spiritual enthusiasm while
they cling tightly to rational secularism. Much of what distinguishes
the U.S. from France follows from that: Where we are optimistic,
France is pessimistic. Where we have hope, they have cynicism. Where

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