Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su

Sigmar Gabriel, the left-wing former German foreign minister and still an influential voice in European politics, is talking very tough these days. In a recent interview with Stern, Gabriel said Germany should be willing to escalate the war with Russia over Ukraine.

“I never thought I’d have to say this: However, we’ll need to checkmate Russia again as we did during the Cold War with the Soviet Union,” Gabriel said. “Putin must grasp our resolve.”

“The clear signal should be sent to Putin: Stop this war—or we’ll target you. If that entails deploying German air defense systems, assisted by the Bundeswehr, to establish no-fly zones in Ukraine to shield Ukrainian cities from Russian attacks on the civilian population, I wouldn’t guarantee Mr. Putin that we’d never act this way.”

Who is Herr Gabriel kidding? It is bizarre to read the former German foreign minister’s bluster, in light of how feeble the German armed forces have become. Stalin’s infamous joke—How many divisions does the Pope have?—could almost be said about the German Chancellor today.

In 2024, Spiegel published a brutal report on what it termed “The Bad News Bundeswehr,” decrying the “abysmal” state of Germany’s military. The idea that Chancellor Olaf Scholz sending in the Bad News Bundeswehr to defend Ukraine would stay Vladimir Putin’s hand is mental.

The problem is not only one of troops and materiel. As the Austrian political commentator Ralph Schölhammer points out, 44% of Germans polled said they definitely would not defend their country even if it were attacked. An additional 13% said they “probably” would not. Only about one in five Germans polled said they would definitely defend Germany.

“Germans don’t even want to defend their own country,” said Schölhammer, “but you think they will fight for [Ukraine]?”

He went on to say this is a problem throughout the West. Even in the United States, which Europeans depend on for their defense, a 2023 poll found that while 64% overall (and 72% of males) said they would take up arms if America were invaded, a shocking three in ten 18 to 29-year-olds (including 20% of men in that age cohort—the group that would do most of the fighting) say they would surrender.

There is a stark divide between U.S. liberals and U.S. conservatives on the question. Eighty percent of Republicans say they would fight if the US were invaded, but only 46% of Democrats would. Keep in mind that the question is not whether or not you would be willing to fight in a war that merely involved your country, but rather if your country were invaded – a question of national existence.

“As it turns out, postmodern-secular-hyper rationalism is a lot of fun in peace times, but leaves you utterly defenseless during times of conflict,” Schöllhammer remarked. “The future belongs to those willing to fight for it.”

What would Germans be fighting for? Katja Hoyer, a German-born academic living in Britain, recently wrote in The Spectator, “I’ve been in and out of Germany a lot in recent months, and it’s hard not to gain the impression that its society is falling apart at the seams.” Citing a number of distressing facts, Hoyer concluded, “Germany has undergone drastic social change over the last few years with mass immigration, Covid and economic uncertainty chipping away at its fragile sense of stability and cohesion.”

Cultural malaise is general throughout the West, but is especially strong in Europe. The French novelist Michel Houellebecq saw it all coming, and understands it better than just about any politician. Though Houellebecq is not a religious believer, his novels explore the social consequences of a world without God. In his great study Without God: Michel Houellebecq and Materialist Horror, American literature scholar Louis Betty says the French writer’s fiction is about “societies and persons in which the terminal social and psychological consequences of materialism are being played out. It is little wonder, then, that these texts are so often apocalyptic in tone.”

Betty continues:

Houellebecq’s novels suggest that once religion becomes definable as religion – that is, once its symbols no longer address themselves to society at large as representative of discipline and moral authority, but rather address only the individual as motivators of religious “moods and motivations” – it is already doomed. Religion must do more than provide a space for the individual to enter, à la [anthropologist Clifford] Geertz, into the “religious perspective.” This is simply not enough for modern people; the symbols therein are too weak, too uncoupled from ordinary existence to give serious motivation. Religion must set a disciplinary canopy over the head of humankind, must order its acts and its moral commitments, must furnish ultimate explanations capable of determining the remainder of social life; otherwise, religious loses itself in the morass of competing perspectives (scientific, commonsense, political, etc.) This is precisely what has happened in the West.

The collapse of Christianity as the animating force in Western civilization has brought us to this point. Secular values are simply not enough to motivate a people to live sacrificially to perpetuate their social order—whether it’s making the sacrifices necessary to defend the nation in war, or even the sacrifices necessary to sustain the nation’s population. People need to feel that their lives are part of a transcendent order, suffused by ultimate meaning.

This is why in his best-known novel, Submission (2015), Houellebecq has a demoralized and spiritually exhausted France turn to a Muslim political party to govern la République. For the French, those people, the Islamists, are a kind of solution. The novelist’s point is not that Islamist government is desirable, but that the future inevitably belongs to people who believe in something greater than sex, shopping, and material pleasures.

This week in America, liberal commentators are in a tizzy over some anodyne remarks made by Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito to a liberal activist who pretended to be a conservative Christian, and baited the Catholic jurist into making a potentially controversial statement. Alito told the activist, who secretly recorded their conversation, that the United States should be “a place of godliness.”

This statement of civic religion is as bland as it sounds. Most Americans would agree with it. In fact, for virtually the entirety of American history, all but ideological cranks would have agreed with it. Not now. The Left is in a full-tilt panic over what this means for the supposed advent of “Christian Nationalism” in America. Yet Justice Alito is right, if only in a sociological sense. Read your Houellebecq.

At the leadership level in Europe, only Viktor Orbán seems to get it. In his 2018 speech at Tusványos, for example, the Hungarian prime minister said that civilizations are spiritual entities.

“They are formed from the spirit of religion, the spirit of creative arts, the spirit of research and the spirit of business enterprise,” he said. Europe has rejected its Christian foundations, and has grown pale and weak in the other spirits.

Orban proposed “Christian democracy” as an alternative to “liberal democracy.” He explained:

Christian democracy is not about defending religious articles of faith—in this case Christian religious articles of faith. Neither states nor governments have competence on questions of damnation or salvation. Christian democratic politics means that the ways of life springing from Christian culture must be protected. Our duty is not to defend the articles of faith, but the forms of being that have grown from them. These include human dignity, the family, and the nation—because Christianity does not seek to attain universality through the abolition of nations, but through the preservation of nations. Other forms which must be protected and strengthened include our faith communities. This—and not the protection of religious articles of faith—is the duty of Christian democracy.

Orban’s distinction between the role of politicians and jurists, and the role of priests and pastors, is of central importance. He’s saying that Christian democratic politics must support the social forms that emerge from the Christian faith, but has no business promoting the faith itself. That falls to families, churches, religious schools, and others. Justice Alito would doubtless agree.

How are these bearers of religious meaning doing? Most are failing. As I wrote earlier this year in The European Conservative, this continent’s Catholic bishops act like “hospice chaplains to civilization’s euthanasia.” The liberal leadership class in Western churches too often seeks to bless the spiritually and morally feeble status quo, behaving as therapists, not prophets.

Meanwhile, the only grassroots sources of vitality come from religious conservatives—those who take the faith seriously enough to live sacrificially for it. In the Catholic Church, in many Protestant churches, and now even in some Orthodox churches in the West, institutional elites have cut themselves off from the source of the faith’s power to change lives and civilizations, and wonder why it’s dying on the vine. As C.S. Lewis once said, “We castrate, and bid the geldings be fruitful.”

A civilizational order that is not worth dying for is likely to be one that is not worth living for either. It is true that in ages past, men of the West marched into pointless wars of aggression, sanctified by sermons and the blessings of divines. As regrettable as that is, it does not obviate the fact that all societies need religion—a liberal society most of all. The German jurist Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde famously said that “the liberal, secularized state lives by prerequisites which it cannot guarantee itself.” Almost 200 years earlier, the American statesman John Adams articulated the same sentiment about his country’s liberal founding: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

This week in Budapest, I met with an American academic active in the struggle for international religious freedom. We spoke about the Russia-Ukraine war, and established that we both believe Russia ought not to have invaded its neighbor. I added that as an Orthodox Christian, it grieves me how Putin has instrumentalized the Church to advance his war aims.

Then the American, a conservative Christian, posed a provocative question, that went something like this: For all his thuggishness, do you think that Vladimir Putin is on the right side of broad civilizational trends? My interlocutor brought up Putin’s harsh criticism of Western secularism and its emptiness, contrasting it to a Russia built on traditional values, including religion. Yes, Russia is in deep social and demographic trouble, and yes, Putin might be a colossal hypocrite, but, said the American, on the deep civilizational questions, isn’t Putin, you know … right?

I knew the answer, but as a man of the West, was too depressed by the question to admit it. For what it’s worth, though, the bellicose Sigmar Gabriel doesn’t even know that much. “Putin must grasp our resolve,” thundered the German. Alas for us, I think he does.

Original article: The European Conservative