Does God have a prayer in Europe?

PRAGUE, Czech Republic — Prague is cluttered with churches. From humble parish chapels to the Gothic grandeur of St. Vitus Cathedral, the wonderment of Christian faith seems to ooze out of the city's every pore.

But the churches are mostly empty, and the only wonder to most Czechs is why anyone bothers to go.

Czechs are among Europe's most fervently secular people. According to a European Union (EU) survey published last year, only 19 percent of Czechs said they believed in God; most of the rest proclaim themselves atheists. Only the former Soviet republic of Estonia had a lower percentage of believers.

Jan Kittrich, 30, a Prague lawyer, is typical. He described himself as an atheist but quickly added that he had nothing against churches.

"I love to visit them," he said. "But I see them as historical objects, not as religious places."

The Czechs are not alone. From Ireland to Italy, church attendance across Europe is down drastically, and apart from Western Europe's rapidly growing Muslim communities and the staunch piety of Poles in the east, religion as a moral force in public life continues to wane.

By all accounts, British Prime Minister Tony Blair is a devout Christian. But when Blair recently told a TV interviewer that his religious faith informed his world view, he was lampooned and lambasted from the left and right. The message for British politicians was clear: If you have a religious urge, keep it in the closet.

Europeans and Americans share a civilization and many values. But in matters of faith and religion, Europe and the United States appear to be headed in opposite directions.

Especially since the 2004 U.S. elections, Europeans have expressed alarm at the increasing intensity of U.S. religiosity. Jacques Delors, former president of the European Commission, has spoken of a widening "values gap" between Europe and the United States that could strain future relations.

But religion long has played an important role in U.S. civic life. God's name is invoked in the Declaration of Independence and on U.S. currency.

More recently, "God Bless America" has become the standard sign-off of politicians across the political spectrum.

Communism's aftermath

President Bush is not the first president to proclaim America to be God's instrument on Earth. John Kennedy, in his 1961 inaugural address, said, "here on Earth, God's work must truly be our own."

Europeans are more diffident about God, and the Czechs more so than most Europeans.

Lori Gregory grew up in Philadelphia and is a Christian missionary in the Czech Republic. She and her husband, Bill, an ordained Southern Baptist minister, came to Prague 13 years ago to work for Young Life, an organization that focuses on teenagers. It has not been easy.

"When we bring up the subject [of faith], it's like asking if you believe in UFOs. That's what we're up against here," Lori Gregory said. "In the States, you can assume most kids know why Christmas is celebrated. In the Czech Republic, kids think Baby Jesus is like Cinderella or Shrek. ... They think it's all a fairy tale."

Given 40 years of communist rule, perhaps that is not surprising. Kittrich, the lawyer, grew up in a small town in Moravia. He had one grandmother who told him stories from the Bible, and another, a police colonel, whose home was filled with statues of Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin. "That was her religion," he said.

His mother, he said, was a member of the "hippie generation" that rejected all religions and ideologies. Kittrich's first encounter with a church group came while he was a teenage exchange student in Elkin, N.C. He began attending services at the local Methodist church.

"Three times a week there were church activities: suppers for homeless people, youth groups. I joined the soccer team. The people were really nice and it opened my eyes," he said. "But it always seemed more of a social community than a religious community, so when I got back here, I didn't follow up."

Kittrich acknowledged that he often thinks about religion. "But I don't think I'm missing anything," he added.

Tomas Halik, a Roman Catholic priest and professor of philosophy at Prague's Charles University, is not surprised at the spiritual indifference. He thinks Czechoslovakia's communist rulers and their masters in Moscow deliberately targeted the country for "an experiment in the total atheization of society."

The crackdown on the church and clergy was much harsher than in neighboring Poland, Hungary or the Soviet Union, and the decades of repression did serious harm to the Czech religious identity, Halik said.

"Czech society is not really atheistic; it's worse. Czechs today hardly know anything about religion," he said.

Halik, who likes to joke that he "converted from agnosticism," was secretly ordained in East Germany in 1978.

During the communist era, he became well-known as a spokesman for the Charter 77 group, which later played a key role in the 1989 Velvet Revolution that ended communism. Throughout those years, he kept his ordination a secret from everyone, including his mother.

These days he leads a small congregation in Prague made up mostly of university students. He has baptized about 800 adults in the past 12 or so years.

Halik said the Czech Catholic Church wasted an opportunity in the early 1990s, mainly because it had no experience in public life and most of its priests "only knew how to operate in the old communist style: the liturgy and nothing more."

Dusan Trestik, a historian at the Center for Medieval Studies in Prague, agreed. "I think you have to say the church failed in the needs of modernization," he said. "The church was offering traditional Christianity for grannies. You had 18- to 20-year-olds, and the church didn't know how to speak to them."

But Trestik noted that the Czechs' standoffishness toward religion predates the communists by centuries. Christianity arrived in the Czech lands in 865, but its defining moment came in the early 1400s, when Jan Hus, rector at the University of Prague, challenged the authority and teachings of Rome. For this, he was burned at the stake.

"In all aspects, it was a Protestant Reformation a century before Protestantism," Trestik said. "But the Hussite revolution ended like all revolutions: badly. The Hussites mutually defeated each other."

The Czech lands fell under the control of the German-speaking Habsburgs. Catholic authority was restored, but Czechs henceforth regarded the church as something imposed from the outside.

"Somethingism"

When ordinary Czechs identify themselves as atheist, they usually don't mean it in the strict sense. When pressed, most Czechs acknowledge they believe in "something."

"Even rational people need to believe in something, something bigger than themselves to make sense of their lives," said Dana Hamplova, a Prague sociologist. Her research has found that while Czechs mistrust organized religion, they rank very high among Europeans who believe in the power of fortunetellers, amulets and other nontraditional forms of spirituality.

"They are looking for something, for guidance, and in the pure sense, it's religious," she said.

Pavel Rican, a religion professor at Charles University, referred to this as "somethingism" and described it as a "degenerated religiosity" that has become the norm in much of Europe.

"Superstitions, cults, interest in herbs; there are so many people now to whom salvation means good health," he said.

Europeans, including many who are religiously inclined, tend to be openly disdainful of U.S.-style religiosity.

"This kind of do-it-yourself Christianity — people like Billy Graham and Jesse Jackson and all the TV preachers — would be impossible in Europe," said Trestik, the historian. "Christianity like some kind of supermarket is completely impossible in Europe."