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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   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)