One thing uncommon is occurring in Denmark – and different international locations throughout Europe, together with Britain, ought to concentrate. This spring, Denmark’s Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen, stood earlier than a gaggle of college college students and made a putting assertion: ‘We’ll want a type of rearmament that’s simply as vital [as the military one]. That’s the religious one.’
Few anticipated such phrases from the chief of the Social Democrats, a celebration which spent a lot of the twentieth century decreasing the Church of Denmark’s affect in public life. But this was no passing comment. Simply days earlier, Frederiksen had introduced a serious army build-up: elevated conscription, a pointy rise in defence spending and intensified strategic readiness. Like the remainder of Europe and Nato, Denmark is making ready for a extra harmful world.
However there’s a deeper drawback, one which Frederiksen – unusually for a western chief – has dared to establish. Many younger Danes are unwilling to struggle. Some overtly admit they wouldn’t die for Denmark – not for democracy, not for the flag, and positively not for a contemporary welfare state that guarantees every thing however evokes nothing.
This isn’t simply Denmark’s disaster. It impacts all post-Christian societies and raises a query that Britain, too, should confront. What binds a individuals collectively when the techniques they trusted begin to falter?
Denmark is among the many most secular nations on Earth. Although the Church nonetheless exists by legislation, it performs little function within the every day lives of most residents. Faith is considered as a non-public matter. For generations, the state has quietly absorbed the Church’s conventional capabilities: take care of the poor, ethical formation, rites of passage, neighborhood. And but the nation’s Prime Minister is now calling on the Church to return. In an interview with the Christian newspaper Kristeligt Dagblad, she went even additional, urging the Church of Denmark to step up not merely as a cultural establishment, however as a significant a part of nationwide life.
‘I consider that individuals will more and more search the Church,’ she mentioned, ‘as a result of it presents pure fellowship and nationwide grounding… The church room has helped individuals by many crises. I consider the Church will discover that these occasions name for such an area.’
Then got here a sentence that may have been unthinkable from a Danish Social Democratic Prime Minister only a decade in the past: ‘If I had been the Church, I’d be considering proper now: how can we be each a religious and bodily framework for what Danes are going by?’
This isn’t spiritual romanticism. It’s political realism. It’s the recognition that rights, providers and social protections can not maintain a society on their very own. Persons are not keen to endure for tax fashions. They don’t danger their lives for procedural democracy. However they’ll struggle for what they maintain sacred.
Denmark is discovering what many countries within the West are about to study: {that a} system constructed on consolation, entitlement and private freedom leaves nothing to defend when hardship happens. And hardship – within the type of struggle, risk and sacrifice – is returning to the European Continent.
Britain is in an analogous scenario. Army recruitment is declining. Political leaders converse of recent international threats and of boosting defence spending, however say nothing of perception, which means or ethical braveness. Nobody appears to be asking the basic query: do we’ve something left that individuals would die to guard? That’s the actual disaster.
What’s turning into clear in Denmark is the restrict of secular governance. Rights and freedoms, as noble as they’re, don’t exist in a vacuum. They’re the fruit of a deeper ethical imaginative and prescient, one rooted in transcendence, in faith, in a shared understanding of fact and goodness. Reduce off from these roots, the tree won’t stand. And when sacrifice is required, the need to make it should vanish.
Because of this Frederiksen’s phrases matter. They aren’t essentially a return to private religion, however they’re an admission that religion itself is critical. That no civilisation can survive, not to mention defend itself, with out one thing sacred at its basis.
Britain nonetheless retains symbols of religion – cathedrals, bishops, coronation liturgies – however with out conviction, these symbols will turn into museum items: objects of nostalgia, not sources of power. In the long run, the query going through each western democracy is just not the way to govern, however why it exists.
The truth that a name for ‘religious rearmament’ has come from the Prime Minister of Denmark means that the disaster of which means is lastly reaching essentially the most rational, bureaucratic and post-religious corners of European politics. Even those that changed the Church with the welfare state are starting to really feel the bottom shifting beneath them.
