The Persistence of Christianity in Post-Christian Europe

When I used to teach Jewish history to undergraduates, I often found that they had trouble wrapping their minds around the notion of secular Jewish culture, or ideologies like secular Zionism or Jewish socialism. I once pointed out that many of them were secular Christians: very few went to church, but most celebrated Christmas; few were believers, but in college they studied literature drenched in the Christian religious tradition. Katja Hoyer expounds on a similar idea in describing the role of Christianity in contemporary Europe, where, as Daniel Johnson explained in a powerful and unsettling essay two years ago, it seems to be withering away: