Europe has a dream that is secular and freer than the American dream

At cocktails parties, community gatherings, and neighborhood associations everyone talks about money and real estate values. Nobody talks about religion or politics—although these are two most incendiary topics on people’s minds and in their souls and they affect everything and twist people into red and blue conditions, hyper-Christians or socialists, real Americans or postmodern Bolsheviks, “the recession is over” -analysts or “are you kidding me?” -sufferers.

The traditional American dream of personal autonomy, property, unhindered wealth amassment, and self-reliance has run into the spiritual morass of the 21st century and its decided vacuum of religious rationalization, and its growing schism between poor and affluent. Meanwhile, the church community is unable to distill or camouflage the long-standing forced agreement between the two just to let things be. The lack of a real middle class to buffer things, and the gargantuan presence of the Internet and the 24-hour media also daunt the furtive standoff that once kept the American Dream intact for the lucky and an ideal for the hopeful. We little guys quickly find out the dirt about the philandering congressmen, the hedge fund rats, and the predator talk show hosts; our Puritanical roots and empty wallets put us in ornery and resentful spirits.
 

The purveyors of the American Dream raise people’s hopes by using military force to protect our “vital self-interests,” triggering temporary waves of patriotism, national euphoria, and inclusive feelings in a culture that actually eschews interdependence and integrated neighborhoods. We are very much “in to” security. President George W. Bush really opened a wound with the Iraq lie and fiasco, deepening our depression; President Obama, with stronger European, non-doctrinaire instincts, will hopefully avoid a similar path with the hopeless Afghanistan mission.

Paradoxically, just over sixty years since the close of World War II, Europeans are living a quiet dream (not a utopia) that is essentially free of the overbearing holy self-righteousness that so strangely pervades American political life. To quote one scholar: “It is inclusivity that brings security—belonging, not belongings.”

I’ve seen this in London, Paris, Budapest, Rome, Naples, Florence, Barcelona, Vienna, Prague, Athens, and other smaller towns and villages in Greece and coastal Turkey. American life hyper-ventilates with proclamations and guilt about religion and faith—matters related to privacy in our charter documents and generally disdained by the Founding Fathers. European life is all but secular; the commanding issues are sustaining the already in-place health care systems, water supplies, fuel emission standards, multi-language education, multiculturalism, and interdependence.

In the US, churches and synagogues are too often flashpoints for controversy and injunctions and protests about civic symbols and menorahs or mangers. In Europe, they are regarded as buildings of artistic majesty, something like museums, and clerics just do not run for political office. While the efficient and clean trains and the Euro currency continue to link the nation-states of the emerging European Union, American commentators more and more shake their heads at the profoundly angry and polarized American people—who ironically saved Europe from itself just sixty-five years ago.

(Many thanks to my dear stepdaughter Samantha for an inspiring discussion on this topic!)

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