The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics Without God

Why do Europeans and Americans see the world so differently? Why do Europeans and Americans have such different understandings of democracy and its discontents in the twenty-first century? Contrasting the civilization that produced the starkly modernist cube” of the Great Arch of La Défense in Paris with the civilization that produced the cathedral” of Notre-Dame, George Weigel argues that Europe's embrace of a narrow secularism has led to a crisis of morale that is eroding Europe's soul and threatening its futurewith dire lessons for the rest of the democratic world.Weigel traces the origins of Europe's problem” to the atheistic humanism of the nineteenth-century European intellectual life, which set in motion a historical process that produced two world wars, three totalitarian systems, the Gulag, Auschwitz, the Cold Warand, most ominously, the Continent's de-population, which is worse today than during the Black Death.And yet, many Europeans still insistmost recently, during the debate over a new EU constitutionthat only a public square shorn of religiously-informed moral argument is safe for human rights and democracy. Precisely the opposite, Weigel suggests, is true: the people of the cathedral” can give a compelling account of their commitment to everyone's freedom; the people of the cube” cannot.Can there be any true politics”any true deliberation about the common good, and any robust defense of freedomwithout God? George Weigel makes a powerful case that the answer is No,” because, in the final analysis, societies are only as great as their spiritual aspirations.