Four friends meet in a Brussels bar after an evening at the cinema. The four friends – a happily married Greek man, a gay Spaniard, a 30-year-old Czech woman and a 32-year-old Maltese man – emerged from the film in shock and decided to discuss what they had seen over a beer.
The film they had just endured was Jesus Camp: a disturbing insight into the religious and political force known as Evangelical America. The camp’s leader, Becky Fischer, believes that Christians are fighting “a war” against liberalism, secular society, abortion, Islam and any number of ‘anti-Christian’ targets. “I want to see young people as radically committed to Jesus Christ as they are to Islam. I want to see them laying down their lives for the Gospel,” she says in the film.
The most obvious worries were dispensed with first: whether the documentary was impartial, whether it’s wrong to indoctrinate children from such a young age, and the importance and influence of the religious right in American politics and society.
But the discussion soon moved on to Church-State relations in Europe.
The Greek man, who is fascinated by all things religious and believes in God, was scathing about Church-State relations in his country. The Greek constitution recognises the Eastern Orthodox Church of Christ as the “prevailing religion in Greece”, and this has bestowed all sorts of privileges on the unelected members of the Church – both financial and political.
“The Church has had, and continues to have, a profound impact on the way we think as a nation. The Church has a finger in every pie: education, social life, politics and finance. It is a temporal power, as well as a spiritual one. It is a political force in its own right. The privileged presence of the Church in the institutional and public life of the nation creates discrimination for those who do not practice the Orthodox religion.”
He explained how he had endured 12 years of compulsory religious education which left no room for an exploration of alternative opinions or faiths. He later understood that what he had learnt at school was, in fact, a form of nationalistic-cum-religious ideology.
The Spaniard explained how he had hidden his homosexuality from his parents for 10 whole years because “my very traditional Catholic mother would have died of shock had I introduced her to my boyfriend”.
“In Spain, the Church had regulated entire areas of people’s social and personal life for centuries, aided and abetted by friendly politicians. When all this started to change with Zapatero, they obviously panicked. The Church organised massive anti-Zapatero rallies around the country. I’m not a big Zapatero fan, but he has had the courage to confront the Church and its grip on people’s personal lives head-on. This has been a great thing for individual freedom in my country.”
“How about a country which hasn’t introduced divorce legislation?” asked the Maltese man. “It’s odd, true, but don’t look too shocked. Italy went through a 10-year battle which ended with the 1974 referendum on divorce; Spain only introduced it in 1981 after major upheaval in society. It’s a process we have to go through.”
“OK, but why is it taking so long in Malta?” the friends asked.
“Our Constitution gives the Church the ‘duty and the right to teach which principles are right and which are wrong’. Our institutional symbolism is Roman Catholic: the Archbishop addresses the nation on Independence Day, Members of Parliament swear allegiance to the Constitution of Malta but kiss the crucifix. Over the past 20 years, we have only witnessed minor, largely unorganised, challenges to the Church’s privileged position in society. While social mores have been changing rapidly, the ruling party has been keen to maintain the status quo: its ideology, value-system and political support are tightly bound up with the Church’s own value-system. In fact, it largely replicates the Church’s position on a wide array of matters touching on individual liberty. Besides, it’s not entirely clear whether the party would accept openly declared atheists and homosexuals to stand for election. It has certainly shown itself to be hostile to those it has labelled ‘the liberal elite’ and its MPs and MEPs appear reluctant to discuss the divorce issue openly. It is this veil of silence, rather than the lack of divorce legislation itself, which is a threat to the democratic process.
“Past experiences – mainly nasty – convinced a ‘pragmatic’ Labour party to maintain a very low profile on issues which might irk the ecclesiastical authorities. So the result is institutional silence on issues which the Church considers ‘absolute truths’ and which have been treated as such by the governing party. This refusal to debate certain issues openly, to hide away from ‘delicate issues’, has damaged our democracy. People shouldn’t challenge the Church’s right to voice an opinion (as long as its opinion is treated as an opinion, and not as a form of higher law), on these issues, but they should certainly question whether the Archbishop should address Independence Day celebrations.
“People talk, they write articles, they argue. We’re a free society in that respect. But most opinion-makers shy away from calling a spade a spade by addressing these fundamental institutional issues. They’re happy to declare that Malta is a ‘secular country’, without examining what distinguishes our institutional set-up from that of other countries. It doesn’t help that most intellectuals have been extremely timid in their approach – you sometimes wonder whether they have simply decided to ignore what’s going on around them. The result has been a growing sense of frustration in people who feel that they are members of a Catholic community rather than citizens of a sovereign state. The frustration is such that they end up comparing Malta to Iran and to the Taliban. That is clearly an exaggeration, but it shows that a tension exists. And we’re not addressing that tension. So the question goes far beyond the mere question of recognising that divorce is a civil right. We must confront the underlying institutional issues openly if we really want to move forward.”
The Czech woman was astonished by her friends’ accounts and, sensing a hint of anger and resentment in their voices, she suspected that the three men were overstating their case for the sake of an interesting argument.
“Come on, guys, you’re taking things too seriously. We’re talking about Europe here, it’s not as if your countries are populated by fundamentalist evangelicals.”
Coming from a Czech person, her attitude was understandable. A long history of brutality against those who were considered heretics, and 40 years of Communism, have formed a people who are allergic to and suspicious of any imposed dogma. People are free to believe and practice what they like but agents armed with “absolute truths” are frowned upon, in particular if these truths become institutionalised. Everything is up for debate. Individual liberty, good literature and a healthy dose of cynicism in the face of absolute manifestations of power make for a nation with a remarkably free spirit.
And guess what? Our Czech friend is the only one among us who attends Mass every Sunday.

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