On the morning of June 24, the world awoke to a changed Europe. With the so-called ‘Brexit’ referendum, the UK voted to leave the European Union, and as such, the EU lost one of its most important member nations. Almost immediately, there were calls from France, Italy, and the Netherlands to hold similar referenda, jeopardizing the entire EU experiment.
There are a number of scholars who interpret the Brexit as part of a wider trend among the various nations of the world, and that trend is a turn towards nationalism and the political right. And while there are various reasons for this, it seems to be mainly fueled by a backlash against globalism and the erosion of cultural and national identity.
Nevertheless, these scholars seem to have missed how this turn towards nationalism that we are seeing all over the globe actually entails a resurgence of historic religious identities and moral commitments. As such, this nationalist turn in the UK, particularly in England, has the potential for a very significant conservative Christian renewal in the West as a whole.
But within these balkanizing tendencies is a process called re-traditionalization. Because globalization challenges the traditions and customs, the religions and languages of local cultures, its processes tend to be resisted with a counter-cultural blowback.
In the face of threats to localized identity markers, people assert their religiosity, kinship, and national symbols as mechanisms of resistance against globalizing dynamics. This is what we would call re-traditionalization; when culture and customs are threatened with extinction, they tend to go through a revival, a renaissance, a recommitment among populations. Could this be what we are seeing with England and the Brexit?
And with this national revival comes a re-embracing of traditional moral values. Along with India, Islamic and African nations, Russians have publically and legislatively rejected what they consider the civilizational suicide of LGBT activism and feminism. Even many Eastern-European countries that feel threatened by Russia’s recent militarism, such as Georgia and Moldova, consider globalized secular values far more threatening.
Indeed, the current rise of nationalism throughout Europe is concomitant with a growing religious conservatism. In Europe, immigration ironically is making the continent more religiously conservative, not less; in fact, London and Paris are some of the most religiously dense areas within their respective populations.
Since 1970, charismatic Christians in Europe have expanded steadily at a rate of 4 percent per year, in step with Muslim growth. Currently, Laestadian Lutherans in Finland and Holland’s Orthodox Calvinists have a fertility advantage over their wider secular populations of 4:1 and 2:1 respectively.
It is true that British national allegiances have yet to exemplify anything remotely akin to a Christian revival; indeed, church attendance in the UK has long been on the decline. Nevertheless, there seems to be a decline to this decline. Most people in the UK still think of themselves as Christian, and immigrants from Africa and Eastern Europe, Catholic Poles in particular, have made Britain more, not less, religious. There has been an increase in evangelical church attendance, all the while Islamic birthrates in the UK are dropping to under three children per woman.
All of this suggests that the Christian tradition remains a significant factor within British cultural identity and will only increase in the coming years if nationalist trends continue.