Religion and culture

David Warren writes a post about religion and culture:

“Religion” & “culture” are two different, though closely & mutually related things. Christianity could not account for all the differences between Spaniards & Englishmen, Germans & Italians, Frenchmen & Poles, Europeans & Americans, even within the Catholic Church. Religion unifies, culture diversifies. The “highest” culture will always be religious, because religion, revelation, God, penetrate most deeply the soul of man qua man. Religion is the music; culture is our song. The culture fashions the religion into a new song. But religion raises & inspires & is its principle of life. A culture freed of religion dies; falls into silence, as if the music were taken out of the song, the soul out of the body. Europe, in freeing itself “progressively” from its Christian heritage, has performed its suicide, for centuries in slow motion, ever quicker towards its end. Over the last several decades it has fully embraced what an old pope called “the culture of death,” & the next called “the dictatorship of relativism”: the culture of glibness; of pure self-adornment; the nihilism that whispers, “one thing is as good as another,” then howls its last out of empty despair.

Read more here: http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/2013/03/15/an-alteration-of-course/