As we wrote earlier this month,  a backlash is building against European Union bureaucrats over their growing litany of intolerance for anything except intolerance. Christians, Jews (and let's be fair), even decent Muslims are demanding the right to affirm their faith and culture in Europe's public square.

The role these faiths have played in shaping the freest, greatest and most progressive civilization the earth has ever known cannot be understated. But unlike the other enduring civilizational colossi, such as the great Eastern ones, Europe's civilization is fraying under the relentless pounding of EU secular humanism.

This modern credo hates history, despises religion and negates culture. It tolerates only the void of atheism in Europe's public institutions, stripping all references to divinity from the draft European constitution, all representational geography from the currency, and all signs of religious life from the public square, seeking to turn the beauty of what is all around in Europe into some sort of rootless shell or lifeless museum.

Religion in particular is under attack from this Brussels crew, and their special targets include crosses on walls, veils on girls, marriage itself and incredibly, Stars of David at Kristallnacht remembrances (as happened in Norway). It envisions a glittering, soulless and wholly material welfare state where government replaces all signs of the unique language, history, geography and faiths that created Europe. And like all socialist experiments, it fails, because it fails to understand human nature. The ugly unorganized response to this arrogance can be seen in the visceral nationalism present in soccer hooliganism, and worse yet, in growing Islamofascism.

The emerging force to counter this trend is a new group called the Theocons. The take their inspiration from the likes of Cardinal Ratzinger and Rocco Buttiglione (see the link to his WSJ essay in the Thinker link above). Call them conservative if you will, but like their cousins the Neocons in the U.S., their true agenda is radical, and rooted deeply in a decisive and confident understanding of human nature.  The Theocons seek to embrace Europe's better heritage instead of reject it and to create the kind of society that Europe absent its horrible wars is really meant to be. As Buttiglione predicted in his WSJ essay, they are growing.

A.M. Mora y Leon   12 3 04