What comes after secularism?
OPINION — France was supposed to be finished with Christianity. Apparently, Christianity wasn’t finished with France.
That is the surprising story now emerging from one of Europe’s most secular societies. Tens of thousands of young people recently filled the Stade de France for prayer. Hundreds of thousands gathered for Mass in Paris. At newly restored Notre-Dame, the symbolism was hard to miss — cathedral and faith rising together. At Lourdes, enormous crowds gathered for candlelight processions. Pope Leo’s visit did not look like a ceremonial farewell to an aging faith. It looked like an astonishing public outpouring of belief — young, visible and unapologetically Christian.
But crowds can be deceiving. Numbers of converts are harder to dismiss.
This past Easter, more than 21,000 adults and teenagers were baptized into the Catholic Church in France. Adult baptisms have more than tripled in a decade. Evangelical churches are also growing. This is not merely nostalgia for an older France. Many of these new Christians are not returning to a childhood faith. They are coming from atheist, agnostic, unaffiliated and non-Christian backgrounds.
What looks like a remarkable transformation may be underway. Pope Leo named its deeper impulse: the human heart still thirsts for meaning, truth and fulfillment that possessions, pleasures and distractions cannot satisfy.
Why?
Perhaps because secular modernity changed the culture without changing human nature. We still ask the fundamental existential questions: Why are we here? What gives life meaning? Does suffering have purpose? Is truth more than preference? Does our existence point beyond ourselves?
That does not prove Christianity true. But it does suggest that the hunger Christianity addresses was never modernized away. Not even in France.
There is a delicious historical irony here. France was supposed to show the world what comes after Christianity.
Perhaps it is instead showing us what comes after secularism.
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