Are you a Catholic atheist or a Protestant atheist?

"Every major question in history is a religious question. It has more effect in moulding life than nationalism or a common language." 

Hilaire Belloc

Religion underlies economics, not vice versa as the Communists thought. This is true at all times and in all places, including our own as Roger Scruton shows here, talking about the
euro crisis.

Spain is utterly Catholic, Norway utterly Lutheran, whether Spaniards or Norwegians believe or not in God. As they say in Northern Ireland, are you a Catholic atheist or a Protestant atheist? Muslim and Hindu atheists are even more different.

This is not a comment on how many people believe in God or think about religion in Spain or Norway. Norwegians are hard working and prosperous, despite their high taxes and huge welfare state, because of Lutheranism - from which they get their work ethic and sense of responsibility. Greece, other Orthodox countries, including my beloved Romania, are very different. I have a close Romanian friend who is a Protestant and, knowing her, I must respect the idealism and uncomplicatedness of Protestantism in a country as murky as Romania. Though I love the Orthodox religion.

Lord Rees-Mogg even wrote an entertaining though tendentious article about the Catholic and Protestant attitudes towards prostitution, comparing bordellos in Paris with women sitting in shop windows in Amsterdam's red light district. In England everything changed during the Reformation, when folk religion was eradicated and the country was in many ways maimed. It was an even bigger social dislocation than mass immigration since 1948, - and can be compared to the Bolshevik revolution in 1917.

At least when Catholics do not believe in God we know exactly what God we do not believe in. Or at least we used to. Unfortunately maybe this is out of date, like so much else. I suppose some Catholics stop believing in Hans Kung's God, which is not very close to the Catholic one.

On the continent, ancient history lives on through the Catholic Church, which absorbed the ancient pagan festivals for her own purposes fascinating, but does not live on in the Protestant countries. I am reading Robin Lane-Fox's Pagans and Christians on exactly this theme in 2nd and 3rd century European history.The local gods became local saints - that beautiful folk religion which the Catholic and Orthodox countries have. I grew up in Southend on Sea, Essex, where as a boy I always knew they had paved over the local gods.

The best description of the impact on the Reformation is this wonderful poem about fairies by an Anglican, Bishop Corbet:


Farewell rewards and fairies
Good housewives now may say,
For now foul sluts in dairies
Do fare as well as they;
And though they sweep their hearths no less
Than maids were wont to doe,
Yet who of late for cleanliness,
Finds sixpence in her shoe?

Lament, lament old abbeys
The fairies' lost command,
They did but change priests' babies,
But some have changed your land
And all your children stolen from thence
Are now grown puritans,
Who live as changelings ever since
For love of your demesnes.


At morning and at evening both,
You merry were and glad,
So little care of sleep and sloth,
These pretty ladies had,
When Tom came home from labour,
Or Cisse to milking rose;
Then merrily went their tabor
And nimbly went their toes.


Witness those rings and roundelays
Of theirs which yet remain,
Were footed in Queen Mary's days
On many a grassy plain.
But since of late Elizabeth
And later James came in,
They never danced on any heath
As when the time had been.


By which we note the fairies
Were of the old profession,
Their songs were Ave Maries,
Their dances were procession;
But now alas they all are dead
Or gone beyond the seas,
Or further from religion fled
Or else they take their ease.