We Do Not Need a New, Very Different St. Benedict
The reason why Europe cannot shake off its Christianity without losing a sense of its identity is because it was and still is covered in monasteries. This is also why the English could never wholly accept Protestantism, and they had to settle for a weird Catholic-Protestant hybrid called Anglicanism, forcing themselves to adopt an array of theological contradictions which together they charmingly called ‘religious moderation.’ Over the years, the English carefully avoided being troubled by such eccentricities as religious conviction by avoiding the topic of religion altogether. The problem, of course, is that one cannot live among monasteries for a thousand years and then successfully be secular. The English, in turn, remain intensely religious, but today they express their religiosity by their commitment to the petty secular causes and sentimental utopianism which has now left them jaded and unable to do anything except lie down and be colonised by foreign populations.
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