And so the peoples of the West are enlightened enough to have cast off the stultifying oppressiveness of religion for a world in which the state regulates every aspect of life. In 1944, at a terrible moment of the most terrible century, Henri de Lubac wrote a reflection on Europe’s civilizational crisis, Le drame de l’humanisme athee. By “atheistic humanism,” he meant the organized rejection of God — not the freelance atheism of individual skeptics but atheism as an ideology and political project in its own right. As M. de Lubac wrote, “It is not true, as is sometimes said, that man cannot organize the world without God. What is true is that, without God, he can only organize it against man.” “Atheistic humanism” became inhumanism in the hands of the Nazis and Communists and, in its less malign form in today’s European Union, a kind of dehumanism in which a present-tense culture amuses itself to extinction. “Post-Christian Europe” is a bubble of 50-year-old retirees, 30-year-old students, empty maternity wards . . . and a surging successor population already restive to move beyond its Muslim ghettoes.

Already, Islam commands more respect in the public square. In Britain, police sniffer dogs wear booties to search the homes of suspected Muslim terrorists. Government health care? The Scottish NHS enjoined its employees not to be seen eating in their offices during Ramadan. In the United Kingdom’s disease-ridden hospitals, staff were told to wear short sleeves in the interests of better hygiene. Muslim nurses said this was disrespectful and were granted leave to retain their long sleeves as long as they rolled them up and scrubbed carefully. But mandatory scrubbing is also disrespectful on the grounds that it requires women to bare their arms. So the bureaucracy mulled it over and issued them with disposable over-sleeves. A deference to conscience survives, at least for certain approved identity groups.

The irrationalism of the hyper-rational state ought by now to be evident in everything from the euro-zone crisis to the latest CBO projections: The paradox of the Church of Big Government is that it weans people away from both the conventional family impulse and the traditional transcendent purpose necessary to sustain it. So what is the future of the American Catholic Church if it accepts the straitjacket of Obama’s “freedom to worship”? North of the border, motoring around the once-Catholic bastion of Quebec, you’ll pass every couple of miles one of the province’s many, many churches, and invariably out front you’ll see a prominent billboard bearing the slogan “Notre patrimoine religieux — c’est sacre!” “Our religious heritage — it’s sacred!” Which translated from the statist code-speak means: “Our religious heritage — it’s over!” But it’s left every Quebec community with a lot of big, prominently positioned buildings, and not all of them can be, as Montreal’s Saint-Jean de la Croix and Couvent de Marie Reparatrice were, converted into luxury three-quarter-million-dollar condos. So to prevent them from decaying into downtown eyesores, there’s a government-funded program to preserve them as spiffy-looking husks.