Christopher Lord - Parallel Cultures: Majority/minority relations in the countries of the former Eastern Bloc

The history of Europe can be interpreted from two points of view: as the history of Christianity, and as the history of the European states. These two points of view are not mutually exclusive: the European states have until recently also represented themselves as Christian bodies, and so the two histories can form an organic whole. At moments of great crisis the Reformation is the obvious example the link between the political and the spiritual appears at the surface of events, but in the normal run of things these two histories of Europe would seem to go at different speeds. If we take the long view, the religious history, with its deep changes in morality and cosmology, would seem to have the profounder effect on the life of people (and not just religious people; we are all religious, in the sense that we accept moral and cosmological traditions that have no other basis or claim to legitimacy than their historical acceptance by various organised religions; and we can also argue, following Weber, that modern social structures such as capitalism have themselves been produced through a transformation of religion); but at the beginning of the twenty-first century, we are biased in the other direction, and will tend to give the greater importance in our histories of the past to the kind of questions which present themselves to us in everyday life today: questions of politics, and of national politics in particular.