Keswick speaker Hélder Favorin writes: Amalia, from Eastern Europe, shared these words: ‘I turned 20 recently and I cannot stop appreciating how full of colour and meaning my life has become. I feel secure and confident about my future. I’ve had anxiety attacks and even a few severe panic attacks; I couldn’t handle it alone. But because of my faith in Jesus, I have found peace and protection. He is my rock and I know that I can rely on Him in any situation.’(1)
Amalia’s honest testimony may feel like an oasis in the desert-like spiritual landscape of European youth, the most secularised, atheistic and agnostic demographic in the world. At the same time there might be many more oases – and even rivers of God’s activity among youth in Europe – than we realise. The tide keeps turning.
With its point of reference in Nietzsche’s popular 19th-century affirmation that ‘God is dead,’(2) the general secular view proclaimed that scientific progress would create advanced societies in which God and religion would be unnecessary and consequently disappear, at least from the public sphere. Nineteenth-century European thinkers such as Max Weber, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, underscored by rationalism, embraced this view. The prominent Spanish sociologist Eduardo Bericat rightly observes that the history of Europe is intimately linked to a project of cultural modernity that considered both institutional religion and personal religion a vestige of past eras. Thus, since its inception, modern progress has been made alongside a process of intense secularisation, which has made Europe the most secular society on the entire planet.(3)
