First, as fellow RD blogger Julie Ingersoll has pointed out, Breivik’s more interested in Christianity as pan-European culture than as piety. Violent Islamic extremists don’t find traditional religion compelling either; in fact, the more religiously rooted you are in Islam, the less likely you are to even sympathize with violent rhetoric, let alone engage in violent action. (Contrary to the common bias that religious observance makes violent action more likely.)
In the European case, the decline of religion over the decades has been simultaneous with the damping of nationalist sentiment, though many times for good reason. It has unfortunately been replaced by an unsatisfying, often unpopular, elitist, and distant capitalist project, which is economically unnerving and therefore also culturally terrifying. Meanwhile, the old Left is often either complicit in the worst excesses of that project, or too fractured or alienated to speak cogently to new challenges.
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