[Perun]

I agree with Mynydd on this one. In fact the common European perception of what it means to be a nation largely comes from the example of the Israelites in the Old Testament. So whatever your views on Christianity are, you cannot deny that European nationalisms have been largely shaped by it. Particularly the notion of various tribes uniting into one nation-state. This notion was relatively lacking among many(if not most) pre-Christian peoples of Europe. It was usually the tribe(or city-state for the Greeks) that gain most loyalty, not the nation.

And Mynydd touches onto another point. Although one cannot deny the influence of Greece and Rome on European civilization, we must remember that is largely a result of projection onto the past by following generations than on how the Greeks and Romans saw themselves. To them, Europe was a very vague geographical entity with constantly shifting borders. It had no cultural or ethnic/racial connotations. And the ethno-centrism of the Roman Empire was not based on it being a European empire, but on being a world empire. Nobody at that time identified themselves as "European".

It was Christians, through intreptations of the Biblical story of Noah's sons, that a racial element to Europe first came into place. Also it was the spread of Christianity across Europe that gave a more cultural element to it as well(and since it helped spread Greeco-Latin culture as well, which further celemented their place as the basis of Europe).

To try to sweep off Europe's Christian heritage as many try to do is actually in many ways to destroy the very meaning behind what it means to be European. Christianity was an important element in Europe's development, that simply cannot be denied.