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For many people for much of Christian history, Christianity and Western culture had considerable identification with each other, and this situation persists to some degree.
Up until the 18th century, which (I am told) is the century in which church attendance dropped below 50%, to be European was usually to be Christian, and furthermore, to be Christian was usually to be European. Neither of these things is true any longer.
The eighteenth century was also the century in which missionary efforts outside of Europe began (or rather, were revived, as the first two centuries of the Christian era were also characterised by missionary activity outside Europe, frequently in response to persecution within Europe.) We should not overlook the fact that Christianity originated, not in Europe, but in the Middle East, and that there are ancient churches in that area dating back to the early centuries. Parts of Europe, including the part which my ancestors inhabited at the time, were evangelised only about a thousand years ago, when these Eastern churches had existed almost that long.
The majority of Christians are now non-Western. Frequently, for reasons involving missionaries from a culture which had been intertwined with Christianity for so long that the distinction had blurred in places, these Christians have adopted elements of Western culture also, usually to do with dress or customs but also beliefs which have been held in the West since pagan times.
Recent thought on missions (for an entire academic discipline, missiology, exists for the purpose of thinking about missions) is that "indigenisation" is a good and beneficial thing for churches. That is, non-Western churches should incorporate into their Christianity such elements of their ancestral culture as are not incompatible with Christianity (which these are is a debate in itself, of course - see my digression on synthesis and synchretism). This, after all, is what European Christians did.
For example, the Celtic cross. I am told that there is a very fine Celtic cross in Scotland which my ancestors used to use as an assembly point when they were about to go out and slaughter another Scottish clan (apparently without appreciating the irony). The distinctive feature of the Celtic cross is the circle centred on the point where the vertical and horizontal elements join, and this was an ancient pagan Celtic symbol of the universe. The cross shape (which had arms of even length) symbolised the four quarters of the earth, and at their centre the circle represented the connection between this world and the Otherworld. Canny missionaries to the Celts picked up this symbol, altered it slightly to draw it closer to the Christian cross, and so used it as a point of contact to win Celtic converts, as the Apostle Paul had quoted Greek poetry in Athens.
Christianity has always been far larger than culture, since the early days of the Acts of the Apostles when first Greek-speaking Jews were accepted, then Samaritans, and finally Gentiles. It has always had the ability to incorporate aspects of various cultures into itself, sometimes transforming their significance in the process. It has always, too, sparked debate about what belongs to gospel and what to culture. Unfortunately, for many centuries European culture and Christianity were so much together that, like an old married couple, they came to resemble one another and be identified as one unit, and the continuing confusion of the two has been counterproductive in a number of ways.
Now that culture is becoming global, Christians face a new challenge which is an extension of the old challenge: to incorporate aspects of many local cultures into an understanding of Christianity which makes sense in a global environment.
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