Why Christianity Is Collapsing

We are living through a historic culture change that many of us oldsters weren’t sure would ever happen. Christianity is collapsing in Western democracies with astounding speed. The long-awaited Secular Age is rolling like a juggernaut. Freethought efforts finally are winning the day.

Christianity remains strong in less-developed tropical places, where millions “speak in tongues” and exhibit holy-roller behavior. But it is disintegrating in America, Europe, Canada, Australia and other advanced societies. Soon, Christians will be a minority in the First World. Hurrah. Intelligent scientific thinking now dominates – not supernatural fairy tales.

Why did this great transformation arrive in our lifetime? Many explanations have been offered.

Many sociologists say Western life has improved so much – with prosperity, health care, job security, few wars, modern comforts and better education – that people no longer need to hope for rewards after death. When couples stop going to church, their children grow up without being indoctrinated.

Some scholars like Mary Eberstadt, author of How the West Really Lost God, say the sexual revolution curtailed much of the patriarchal family, leaving fewer traditional households to fill church pews.

Some scholars like computer scientist Allen Downey say the rise of the Internet, with its great power to spread skeptic messages, helped fuel the decline.

Others say never-ending sex scandals involving priests and ministers showed that highly religious people can be grossly immoral.

And it’s frequently observed that intense involvement of white evangelicals in narrow-minded politics has alienated millions of moderate young Americans.

I want to add another explanation: I think rising intelligence and growing scientific knowledge have enabled millions to see that supernatural gods, devils, heavens, hells, prophecies, miracles, etc., are just fantasies – they don’t actually exist. Magical church tenets are fiction – lies.

For example, each human personality – all eight billion of us – is created by our huge brain, the most complex object in the universe. When the brain dies, along with the body, it’s hardly likely that the psyche can come out of the corpse and travel to a hereafter. The personality simply dies with the brain. So church promises of heaven evaporate.

Undoubtedly, all these factors pushed the profound transition we are watching. It’s mostly a phenomenon of young adults. As old churchgoers die off, they are followed by young generations who say their religion is “none.”

Christianity, which shaped our world for millennia – causing crusades, inquisitions, witch hunts, Catholic-Protestant wars, pogroms against Jews and Anabaptists, burning of “heretics,” blasphemy trials, and the like – is retreating before our eyes.

A half-century ago, philosopher-historian Will Durant wrote, in The Age of Reason Begins:

Is Christianity dying? Is the religion that gave morals, courage and art to Western civilization suffering slow decay though the spread of knowledge, the widening of astronomic, geographical and historic horizons, the realization of evil in history and the soul, the decline of faith in an afterlife and of trust in the benevolent guidance of the world? If this is so, it is the basic event of modern times….

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