The decline of Christianity

[Wertbag]

I am 40 years old and in my lifetime I have seen Christianity dwindle to the point where I believe the end is in sight.  Now by ‘end’ I don’t mean the complete eradication of Christianity (I would love for that to happen but am a realist in believing it never will), but that it will reduce to the point where it is the minority in every way to the non-religious in the Western World and therefore ignored and irrelevant to life on our planet.

30 years ago, as an agnostic searching for the truth, I visited the local public library and browsed the religious section.  There were hundreds of books in favour of Christianity but I couldn’t find any that gave an alternative view.  This search pre-dated the internet and finding information proved challenging.  I have revisited the same library and now the shelves are packed with competing viewpoints for every subject.

 

There is a default condition that if a statement sounds reasonable at its face value and no one is arguing against it then we will generally accept it as plausible.  Someone could say “Do you believe Japan exists?”  Having never heard of anyone who claims it doesn’t would mean I’ve by default always accepted that it does.  I’ve never travelled there and it has never even occurred to me that it could be a huge conspiracy.  As soon as someone starts providing evidence and a valid argument why it in fact doesn’t exist then I would have to reassess my understanding and investigate more thoroughly.  So to my mind the very fact that an alternative viewpoint exists makes you ask questions of your beliefs that otherwise would never have been asked.  Jump back a hundred years and you have a society where Christianity was not questioned, so the question was simply “which denomination are you?” because there was no alternative to consider.

 

The internet only really started becoming common in the last 20 years and massive sharing sites like YouTube in the last 10.  I therefore believe it will be this generation that grow up with such technology already in existence that will know such arguments from day 1.  As the older generations pass away then society will be made purely of people who are aware this argument exists.  Once they start browsing they will be able to compare both sides (science, reason, evidence and logic vs faith, bad science, confusion) and more and more will see there is only one position which stands up to debate.

 

I found this interesting list of statistics (believable as it is a Christian website giving the bad news), it is a 2007 article so dated but still of great interest:

http://www.churchleadership.org/apps/articles/default.asp?articleid=42346

· Every year more than 4000 churches close their doors compared to just over 1000 new church starts!

· From 1990 to 2000, the combined membership of all Protestant denominations in the USA declined by almost 5 million members (9.5 percent), while the US population increased by 24 million (11 percent).

· Half of all churches in the US did not add any new members to their ranks in the last two years.

 

I believe this has reversed a bit due to an influx of non-Western Christians, but the same reasons for the decline in the West will flow through to the other parts of the world, just a little slower. 

It is not a case of the internet is the only factor to consider, as you see atheism discussed on every form of media.  From books, to legal challenges, debates to talk shows the message is loud and clear.  There is an alternative, there are plenty of people who are non-believers, you will not be struck down or disadvantaged by disbelief and many of the most famous and intelligent people support this viewpoint.  It is one thing to have some nobody on the internet say “I don’t believe” but hearing it from incredibly smart people (Hawking, Tyson, Nye, Dawkins etc), the world’s richest people (Gates, Branson, Buffet etc), your favourite movie celebrity (Brad Pitt, Morgan Freeman, Angelina Jolie, Stephen Fry etc) or TV personalities (Bill Maher, Ricky Gervais, Billy Connelly, Jeremy Clarkson etc) really makes people pay more attention.  Being a successful atheist shows that you don’t need to be blessed to achieve your goals. 

 

In my early days of study on the subject it was one of the things that really stuck in my mind; we all have the same life expectancy, suffer from the same amount of illness, accidents, crime, cancer and negative events in our life.  If God really cared about any group on the planet we should see one group whose very blessed lives proved their divine protection.  We don’t see that, and it is a reason people leave the church.  Atheists having great lives while they should be hated by God while Christians suffer badly and yet they are meant to be the chosen ones.  That reality continues to beat against the loving claims Christian’s make of God.