Excellent. From personal experience and as a long time church goer (Presbyterian) I would say anecdotally that yes the Canadian mainline churches have gone woke. I personally don't want 'the current thing' ideology with my scripture.
Out local Presbyterian church in Kanata was sliding into serious woke, and become irrelevant and annoying to me, and hence we moved to another local church that is technically Wesleyan, and in style is very modern (i.e. rock band, lights shows) but the message and theology is classic, they NEVER talk current social justice nonsense and the church is growing like crazy.
I don't really like the style (I prefer classic services) but compared to the Presbyterian church in Canada, this place is a port in a storm and I love it.
We have recently started attending a similar church (Baptist) and it too is growing like crazy. Lots of young families, lots of recent immigrants, modern music, modern building--but very traditional in its message.
I am not even that super religious, but I do believe in God, and I want my kids raised with some reasonable religion, for all sorts of practical reasons. My wife and I are well aligned on all this.
When we moved to Kanata six years ago from Montreal, we automatically defaulted to the local Presby church, and but after awhile I just couldn't take it. The final straw for me was maybe three years ago when we attended a service and they pulled some gay black kid up on stage in the middle of the formal service to do some performing arts calisthenics routine, and I thought, WTF? This is no slight against gay black kids that want to do performing arts, but that it not what I expect nor want from a church service.
And I certainly don't want to be lectured about 'social justice' or 'climate change' and it was clear that is where the Presby church was headed. So fuck off to them.
I'll accept my rock concert church filled with kids and life and traditional messaging from the scriptures any day of the week over woke nonsense.
Always appreciate your thoughtful comments - thanks Steven.
We went to church today here in the USA in a big church with modern music and zero stained glass. It looks like an auditorium from outside and on the inside. But the pastor was awesome and his message was amazingly insightful and well delivered, talking about the excesses of DEI and the need to love everyone equally.
I grew up going to Sunday school and singing in the junior choir in a United Church with a big-ass pipe organ, back before it was destroyed by wokeness. My mom was the fill-in organist on occasion. I am very traditional about church - I like the stained glass windows, pipe organ, traditional hymns, the smell of the old building and even the hard wooden pews.
Julie comes from a Baptist family, so I started attending church with her at a big, modern one that sounds exactly like the one you are now attending. The modern music, drums, bass, electric guitar and light show did (and still do) kind of freak me out, but the sermons are traditional and speak of personal responsibility and the need to commit to a higher power. None of this "you're beautiful just the way you are so just keep doing whatever weird shit you were doing and that's fine because Jesus loves you and you're special" message of the Woke churches. Instead, pull up your sleeves and do something good in the world.
I still miss the organ, but I'll put up with drums and bass to find real spiritual guidance.
Same exact situation. I was a member of St Andrew and St Paul on Sherbooke Street in Montreal from 2000 to 2018 when we moved, it is the flagship church Presby church. Loved it, miss it.
Ironically - my childhood church (St. Andrew's in downtown Sydney NS) shut down as a church and is now the HAT - the Highland Arts Theatre. It has rainbow flags all over it and is run by a guy who was on the front page of the Cape Breton Post proclaiming that he was a "gender-non-conforming pansexual" or something very close to that. God moved out, and Satan moved in.
I'm all for people being who they want to be (as long they are not forcing their views on others) but I do think our society is facing a marked increase in narcissistic personality disorder.
Thank you for this article on a snowy Sunday morning. The quotes from Solzhenitsyn are very illustrative of the turbulent times we live in and the vulnerability of Christianity in the West.
I always went to church until I was in my 40's. I am very connected to my spiritual core but do not attend services. However, I always find peace visiting a church. When travelling in Europe I enjoyed going into as many churches as I could and lit a lot of candles. I think sometimes we put the priest/minister on a pedestal and when they fall off, we fall away. I hold my own spiritual beliefs and I feel very connected to God. It really upset me when the churches were torched across Canada a few years back. For many (maybe not all) those churches represented peace, happiness, and good memories.
I’m not a religious person myself, but even to me it seems clear that the decline in religious belief and church attendance can account for much of what’s going wrong in the Western world today. On an individual level, people are filling that “God-shaped hole” in their psyches with all kinds of nonsense; and on a community level, people do not have the same sorts of connections and interactions with others that churchgoing used to foster.
I grew up very Roman Catholic. For as far back as I can remember I could find fault and even evil in it as they treated my family horribly and my father was the janitor.
I searched for somewhere to belong, because although the Catholic church wasn't for me, I knew God was.
I was literally "saved", and I'm still trying to figure out why but it doesn't matter because I'm chosen.
I became Fellowship Baptist and in 2015 my husband and myself were both baptized into it.
Then covid hit!
If there is one thing that covid showed the world, is who will line up for the Mark of the Beast and who will stand tough.
In 2022 I was so happy. I could attend church again and that Christmas I was asked to volunteer to decorate the church.
Faith Baptist in Sydney is not the size of most Catholic churches, but decorating still takes a lot of work.
I couldn't have been happier. Seeing everyone again meant so much to me.
So we get the decorating completed and I was sharing with one of the ladies how happy I was to be back. Then our very own pastoral care provider (a retired RN) said she was glad to see I finally got my vaccination.
I said, "No, I did not" and I was pleased at that.
She politely (I use that word lightly) asked me not to come to Christmas service and she would send me the YouTube link so I could watch it online at home to "keep everyone else safe".
Needless to say, I haven't returned.
I'm still looking for a spiritual home but true Christianity would even allow lepers to attend.
Jesus is my savior! He sent a pastor who I never heard of to knock on my door when I was all alone in a strange town with no friends whatsoever.
I was very close to completing my plan to commit suicide when Pastor Eric Watson knocked on my door and gave me his own Bible.
Months later, I asked him why he knocked on my door. He said he saw lights on and he knew my apartment had been empty for weeks. I told him I was there for 5 weeks already and he said, "I'm here 3 times a week, there wasn't even a curtain in the window." He never noticed my lights once in all that time, and I had curtains up before I was completely moved in.
He really wasn't supposed to see me until that evening. I wouldn't have let him in.
God chooses us 🙏
No building will change that and when you wear the armor of God, you will be protected from ridicule.
I miss my "church" family and I watch the sermons on YouTube but I know I'm still not wanted in person.
Sometimes our churches need to be the little ones. They exist in our homes.
Wear the Armor of God, thank Him always for His blessings and praise His son Jesus 🙏
Much the same at my local church. I recently started attending again but probably won't continue. The Sunday morning service now starts with a land acknowledgement and the whole focus has changed.
The rot in Western civilization is indeed in the heart of man - and only as the West is re-evangelized, will the rot cease. "The heart is desperately wicked above all things - who can know it?" (Jeremiah)
The solution for the West's problems is not found in political systems or revolutions - but at the foot of the Cross.
Your description of the beautiful and explosive growth of the Church in Africa and Asia is a wake-up call to Western Christians - who define Christianity only in terms of the West.
Western, "mainstream" Protestantism is in crisis - but the Church is growing and thriving elsewhere (but not in its historical home).
I call the once "United Church," the United Club - since it bears no historical, traditional or spiritual definition of a Church.
Thank you Francis!. So true about the United Church. They have adopted every possible woke position, but the cherry on top that made me realize they were a lost cause is when they accepted having atheist ministers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gretta_Vosper As you say, a church without God is just a social club, and humans without God are morally rudderless, left to argue over "the public good" and quibble about issues of moral relativism to try to divine right and wrong.
I was born Catholic and will be happy to die . Does the Church have flaws? Of course, try being over 2,000 years old with billions of members across time and space and not having serious lapses. Indeed name one religion as expansive as the Catholic Church that is widely recognized as having been better at their mission.
I attended Catholic school 1-12 and received my MBA from a Catholic university via the GI Bill after my military tour. Nearly everyone in the US military is Christian btw. I am unsure if Jesus views success in terms of the number of souls that have the privilege to enter Heaven or not. Maybe He has other criteria like quality of souls? None of us know.
Anyway, my third grade nun, Sister Eileen, explained to me that a) my life on earth was temporal and short, my life after earth was in Heaven or Hell, eternal and beyond long, and c) I’d better behave accordingly. Truth can be so simple.
When Dr. Jordan Peterson began to post his philosophical/religious videos on how to live a good life, he claims that he was not targeting men, and that his massage, although attracted many women, attracted far many more men, to his surprise. This, he partially attributed to more men being present on YouTube. Jordan Peterson also claims that the woke political movement targeted young women, who, were coming of age and at a vulnerable time in their psycho/physical development. This may account for some of the lack of religious interest for some women.
In Tucker Carlson's interview with Mr. V. Putin, Putin stated that Russian society was encouraged to adopt the Christian faith, which led to a more peaceful and content country.
Liberalism without a shared community oriented value system like religion might lead to self indulgent craziness in a society. Perhaps western society is self correcting.
Thanks for this. Excellent commentary. Jonathan Haidt likes to invoke Blaise Pascal's "God-shaped hole in the human heart" as one of the key reasons why America is adrift in a sea of loneliness and anxiety, and I think he's bang-on.
One can be a good person without believing in God, gods, or any deity. If someone performs good deeds solely because their favorite scripture commands it, rather than out of genuine moral conviction, it raises concerns about their motivations.
Could the resurgence of Christianity—or any dominant religion in a given region—be a reaction to societal stress and uncertainty? Consider Scandinavian countries, which consistently rank among the best places to live. They also have some of the highest levels of secularism, suggesting that prosperity and social stability may reduce the perceived need for religious belief.
Some of the best, most moral people I know are atheists or agnostics, for sure. But where does their moral conviction come from? Or are they just coasting on the fumes of a Christian morality that is so ingrained in them--because we have been a Christian culture for 2000+ years-- that they no longer are even aware of its source? Like a fish who doesn't know what water is.
What Tom Holland argues is that atheist "humanist"values are just Christian values that don't give a proper nod to their roots. To take an obvious example, almost nobody in the West would argue that killing newborn babies is okay--we all agree that this is murder and is wrong--but why do we all agree on this? In ancient Rome it was perfectly acceptable to rape your slave girls and when they had your unwanted children, to throw the babies out on a hill to die. You could do this openly and still be considered a "moral" person. It is only if you accept the Judeo-Christian idea that all human beings are created in the image of God (and therefore all lives are inherently valuable) that this becomes an abhorrent practice.
For an atheist/materialist, there is no fundamental principle that prevents us from returning to ancient Roman morality--which was essentially the point Nietzsche was making when he said that the "death of God" would result in massive bloodshed.
The Nazis abandoned Judeo-Christian morals and decided that some human lives were less valuable than others--starting with their "euthanasia" program for "lives not worthy of life" and proceeding down a long slippery slope to the Holocaust. Holland and others have argued that we give up our Judeo-Christian heritage at our peril.
Respectfully, I have to disagree. Morality is not merely a byproduct of Christian tradition—it has deep evolutionary roots. Acts of altruism and fairness have been well-documented in primates, demonstrating that these traits are innate, not merely cultural constructs. Evolution has favored moral behavior because cooperation and empathy enhance group survival. Simply put, we are wired to be moral and altruistic toward each other because it benefits our species.
Christianity did not invent morality; rather, it codified and capitalized on pre-existing human tendencies, embedding them into its religious texts. And while Christian teachings do contain messages of compassion, the Bible is also filled with violence, tribalism, and norms that are utterly unacceptable by today's Western ethical standards. To claim that modern moral convictions stem solely from Christianity overlooks both the darker aspects of religious history and the broader biological and social origins of morality.
Evolutionary biology has always struck me a form of "science of the gaps" -- always coming up with "just so" explanations applied retroactively to human behaviour. Of course all social animals exhibit rudimentary forms of morality towards members of their "in-group", but a chimp, for example, will tear any chimp who is not from their kin-group limb from limb if given the chance, and will not feel any remorse about it. The revolutionary thing about Christian morality--and arguably other great human wisdom traditions--is the overcoming of this biological imperative and extension of love toward even those who do not contribute to perpetuation of our genes and cannot possibly ever repay us.
Of course humans are not perfect, and it's easy to point out the inconsistencies and imperfections in how the tradition has been applied. The radical atheists were great at seizing on examples of religion being used an an excuse for tribal violence. But the great atrocities of the past century were carried out almost exclusively by atheists, who felt they had overcome traditional Christian values and replaced them with better ones. The communists were avowed atheists, for example, and I know you are all too familiar with their atrocities. The question facing the West--as the arch-atheist Nietzsche was all too aware--is whether we can sustain this higher form of morality (imperfectly applied as it has been) without sustaining the foundations on which it was built. Even if you think it's just a more sophisticated form of evolved self-preservation with no foundation in metaphysical reality, it is precisely the evolved system which built a successful civilization in the West. One that we are now, I fear, losing--and the results speak for themselves as we devolve into nihilism, hedonism and a culture of malignant narcissism.
Chris here with just a minor note to add to Julie's. Without an inherited and accepted moral code, each generation and individual is left to decide what is right and wrong in each situation that they find themselves in. The Sam Harrisses of the world believe that they can reason themselves into the correct moral decision case-by-case. Ethics become utilitarian and instrumental. Sam Harris falls back on the idea of choosing morality based on "maximizing human flourishing". But the problem is that one can justify exterminating the Jews through that logic. Or, more concretely and recent, as Sam himself did, one can justify locking unvaccinated people up, or can justify not caring if Hunter Biden has dead children in his basement.
I do agree with you and Julie that there are lots of great people who are atheists. But I agree with Julie that we often think we have achieved our morality through rational thought when in fact it is a Christian cultural inheritance. And atheism endangers the fundamental principles that bind us as a culture - as per my note to Adam Lehto above, I don't think it's a coincidence that we feel the disintegration of our culture at the same time that we have abandoned Christianity.
A very thought provoking essay on the perennial question of belief systems. I read through it but in truth became stuck on that first quote of Solzhenitzyn's: "I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened." It reminds me of something my mother told me about her early childhood as a farm girl: when an eclipse occurred people believed it was the end of the world. Now, an eclipse doesn't last very long and so those believers no doubt went about the business of living when it passed, but the point is that they created a narrative to explain what was for them unexplainable. I've been a part of a number of Christian religions and I've been atheist, agnostic but mostly just question and notice the contradictions in religions, the ways that people interpret what they hear and how they find others to share their interpretations. No religion that I'm aware of is perfectly peaceful. I would say a possible exception in the "western" world would be the Amish (my birth religion) but even there at the level of families there can certainly be "differences" and sometimes violence in families. Nobody is passive all the time. Maybe Hinduism in the "east"--don't know enough about it. In any case, we are meaning-making creatures not given to simply living in the moment, and so we borrow trouble (anxiety) and need comfort, taking it in different forms. Often we find that comfort in the form of becoming communities with like-minded souls and that tends to make us more civil, more focused, more generous, at least with others in the community, and sometimes more humble (thus attributing success to "God" rather than to one's own efforts). It can also, I think (haven't thought this through), make us susceptible to mass formation (see Mattias Desmet) and so we not only need our communities, we need an "other". Perhaps the demise of churches is that the demarcation had become less clear.
I'm rambling, clearly inspired by your essay. Thank you for today's food for thought!
Great question! I'm not sure they're mutually exclusive. As one of my wise grad school profs taught, we must be open to surprise. Maybe that's the meaning finding or discovery aspect. And then what we do with that surprise may well be the meaning making. If we do nothing with it or remain closed then we stop anything further. Re religion, speaking personally: I remember being surprised or maybe puzzled is more accurate about my love of hymn singing if I'm a "non-believer". The meaning I made of that was that it's about expressing what's inside, the emotional connection to my past in which such singing was special and it was a connection in real time to other people.
Full disclosure: the thought of Christianity becoming a dominant force in the West again alarms me, all the more so if the resurgence is being led by celebrity influencers (whether of the sporting or the intellectual kind).
Setting my reaction aside as much as possible, I would pose the following questions to anyone who thinks that this dominance would be a desirable state of affairs:
i) What is meant by 'Christianity'? It seems extremely unlikely that whatever is put forward as a model will be able to satisfy all Christians. Invariably, the historical pattern of endless factionalism (which was underway even before the Jesus movement identified as 'Christian') will surely continue. Why should the currently dominant forms of conservative Christianity be regarded as definitive?
ii) What is meant by 'the West'? Again we have a moving target. Is the core of the West reflected best in the 4th century? 12th century? 16th century? 18th century? One could argue that 'western values' only emerged in the aftermath of Protestant reformations, which forced Europe (very slowly and painfully) to disconnect religion from politics, economics, social services etc, at least in terms of the bureaucratic functioning of society. It is very hard to see how any 'resurgence of Christianity' could regain control over all these areas (and more), or that that would be a good thing (even from the standpoint of Christian theology).
iii) Extending the previous point: what would a 'Christian dominant' West actually look like? What would life be like for anyone not in the dominant majority? As with the War on Covid, would dissidents be marginalized, disadvantaged, targeted for punishment etc?
iv) How would a renewed 'Christian West' deal with the other major civilizational blocks of Asia and Africa, let alone the myriad indigenous traditions around the globe? Does it make sense any more to try to do geopolitics from the standpoint of religious commitment (even if Western Christians could ever agree on a platform)?
One may feel the need to lament the rise of 'relativism', 'atheism', and any number of 'isms' in Western society, but it's hard to see how a return to some kind of Christianity will really solve our modern problems.
Chris here with some more thoughts in addition to Julie's.
Church attendance and faith in God has fallen for several generations in most Western countries.
People have been saying "WTF is happening to my country! Why is it disintegrating and why does everyone hate each other!" for several generations now.
Maybe that's just coincidence. But I think not.
As per Julie's comment, it is reasonable to denounce the corruption or excesses of the church. But blaming factionalism on religion is actually the opposite of the truth. Human beings are by nature tribal (factional). The over-arching Christian ethos that has guided our society for millennia has been a counterweight to this tendency, even though it can appear to be a cause. But humans fought and killed each other long before there was a Christ.
I have literally never met a Christian who demands their version be taken as "definitive". I'm sure they exist, but they are like racists, often invoked in arguments but rarely encountered.
The greatest atrocities of the last century have been perpetrated by regimes that were expressly atheist and anti-Christian. From the Gulags, to party purges, to struggle sessions, to purging society of the Jews - all were done by people who had abandoned God or the idea of a morality beyond what they could produce with their own intellect.
Christianity - Christ. A Christian has a personal relationship with Christ. Personal being the operative word. It’s that simple. And it’s that powerful when experienced.
You ask some very good (and complicated) questions! A few points. Some of these are explained in parts 1 and 2 of this series, and if you are genuinely curious I'd recommend that you read them, along with Tom Holland's book "Dominion" -- which explains (in great detail) how the history of what we now call the "west" is actually the history of Christendom and how our entire society is founded on Judeo-Christian values. We take these values for granted now (the sanctity of the individual, equality under the law, etc.) and fail to realize how rare and remarkable--and possibly vulnerable-- they are. One other point: Christians are on average, significantly mentally and physically healthier than their age-matched peers, and religious belief can go a long way toward resolving the "meaning crisis" in our youth. So yes, I think it is relevant to our current times. This doesn't mean we can go backwards to a Medieval type of world where the (corrupt) church held all the political power. The future of the church, as I hinted at here, will be in recapturing our mystical connection to the divine, our ability to apprehend the interconnectedness of things beyond our grasping left brains, and a sense of connection and community that allows us to live peacefully with each other in a rapidly changing world.
(Apologies for the delayed response. I've been battling a particularly nasty cold and I wanted to respond at length. I had to break up my response to get around Substack's comment word limit)
First off, let me say how much I've appreciated the work that the two of you have done in response to the madness of 2020 and its legacy. I don't think we have much to disagree about on that score.
Turning to the themes you've highlighted in your series, Julie (and yes, I did read the first two when they were posted), let me attempt to clarify a little what I was getting at in my critique. The most basic point is that when most people hold up 'the West' and/or 'Christianity' as commendable or worthy of bringing back to prominence in some way, somewhere in their minds is some version of each of these, which in turn is probably not based on any careful historical investigation but on a strong preference (by dint of any number of personal factors) for a certain kind of Christian life experience and/or version of 'the West'. I would say that each of these assumes a mythic dimension and carries most, if not all, of that person's deepest values and hopes. I see that Holland, too, invokes the role of myth in his closing reflections.
I'm not arguing against having such guiding myths. Rather, the point is, as soon as you try to put meat on the bones and craft a vision of 'the West' and 'Christianity' to rally the troops, problems invariably arise. Who gets to decide what is important? What's 'in' and what should be left 'out'? What is, by Christian or Western standards, right and wrong? I don't think that there can be any clear cut answers to these questions since what we're dealing with (as always) is an ongoing unfolding of history. You've given a helpfully concise statement of your own solution to the difficulties that such questions pose: "The future of the church, as I hinted at here, will be in recapturing our mystical connection to the divine, our ability to apprehend the interconnectedness of things beyond our grasping left brains, and a sense of connection and community that allows us to live peacefully with each other in a rapidly changing world." It could well be that I'm just stuck in my "grasping left brain" but I can't help but think that this would be seen as rather weak gruel by just about every historical Christian community, and by most current Christian traditions around the world today. I'm willing to bet that from their perspectives, such a description misses *everything* crucial about Christian identity. Ironically (and I really don't aim to be mean or inflammatory here), it comes across as a rather liberal (dare I say 'woke'?) version of the faith. Even Holland, who, as far as I know, remains a non-believer, points to the centrality of the crucifixion in western Christian thought and practice. Is it not the case that the things that you think the Christian Church should be aiming for are already on offer in a myriad of contemporary spiritualities, some more obviously modern while others leaning more heavily on past traditions? Why the emphasis on being specifically 'Christian', then? (Perhaps Part 4 of your series will address this...)
Holland's answer to this latter question, if I've understood him correctly, is that we don't really have any choice, if we live in the West: we're Christian whether we like it or not. He makes a persuasive case for the persistence of ideas, practices and values, however transformed, that were central to European Christian society in centuries past. In a lot of ways his conclusion is unremarkable. What would be far more surprising was if Westerners (or even a majority of them) had succeeded in completely breaking with the immense weight of the Christian past and its cultural paradigms. But as he argues, even reacting to a dominant culture draws one into its web.
At what point, however, does it make sense to speak of the weaving of a new web, not necessarily in complete repudiation of the old but not in deference to it either? There's an interesting parallel here to the beginnings of the Christian movement. I hold to the fairly standard view (at least in history of religion circles) that Jesus was a figure fully *within* the Jewish world, however different his ethics or any other teaching may have been in certain respects (though I suspect the degree of difference has been greatly exaggerated by the many lenses of later Christian theology that are used to view his life). Likewise, the texts that have survived from the 1st and 2nd century show deep, ongoing resonances with Jewish culture, alongside, at least by the mid-2nd century, clear attempts to differentiate. It's a fascinating, 'wild west' of clashing interpretations of the meaning of the 'Christ event'. But imagine if the Jewish 'mainstream' at the time (and here we immediately run into difficulties since there was no single, dominant version of Jewish tradition, but I ask you to suspend your disbelief for the moment) said to all those upstart Jesus-followers: 'Quit kidding yourselves! You're really just Jews. Stop messing around with these new-fangled ideas. Return to good old-fashioned Jewish values and practices!' If this sort of conservative reaction had won the day, there would have been no separate Christian Church, and the history of the world would have no doubt turned out quite differently.
In the same way, Holland says to us, 'Quit kidding yourselves! You're really just Christians...' Well, yes, one could say that, at least in the sense that our cultural DNA is chock full of Christian elements and is likely to remain so for quite some time. But just as the mainstream Christian movement eventually decided that it needed to definitively reject the idea that it was a form of Judaism (without, in most cases, rejecting Jewish elements altogether, which would have been very difficult), so too most Westerners have rejected a strong, personal commitment to Christianity while retaining certain elements of their Christian cultural past. Again, it would be very surprising if this did *not* happen.
But it isn't just random cultural elements that do the heavy lifting for Holland (and, it seems, in your analysis). Rather, it is a set of values that is portrayed as the unique achievement of Christian Europe and uniquely worth preserving. My impression that this material could be described as 'human rights related'.This raises a few questions in my mind. First, does the importance of these values depend on their being embedded in a religious worldview? In other words, would it be pointless to, say, defend the sanctity of the individual in the absence of a robust Christian worldview of some sort? I don't see why this would be the case. The historical origins of an idea doesn't determine its value. Second, what about all of the cultural content that is, apparently, not worthy of retention? Concealed behind Holland's handful of Christian values worth preserving is a mass of other things from the Christian cultural past that both he and most contemporary Christians would be very uncomfortable in affirming. By what criteria does he sift through and select what is worth keeping and what needs to be thrown away? Third, if there's one deep value that has been placed in the spotlight for me since March of 2020 it is this: the need to think critically in the face of supposedly settled scientific and ethical issues, and, directly related to this in practice, being willing to leave room in society for voices critical of the mainstream. When I think of the history of the Christian movement (and I've studied it extensively), leaving room for dissidence doesn't exactly stand out as a prominent feature. With the possible exception of minor groups like the Quakers and (even more so) the Unitarians, submission to authority has been a central feature of all forms of the faith. Of course, Christianity is not unusual in this regard. It is probably safe to say that our modern concept of personal freedom (for all its potential problems) radically deviates from all pre-modern forms of life. I'm not suggesting that secular societies have successfully freed themselves from authoritarianism and dogma. The War on Covid put that notion to rest. What I *am* arguing is that holding up the freedom to dissent as a general value has no Christian precedent. This is the case from Paul of Tarsus onward. It makes no sense (and is seen as a threat) in the apocalyptic, revelation-central vision of history that informs traditional Christian communities, and that seems to have also informed Jesus' own outlook. The splintering of western Christendom in the 16th century involved all kinds of dissent, of course, but what consistently emerged was not, at first, any move toward respect for diversity or humility about what we can say about God (if anything), but an array of 'micro-christendoms', not to mention a rapidly proliferating set of breakaway movements, a process that continues to this day. One could argue, as Holland would, that defending the freedom to dissent from established authorities is just another example of Christian culture working out its logic, but this seems a stretch. In this case at least, a kind of freedom was envisioned that could not be attained in the context of *any* of the varieties of Christianity on offer. We probably wouldn't have people like Tom Holland writing books like *Dominion* if established churches had retained their power.
A few sundry items before I bring this ramble to an end:
You mention the argument that religious people are, on the whole, mentally and physically more healthy than non-religious people. It's been a while since I've looked at the research, but my recollection is that the effect on health comes not from religious beliefs themselves but from being plugged into a supportive community or network. Phil Zuckerman has a chapter on this in his book *The Nonreligious* (I would also recommend his *Living the Secular Life* if you'd like a readable account of what 'the other side' is up to...)
Chris, you point out that the worst atrocities of the last century have been perpetrated by atheist regimes. My response is that this is because we live in a secular age. Churches lack the political power and direct influence to commit evil on a grand scale. But humans gonna human, whatever their worldview. Power corrupts. Its an old story. If you were writing in 1650 instead of 2025, your observation might well run like this: "The greatest atrocities of the last century have been perpetrated by regimes that were expressly Christian. From the Inquisition, to church purges, to redoubled efforts to indoctrinate the masses, to purging society of the Jews - all were done by people who embrace God and the idea of a morality beyond what they can produce with their own intellect."
You also observe that you "have literally never met a Christian who demands their version be taken as "definitive". I'm sure they exist, but they are like racists, often invoked in arguments but rarely encountered." I would argue that this is a historical aberration, and the product of centuries of painful adjustments on the part of Christian communities as they've been displaced from centres of power. The 'naturalness' of the modern Christian denying that their version of the faith is definitive in any way is, I would suggest, itself evidence of the massive, civilization-wide shift toward a non-religious orientation.
I hope that all of this doesn't feel like some kind of personal attack on your position. These issues are complex and fascinating on multiple levels; my aim here was to inject an alternative perspective or two into the conversation.
And again, my appreciation for your work in the resistance movement that has taken shape in response to Covid insanity is genuine. It seems that neither religious nor secular people had much immunity to this (at least I haven't noticed any meaningful differences): another deep topic to ponder...
Thanks for your very thoughtful replies, Adam. This is exactly the kind of discussion we are hoping to generate. Obviously these are very complex topics, which smarter people than me have been pondering for centuries. A few years ago, I would have made many of the same arguments you are making now. I've changed my mind after listening to (and reading) people like Jonathon Pageau, Paul Kingsnorth, Iain McGilchrist and Andrew Klavan (among others) and also having certain personal experiences that I don't discuss publicly but which would fall into the category of "supernatural."
I'll address just a couple of the points you brought up and just let the rest stand--as an excellent counterpoint to my essay that people can read and make up their own minds.
First, a relatively easy one: the mental and physical health of religious people versus non-religious: There have been a few studies that attempted to tease out why religious people are healthier and it appears that it is not just the effect of social connection. In one study, for example, older adults who joined other types of social activities such as sports groups, volunteer work, etc., did not get the same mental health benefits as those that joined a church. And physically, for a variety of reasons, religious people actually live, on average, 4 years longer. So if you have to decide between exercising and joining a church, join the church!
As for your question: "My impression that this material could be described as 'human rights related'.This raises a few questions in my mind. First, does the importance of these values depend on their being embedded in a religious worldview? In other words, would it be pointless to, say, defend the sanctity of the individual in the absence of a robust Christian worldview of some sort?"
This, I think is THE question--and the key one that I've changed my mind on over the last few years. It's also what Nietzsche was on about--and he seems to have concluded that, once "God is dead," the moral values that arose out of our Judeo-Christian foundation could not hold. Nor did he, the arch-atheist want them to. He felt that a return to pre-Christian "might is right" morality ("will to power" etc) would be preferable. Why shouldn't the strong dominate the weak? Why shouldn't we, the powerful, create our own values from whole cloth?
Some people have called Nietzsche "the only honest atheist" because he recognized and talked explicitly about the moral (and even political) implications of the decline of religious belief and he saw that they were terrifying ("there is not be enough water to wash away the blood", etc.).
"New Atheists" like Sam Harris argue that we CAN maintain our moral foundations (like the sanctity of the individual, equality under the law, etc) without the foundation they arose from--that humans just naturally behave morally or something--but Holland, who was a classicist and knew all about pre-Christian morality--as well as Nietzsche himself (who wanted to go back to pre-Christian morality in spite of the terror and bloodshed he thought would ensue) disagreed. (JBP has argued that Nietzsche correctly predicted the bloodshed of the 20th century.)
Part of what changed my mind on this is that we (in Canada, in 2025) clearly seem to be losing our grasp on the values that were fundamental to making the West great. To take just one obvious example, the principle that we are all equal (founded on the idea that we all created in God's image) is clearly eroding. In Canadian law, there are now separate sentencing rules for indigenous and non-indigenous people. "Woke" activists now argue that we should be divided up by identity groups and that "some animals are more equal than others" -- an idea that goes counter to the Reverend MLK's idea that we are all children of God and therefore equally valuable in His eyes. The woke (and the secular Canadian legal system) are just reverting to a more natural idea--similar to the pre-Christian West and almost every other culture in the world ever--that clearly some people are more valuable than others. (They have to some extent inverted the hierarchy that Nietzsche preferred by elevating victimhood rather than strength but the missing principle is the same.) The idea that we should all be treated equally is the radical one. The "woke" (and white supremacists on the far right, for that matter) are simply working through to the almost inevitable conclusion one arrives at when one no longer believes we are "created equal" and reverts to the more universal human idea that some people are more worthy and some less. You can argue that Christians themselves did not always live up their own principle, but at least the principle always stood there as a rebuke, leading to, for example, the success of the Civil Rights movement in the US. You just couldn't argue against it and call yourself a good Christian. Same thing with the abolition of slavery, which was a human universal before Christians abolished it in the West.
I could give many other examples but I have to start working on my next Stack at some point! You might want to have a look at Chris's article on Sam Harris for his thoughts on why its hard for atheists to stick to principles: https://pairodocs.substack.com/p/the-unravelling-of-sam-harris
Again, thanks for your thoughtful comments....you make some very good points which would make for an interesting debate some day.
Excellent. From personal experience and as a long time church goer (Presbyterian) I would say anecdotally that yes the Canadian mainline churches have gone woke. I personally don't want 'the current thing' ideology with my scripture.
Out local Presbyterian church in Kanata was sliding into serious woke, and become irrelevant and annoying to me, and hence we moved to another local church that is technically Wesleyan, and in style is very modern (i.e. rock band, lights shows) but the message and theology is classic, they NEVER talk current social justice nonsense and the church is growing like crazy.
I don't really like the style (I prefer classic services) but compared to the Presbyterian church in Canada, this place is a port in a storm and I love it.
We have recently started attending a similar church (Baptist) and it too is growing like crazy. Lots of young families, lots of recent immigrants, modern music, modern building--but very traditional in its message.
I think this is a trend. This is our church here: https://bridgechurches.ca/
I am not even that super religious, but I do believe in God, and I want my kids raised with some reasonable religion, for all sorts of practical reasons. My wife and I are well aligned on all this.
When we moved to Kanata six years ago from Montreal, we automatically defaulted to the local Presby church, and but after awhile I just couldn't take it. The final straw for me was maybe three years ago when we attended a service and they pulled some gay black kid up on stage in the middle of the formal service to do some performing arts calisthenics routine, and I thought, WTF? This is no slight against gay black kids that want to do performing arts, but that it not what I expect nor want from a church service.
And I certainly don't want to be lectured about 'social justice' or 'climate change' and it was clear that is where the Presby church was headed. So fuck off to them.
I'll accept my rock concert church filled with kids and life and traditional messaging from the scriptures any day of the week over woke nonsense.
Chris here this time.
Always appreciate your thoughtful comments - thanks Steven.
We went to church today here in the USA in a big church with modern music and zero stained glass. It looks like an auditorium from outside and on the inside. But the pastor was awesome and his message was amazingly insightful and well delivered, talking about the excesses of DEI and the need to love everyone equally.
I grew up going to Sunday school and singing in the junior choir in a United Church with a big-ass pipe organ, back before it was destroyed by wokeness. My mom was the fill-in organist on occasion. I am very traditional about church - I like the stained glass windows, pipe organ, traditional hymns, the smell of the old building and even the hard wooden pews.
Julie comes from a Baptist family, so I started attending church with her at a big, modern one that sounds exactly like the one you are now attending. The modern music, drums, bass, electric guitar and light show did (and still do) kind of freak me out, but the sermons are traditional and speak of personal responsibility and the need to commit to a higher power. None of this "you're beautiful just the way you are so just keep doing whatever weird shit you were doing and that's fine because Jesus loves you and you're special" message of the Woke churches. Instead, pull up your sleeves and do something good in the world.
I still miss the organ, but I'll put up with drums and bass to find real spiritual guidance.
Same exact situation. I was a member of St Andrew and St Paul on Sherbooke Street in Montreal from 2000 to 2018 when we moved, it is the flagship church Presby church. Loved it, miss it.
Ironically - my childhood church (St. Andrew's in downtown Sydney NS) shut down as a church and is now the HAT - the Highland Arts Theatre. It has rainbow flags all over it and is run by a guy who was on the front page of the Cape Breton Post proclaiming that he was a "gender-non-conforming pansexual" or something very close to that. God moved out, and Satan moved in.
PS: I forgot that he was also "non-binary" and that "he" is "they"
https://www.saltwire.com/nova-scotia/cape-bretoner-finding-confidence-support-after-coming-out-as-non-binary-479585
I'm all for people being who they want to be (as long they are not forcing their views on others) but I do think our society is facing a marked increase in narcissistic personality disorder.
“What we all dread most,” said the priest in a low voice, “is a maze with no centre. That is why atheism is only a nightmare.”
- The Complete Father Brown Stories 1914
Thank you for this article on a snowy Sunday morning. The quotes from Solzhenitsyn are very illustrative of the turbulent times we live in and the vulnerability of Christianity in the West.
Vanessa - thank you for all you are doing!!
For anyone who doesn't know, Vanessa is the brains and producer behind CovidCollateral.com - which if you haven't seen you absolutely must!
I always went to church until I was in my 40's. I am very connected to my spiritual core but do not attend services. However, I always find peace visiting a church. When travelling in Europe I enjoyed going into as many churches as I could and lit a lot of candles. I think sometimes we put the priest/minister on a pedestal and when they fall off, we fall away. I hold my own spiritual beliefs and I feel very connected to God. It really upset me when the churches were torched across Canada a few years back. For many (maybe not all) those churches represented peace, happiness, and good memories.
I’m not a religious person myself, but even to me it seems clear that the decline in religious belief and church attendance can account for much of what’s going wrong in the Western world today. On an individual level, people are filling that “God-shaped hole” in their psyches with all kinds of nonsense; and on a community level, people do not have the same sorts of connections and interactions with others that churchgoing used to foster.
I grew up very Roman Catholic. For as far back as I can remember I could find fault and even evil in it as they treated my family horribly and my father was the janitor.
I searched for somewhere to belong, because although the Catholic church wasn't for me, I knew God was.
I was literally "saved", and I'm still trying to figure out why but it doesn't matter because I'm chosen.
I became Fellowship Baptist and in 2015 my husband and myself were both baptized into it.
Then covid hit!
If there is one thing that covid showed the world, is who will line up for the Mark of the Beast and who will stand tough.
In 2022 I was so happy. I could attend church again and that Christmas I was asked to volunteer to decorate the church.
Faith Baptist in Sydney is not the size of most Catholic churches, but decorating still takes a lot of work.
I couldn't have been happier. Seeing everyone again meant so much to me.
So we get the decorating completed and I was sharing with one of the ladies how happy I was to be back. Then our very own pastoral care provider (a retired RN) said she was glad to see I finally got my vaccination.
I said, "No, I did not" and I was pleased at that.
She politely (I use that word lightly) asked me not to come to Christmas service and she would send me the YouTube link so I could watch it online at home to "keep everyone else safe".
Needless to say, I haven't returned.
I'm still looking for a spiritual home but true Christianity would even allow lepers to attend.
Jesus is my savior! He sent a pastor who I never heard of to knock on my door when I was all alone in a strange town with no friends whatsoever.
I was very close to completing my plan to commit suicide when Pastor Eric Watson knocked on my door and gave me his own Bible.
Months later, I asked him why he knocked on my door. He said he saw lights on and he knew my apartment had been empty for weeks. I told him I was there for 5 weeks already and he said, "I'm here 3 times a week, there wasn't even a curtain in the window." He never noticed my lights once in all that time, and I had curtains up before I was completely moved in.
He really wasn't supposed to see me until that evening. I wouldn't have let him in.
God chooses us 🙏
No building will change that and when you wear the armor of God, you will be protected from ridicule.
I miss my "church" family and I watch the sermons on YouTube but I know I'm still not wanted in person.
Sometimes our churches need to be the little ones. They exist in our homes.
Wear the Armor of God, thank Him always for His blessings and praise His son Jesus 🙏
All things good will come after that.
Much the same at my local church. I recently started attending again but probably won't continue. The Sunday morning service now starts with a land acknowledgement and the whole focus has changed.
Thank you for this moving, beautiful essay.
The rot in Western civilization is indeed in the heart of man - and only as the West is re-evangelized, will the rot cease. "The heart is desperately wicked above all things - who can know it?" (Jeremiah)
The solution for the West's problems is not found in political systems or revolutions - but at the foot of the Cross.
Your description of the beautiful and explosive growth of the Church in Africa and Asia is a wake-up call to Western Christians - who define Christianity only in terms of the West.
Western, "mainstream" Protestantism is in crisis - but the Church is growing and thriving elsewhere (but not in its historical home).
I call the once "United Church," the United Club - since it bears no historical, traditional or spiritual definition of a Church.
Thank you Francis!. So true about the United Church. They have adopted every possible woke position, but the cherry on top that made me realize they were a lost cause is when they accepted having atheist ministers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gretta_Vosper As you say, a church without God is just a social club, and humans without God are morally rudderless, left to argue over "the public good" and quibble about issues of moral relativism to try to divine right and wrong.
I was born Catholic and will be happy to die . Does the Church have flaws? Of course, try being over 2,000 years old with billions of members across time and space and not having serious lapses. Indeed name one religion as expansive as the Catholic Church that is widely recognized as having been better at their mission.
I attended Catholic school 1-12 and received my MBA from a Catholic university via the GI Bill after my military tour. Nearly everyone in the US military is Christian btw. I am unsure if Jesus views success in terms of the number of souls that have the privilege to enter Heaven or not. Maybe He has other criteria like quality of souls? None of us know.
Anyway, my third grade nun, Sister Eileen, explained to me that a) my life on earth was temporal and short, my life after earth was in Heaven or Hell, eternal and beyond long, and c) I’d better behave accordingly. Truth can be so simple.
When Dr. Jordan Peterson began to post his philosophical/religious videos on how to live a good life, he claims that he was not targeting men, and that his massage, although attracted many women, attracted far many more men, to his surprise. This, he partially attributed to more men being present on YouTube. Jordan Peterson also claims that the woke political movement targeted young women, who, were coming of age and at a vulnerable time in their psycho/physical development. This may account for some of the lack of religious interest for some women.
In Tucker Carlson's interview with Mr. V. Putin, Putin stated that Russian society was encouraged to adopt the Christian faith, which led to a more peaceful and content country.
Julie will be digging into this in a future article. Great points!!
I wish Elon could DOGE the Catholic Church.
Unfortunately it's not only the Catholic Church, although they're probably the worst for corruption.
Any organization that has humans as middle management is corruptible. Justice may not be seen on this side of the veil, but it will come
Amen Jaye
Liberalism without a shared community oriented value system like religion might lead to self indulgent craziness in a society. Perhaps western society is self correcting.
Thanks for this. Excellent commentary. Jonathan Haidt likes to invoke Blaise Pascal's "God-shaped hole in the human heart" as one of the key reasons why America is adrift in a sea of loneliness and anxiety, and I think he's bang-on.
One can be a good person without believing in God, gods, or any deity. If someone performs good deeds solely because their favorite scripture commands it, rather than out of genuine moral conviction, it raises concerns about their motivations.
Could the resurgence of Christianity—or any dominant religion in a given region—be a reaction to societal stress and uncertainty? Consider Scandinavian countries, which consistently rank among the best places to live. They also have some of the highest levels of secularism, suggesting that prosperity and social stability may reduce the perceived need for religious belief.
Some of the best, most moral people I know are atheists or agnostics, for sure. But where does their moral conviction come from? Or are they just coasting on the fumes of a Christian morality that is so ingrained in them--because we have been a Christian culture for 2000+ years-- that they no longer are even aware of its source? Like a fish who doesn't know what water is.
What Tom Holland argues is that atheist "humanist"values are just Christian values that don't give a proper nod to their roots. To take an obvious example, almost nobody in the West would argue that killing newborn babies is okay--we all agree that this is murder and is wrong--but why do we all agree on this? In ancient Rome it was perfectly acceptable to rape your slave girls and when they had your unwanted children, to throw the babies out on a hill to die. You could do this openly and still be considered a "moral" person. It is only if you accept the Judeo-Christian idea that all human beings are created in the image of God (and therefore all lives are inherently valuable) that this becomes an abhorrent practice.
For an atheist/materialist, there is no fundamental principle that prevents us from returning to ancient Roman morality--which was essentially the point Nietzsche was making when he said that the "death of God" would result in massive bloodshed.
The Nazis abandoned Judeo-Christian morals and decided that some human lives were less valuable than others--starting with their "euthanasia" program for "lives not worthy of life" and proceeding down a long slippery slope to the Holocaust. Holland and others have argued that we give up our Judeo-Christian heritage at our peril.
Respectfully, I have to disagree. Morality is not merely a byproduct of Christian tradition—it has deep evolutionary roots. Acts of altruism and fairness have been well-documented in primates, demonstrating that these traits are innate, not merely cultural constructs. Evolution has favored moral behavior because cooperation and empathy enhance group survival. Simply put, we are wired to be moral and altruistic toward each other because it benefits our species.
Christianity did not invent morality; rather, it codified and capitalized on pre-existing human tendencies, embedding them into its religious texts. And while Christian teachings do contain messages of compassion, the Bible is also filled with violence, tribalism, and norms that are utterly unacceptable by today's Western ethical standards. To claim that modern moral convictions stem solely from Christianity overlooks both the darker aspects of religious history and the broader biological and social origins of morality.
Evolutionary biology has always struck me a form of "science of the gaps" -- always coming up with "just so" explanations applied retroactively to human behaviour. Of course all social animals exhibit rudimentary forms of morality towards members of their "in-group", but a chimp, for example, will tear any chimp who is not from their kin-group limb from limb if given the chance, and will not feel any remorse about it. The revolutionary thing about Christian morality--and arguably other great human wisdom traditions--is the overcoming of this biological imperative and extension of love toward even those who do not contribute to perpetuation of our genes and cannot possibly ever repay us.
Of course humans are not perfect, and it's easy to point out the inconsistencies and imperfections in how the tradition has been applied. The radical atheists were great at seizing on examples of religion being used an an excuse for tribal violence. But the great atrocities of the past century were carried out almost exclusively by atheists, who felt they had overcome traditional Christian values and replaced them with better ones. The communists were avowed atheists, for example, and I know you are all too familiar with their atrocities. The question facing the West--as the arch-atheist Nietzsche was all too aware--is whether we can sustain this higher form of morality (imperfectly applied as it has been) without sustaining the foundations on which it was built. Even if you think it's just a more sophisticated form of evolved self-preservation with no foundation in metaphysical reality, it is precisely the evolved system which built a successful civilization in the West. One that we are now, I fear, losing--and the results speak for themselves as we devolve into nihilism, hedonism and a culture of malignant narcissism.
Chris here with just a minor note to add to Julie's. Without an inherited and accepted moral code, each generation and individual is left to decide what is right and wrong in each situation that they find themselves in. The Sam Harrisses of the world believe that they can reason themselves into the correct moral decision case-by-case. Ethics become utilitarian and instrumental. Sam Harris falls back on the idea of choosing morality based on "maximizing human flourishing". But the problem is that one can justify exterminating the Jews through that logic. Or, more concretely and recent, as Sam himself did, one can justify locking unvaccinated people up, or can justify not caring if Hunter Biden has dead children in his basement.
I do agree with you and Julie that there are lots of great people who are atheists. But I agree with Julie that we often think we have achieved our morality through rational thought when in fact it is a Christian cultural inheritance. And atheism endangers the fundamental principles that bind us as a culture - as per my note to Adam Lehto above, I don't think it's a coincidence that we feel the disintegration of our culture at the same time that we have abandoned Christianity.
Church attendance is dwindling because it has become a woke, bloated, corrupt, greedy, dishonest institution.
Some churches have, for sure--and those are the ones that are dying, thankfully.
A very thought provoking essay on the perennial question of belief systems. I read through it but in truth became stuck on that first quote of Solzhenitzyn's: "I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened." It reminds me of something my mother told me about her early childhood as a farm girl: when an eclipse occurred people believed it was the end of the world. Now, an eclipse doesn't last very long and so those believers no doubt went about the business of living when it passed, but the point is that they created a narrative to explain what was for them unexplainable. I've been a part of a number of Christian religions and I've been atheist, agnostic but mostly just question and notice the contradictions in religions, the ways that people interpret what they hear and how they find others to share their interpretations. No religion that I'm aware of is perfectly peaceful. I would say a possible exception in the "western" world would be the Amish (my birth religion) but even there at the level of families there can certainly be "differences" and sometimes violence in families. Nobody is passive all the time. Maybe Hinduism in the "east"--don't know enough about it. In any case, we are meaning-making creatures not given to simply living in the moment, and so we borrow trouble (anxiety) and need comfort, taking it in different forms. Often we find that comfort in the form of becoming communities with like-minded souls and that tends to make us more civil, more focused, more generous, at least with others in the community, and sometimes more humble (thus attributing success to "God" rather than to one's own efforts). It can also, I think (haven't thought this through), make us susceptible to mass formation (see Mattias Desmet) and so we not only need our communities, we need an "other". Perhaps the demise of churches is that the demarcation had become less clear.
I'm rambling, clearly inspired by your essay. Thank you for today's food for thought!
A great ramble, thanks! But are we meaning "making" creatures or meaning "finding" creatures? That is the big question, isn't it?
Great question! I'm not sure they're mutually exclusive. As one of my wise grad school profs taught, we must be open to surprise. Maybe that's the meaning finding or discovery aspect. And then what we do with that surprise may well be the meaning making. If we do nothing with it or remain closed then we stop anything further. Re religion, speaking personally: I remember being surprised or maybe puzzled is more accurate about my love of hymn singing if I'm a "non-believer". The meaning I made of that was that it's about expressing what's inside, the emotional connection to my past in which such singing was special and it was a connection in real time to other people.
Full disclosure: the thought of Christianity becoming a dominant force in the West again alarms me, all the more so if the resurgence is being led by celebrity influencers (whether of the sporting or the intellectual kind).
Setting my reaction aside as much as possible, I would pose the following questions to anyone who thinks that this dominance would be a desirable state of affairs:
i) What is meant by 'Christianity'? It seems extremely unlikely that whatever is put forward as a model will be able to satisfy all Christians. Invariably, the historical pattern of endless factionalism (which was underway even before the Jesus movement identified as 'Christian') will surely continue. Why should the currently dominant forms of conservative Christianity be regarded as definitive?
ii) What is meant by 'the West'? Again we have a moving target. Is the core of the West reflected best in the 4th century? 12th century? 16th century? 18th century? One could argue that 'western values' only emerged in the aftermath of Protestant reformations, which forced Europe (very slowly and painfully) to disconnect religion from politics, economics, social services etc, at least in terms of the bureaucratic functioning of society. It is very hard to see how any 'resurgence of Christianity' could regain control over all these areas (and more), or that that would be a good thing (even from the standpoint of Christian theology).
iii) Extending the previous point: what would a 'Christian dominant' West actually look like? What would life be like for anyone not in the dominant majority? As with the War on Covid, would dissidents be marginalized, disadvantaged, targeted for punishment etc?
iv) How would a renewed 'Christian West' deal with the other major civilizational blocks of Asia and Africa, let alone the myriad indigenous traditions around the globe? Does it make sense any more to try to do geopolitics from the standpoint of religious commitment (even if Western Christians could ever agree on a platform)?
One may feel the need to lament the rise of 'relativism', 'atheism', and any number of 'isms' in Western society, but it's hard to see how a return to some kind of Christianity will really solve our modern problems.
Chris here with some more thoughts in addition to Julie's.
Church attendance and faith in God has fallen for several generations in most Western countries.
People have been saying "WTF is happening to my country! Why is it disintegrating and why does everyone hate each other!" for several generations now.
Maybe that's just coincidence. But I think not.
As per Julie's comment, it is reasonable to denounce the corruption or excesses of the church. But blaming factionalism on religion is actually the opposite of the truth. Human beings are by nature tribal (factional). The over-arching Christian ethos that has guided our society for millennia has been a counterweight to this tendency, even though it can appear to be a cause. But humans fought and killed each other long before there was a Christ.
I have literally never met a Christian who demands their version be taken as "definitive". I'm sure they exist, but they are like racists, often invoked in arguments but rarely encountered.
The greatest atrocities of the last century have been perpetrated by regimes that were expressly atheist and anti-Christian. From the Gulags, to party purges, to struggle sessions, to purging society of the Jews - all were done by people who had abandoned God or the idea of a morality beyond what they could produce with their own intellect.
Christianity - Christ. A Christian has a personal relationship with Christ. Personal being the operative word. It’s that simple. And it’s that powerful when experienced.
There are actually beliefs that define a Christian. Not all who call themselves Christian, would meet the definition.
That whole identify-as movement has been active among Christians for a long time, with similar, confusing, results
You ask some very good (and complicated) questions! A few points. Some of these are explained in parts 1 and 2 of this series, and if you are genuinely curious I'd recommend that you read them, along with Tom Holland's book "Dominion" -- which explains (in great detail) how the history of what we now call the "west" is actually the history of Christendom and how our entire society is founded on Judeo-Christian values. We take these values for granted now (the sanctity of the individual, equality under the law, etc.) and fail to realize how rare and remarkable--and possibly vulnerable-- they are. One other point: Christians are on average, significantly mentally and physically healthier than their age-matched peers, and religious belief can go a long way toward resolving the "meaning crisis" in our youth. So yes, I think it is relevant to our current times. This doesn't mean we can go backwards to a Medieval type of world where the (corrupt) church held all the political power. The future of the church, as I hinted at here, will be in recapturing our mystical connection to the divine, our ability to apprehend the interconnectedness of things beyond our grasping left brains, and a sense of connection and community that allows us to live peacefully with each other in a rapidly changing world.
(Apologies for the delayed response. I've been battling a particularly nasty cold and I wanted to respond at length. I had to break up my response to get around Substack's comment word limit)
First off, let me say how much I've appreciated the work that the two of you have done in response to the madness of 2020 and its legacy. I don't think we have much to disagree about on that score.
Turning to the themes you've highlighted in your series, Julie (and yes, I did read the first two when they were posted), let me attempt to clarify a little what I was getting at in my critique. The most basic point is that when most people hold up 'the West' and/or 'Christianity' as commendable or worthy of bringing back to prominence in some way, somewhere in their minds is some version of each of these, which in turn is probably not based on any careful historical investigation but on a strong preference (by dint of any number of personal factors) for a certain kind of Christian life experience and/or version of 'the West'. I would say that each of these assumes a mythic dimension and carries most, if not all, of that person's deepest values and hopes. I see that Holland, too, invokes the role of myth in his closing reflections.
I'm not arguing against having such guiding myths. Rather, the point is, as soon as you try to put meat on the bones and craft a vision of 'the West' and 'Christianity' to rally the troops, problems invariably arise. Who gets to decide what is important? What's 'in' and what should be left 'out'? What is, by Christian or Western standards, right and wrong? I don't think that there can be any clear cut answers to these questions since what we're dealing with (as always) is an ongoing unfolding of history. You've given a helpfully concise statement of your own solution to the difficulties that such questions pose: "The future of the church, as I hinted at here, will be in recapturing our mystical connection to the divine, our ability to apprehend the interconnectedness of things beyond our grasping left brains, and a sense of connection and community that allows us to live peacefully with each other in a rapidly changing world." It could well be that I'm just stuck in my "grasping left brain" but I can't help but think that this would be seen as rather weak gruel by just about every historical Christian community, and by most current Christian traditions around the world today. I'm willing to bet that from their perspectives, such a description misses *everything* crucial about Christian identity. Ironically (and I really don't aim to be mean or inflammatory here), it comes across as a rather liberal (dare I say 'woke'?) version of the faith. Even Holland, who, as far as I know, remains a non-believer, points to the centrality of the crucifixion in western Christian thought and practice. Is it not the case that the things that you think the Christian Church should be aiming for are already on offer in a myriad of contemporary spiritualities, some more obviously modern while others leaning more heavily on past traditions? Why the emphasis on being specifically 'Christian', then? (Perhaps Part 4 of your series will address this...)
Holland's answer to this latter question, if I've understood him correctly, is that we don't really have any choice, if we live in the West: we're Christian whether we like it or not. He makes a persuasive case for the persistence of ideas, practices and values, however transformed, that were central to European Christian society in centuries past. In a lot of ways his conclusion is unremarkable. What would be far more surprising was if Westerners (or even a majority of them) had succeeded in completely breaking with the immense weight of the Christian past and its cultural paradigms. But as he argues, even reacting to a dominant culture draws one into its web.
At what point, however, does it make sense to speak of the weaving of a new web, not necessarily in complete repudiation of the old but not in deference to it either? There's an interesting parallel here to the beginnings of the Christian movement. I hold to the fairly standard view (at least in history of religion circles) that Jesus was a figure fully *within* the Jewish world, however different his ethics or any other teaching may have been in certain respects (though I suspect the degree of difference has been greatly exaggerated by the many lenses of later Christian theology that are used to view his life). Likewise, the texts that have survived from the 1st and 2nd century show deep, ongoing resonances with Jewish culture, alongside, at least by the mid-2nd century, clear attempts to differentiate. It's a fascinating, 'wild west' of clashing interpretations of the meaning of the 'Christ event'. But imagine if the Jewish 'mainstream' at the time (and here we immediately run into difficulties since there was no single, dominant version of Jewish tradition, but I ask you to suspend your disbelief for the moment) said to all those upstart Jesus-followers: 'Quit kidding yourselves! You're really just Jews. Stop messing around with these new-fangled ideas. Return to good old-fashioned Jewish values and practices!' If this sort of conservative reaction had won the day, there would have been no separate Christian Church, and the history of the world would have no doubt turned out quite differently.
In the same way, Holland says to us, 'Quit kidding yourselves! You're really just Christians...' Well, yes, one could say that, at least in the sense that our cultural DNA is chock full of Christian elements and is likely to remain so for quite some time. But just as the mainstream Christian movement eventually decided that it needed to definitively reject the idea that it was a form of Judaism (without, in most cases, rejecting Jewish elements altogether, which would have been very difficult), so too most Westerners have rejected a strong, personal commitment to Christianity while retaining certain elements of their Christian cultural past. Again, it would be very surprising if this did *not* happen.
But it isn't just random cultural elements that do the heavy lifting for Holland (and, it seems, in your analysis). Rather, it is a set of values that is portrayed as the unique achievement of Christian Europe and uniquely worth preserving. My impression that this material could be described as 'human rights related'.This raises a few questions in my mind. First, does the importance of these values depend on their being embedded in a religious worldview? In other words, would it be pointless to, say, defend the sanctity of the individual in the absence of a robust Christian worldview of some sort? I don't see why this would be the case. The historical origins of an idea doesn't determine its value. Second, what about all of the cultural content that is, apparently, not worthy of retention? Concealed behind Holland's handful of Christian values worth preserving is a mass of other things from the Christian cultural past that both he and most contemporary Christians would be very uncomfortable in affirming. By what criteria does he sift through and select what is worth keeping and what needs to be thrown away? Third, if there's one deep value that has been placed in the spotlight for me since March of 2020 it is this: the need to think critically in the face of supposedly settled scientific and ethical issues, and, directly related to this in practice, being willing to leave room in society for voices critical of the mainstream. When I think of the history of the Christian movement (and I've studied it extensively), leaving room for dissidence doesn't exactly stand out as a prominent feature. With the possible exception of minor groups like the Quakers and (even more so) the Unitarians, submission to authority has been a central feature of all forms of the faith. Of course, Christianity is not unusual in this regard. It is probably safe to say that our modern concept of personal freedom (for all its potential problems) radically deviates from all pre-modern forms of life. I'm not suggesting that secular societies have successfully freed themselves from authoritarianism and dogma. The War on Covid put that notion to rest. What I *am* arguing is that holding up the freedom to dissent as a general value has no Christian precedent. This is the case from Paul of Tarsus onward. It makes no sense (and is seen as a threat) in the apocalyptic, revelation-central vision of history that informs traditional Christian communities, and that seems to have also informed Jesus' own outlook. The splintering of western Christendom in the 16th century involved all kinds of dissent, of course, but what consistently emerged was not, at first, any move toward respect for diversity or humility about what we can say about God (if anything), but an array of 'micro-christendoms', not to mention a rapidly proliferating set of breakaway movements, a process that continues to this day. One could argue, as Holland would, that defending the freedom to dissent from established authorities is just another example of Christian culture working out its logic, but this seems a stretch. In this case at least, a kind of freedom was envisioned that could not be attained in the context of *any* of the varieties of Christianity on offer. We probably wouldn't have people like Tom Holland writing books like *Dominion* if established churches had retained their power.
A few sundry items before I bring this ramble to an end:
You mention the argument that religious people are, on the whole, mentally and physically more healthy than non-religious people. It's been a while since I've looked at the research, but my recollection is that the effect on health comes not from religious beliefs themselves but from being plugged into a supportive community or network. Phil Zuckerman has a chapter on this in his book *The Nonreligious* (I would also recommend his *Living the Secular Life* if you'd like a readable account of what 'the other side' is up to...)
Chris, you point out that the worst atrocities of the last century have been perpetrated by atheist regimes. My response is that this is because we live in a secular age. Churches lack the political power and direct influence to commit evil on a grand scale. But humans gonna human, whatever their worldview. Power corrupts. Its an old story. If you were writing in 1650 instead of 2025, your observation might well run like this: "The greatest atrocities of the last century have been perpetrated by regimes that were expressly Christian. From the Inquisition, to church purges, to redoubled efforts to indoctrinate the masses, to purging society of the Jews - all were done by people who embrace God and the idea of a morality beyond what they can produce with their own intellect."
You also observe that you "have literally never met a Christian who demands their version be taken as "definitive". I'm sure they exist, but they are like racists, often invoked in arguments but rarely encountered." I would argue that this is a historical aberration, and the product of centuries of painful adjustments on the part of Christian communities as they've been displaced from centres of power. The 'naturalness' of the modern Christian denying that their version of the faith is definitive in any way is, I would suggest, itself evidence of the massive, civilization-wide shift toward a non-religious orientation.
I hope that all of this doesn't feel like some kind of personal attack on your position. These issues are complex and fascinating on multiple levels; my aim here was to inject an alternative perspective or two into the conversation.
And again, my appreciation for your work in the resistance movement that has taken shape in response to Covid insanity is genuine. It seems that neither religious nor secular people had much immunity to this (at least I haven't noticed any meaningful differences): another deep topic to ponder...
Thanks for your very thoughtful replies, Adam. This is exactly the kind of discussion we are hoping to generate. Obviously these are very complex topics, which smarter people than me have been pondering for centuries. A few years ago, I would have made many of the same arguments you are making now. I've changed my mind after listening to (and reading) people like Jonathon Pageau, Paul Kingsnorth, Iain McGilchrist and Andrew Klavan (among others) and also having certain personal experiences that I don't discuss publicly but which would fall into the category of "supernatural."
I'll address just a couple of the points you brought up and just let the rest stand--as an excellent counterpoint to my essay that people can read and make up their own minds.
First, a relatively easy one: the mental and physical health of religious people versus non-religious: There have been a few studies that attempted to tease out why religious people are healthier and it appears that it is not just the effect of social connection. In one study, for example, older adults who joined other types of social activities such as sports groups, volunteer work, etc., did not get the same mental health benefits as those that joined a church. And physically, for a variety of reasons, religious people actually live, on average, 4 years longer. So if you have to decide between exercising and joining a church, join the church!
As for your question: "My impression that this material could be described as 'human rights related'.This raises a few questions in my mind. First, does the importance of these values depend on their being embedded in a religious worldview? In other words, would it be pointless to, say, defend the sanctity of the individual in the absence of a robust Christian worldview of some sort?"
This, I think is THE question--and the key one that I've changed my mind on over the last few years. It's also what Nietzsche was on about--and he seems to have concluded that, once "God is dead," the moral values that arose out of our Judeo-Christian foundation could not hold. Nor did he, the arch-atheist want them to. He felt that a return to pre-Christian "might is right" morality ("will to power" etc) would be preferable. Why shouldn't the strong dominate the weak? Why shouldn't we, the powerful, create our own values from whole cloth?
Some people have called Nietzsche "the only honest atheist" because he recognized and talked explicitly about the moral (and even political) implications of the decline of religious belief and he saw that they were terrifying ("there is not be enough water to wash away the blood", etc.).
"New Atheists" like Sam Harris argue that we CAN maintain our moral foundations (like the sanctity of the individual, equality under the law, etc) without the foundation they arose from--that humans just naturally behave morally or something--but Holland, who was a classicist and knew all about pre-Christian morality--as well as Nietzsche himself (who wanted to go back to pre-Christian morality in spite of the terror and bloodshed he thought would ensue) disagreed. (JBP has argued that Nietzsche correctly predicted the bloodshed of the 20th century.)
Part of what changed my mind on this is that we (in Canada, in 2025) clearly seem to be losing our grasp on the values that were fundamental to making the West great. To take just one obvious example, the principle that we are all equal (founded on the idea that we all created in God's image) is clearly eroding. In Canadian law, there are now separate sentencing rules for indigenous and non-indigenous people. "Woke" activists now argue that we should be divided up by identity groups and that "some animals are more equal than others" -- an idea that goes counter to the Reverend MLK's idea that we are all children of God and therefore equally valuable in His eyes. The woke (and the secular Canadian legal system) are just reverting to a more natural idea--similar to the pre-Christian West and almost every other culture in the world ever--that clearly some people are more valuable than others. (They have to some extent inverted the hierarchy that Nietzsche preferred by elevating victimhood rather than strength but the missing principle is the same.) The idea that we should all be treated equally is the radical one. The "woke" (and white supremacists on the far right, for that matter) are simply working through to the almost inevitable conclusion one arrives at when one no longer believes we are "created equal" and reverts to the more universal human idea that some people are more worthy and some less. You can argue that Christians themselves did not always live up their own principle, but at least the principle always stood there as a rebuke, leading to, for example, the success of the Civil Rights movement in the US. You just couldn't argue against it and call yourself a good Christian. Same thing with the abolition of slavery, which was a human universal before Christians abolished it in the West.
I could give many other examples but I have to start working on my next Stack at some point! You might want to have a look at Chris's article on Sam Harris for his thoughts on why its hard for atheists to stick to principles: https://pairodocs.substack.com/p/the-unravelling-of-sam-harris
Again, thanks for your thoughtful comments....you make some very good points which would make for an interesting debate some day.
--Julie