Hopelessness or Hope?
For so many, normal life, or whatever once passed for it, now appears irretrievably lost.
To be fair, extreme dislocations of this kind are nothing new to human history. But there is something new within our peculiarly combustible cocktail of catastrophes.
We see it in the increasingly violent rhetoric and action taking over once-stable democracies, the frustration and desperation that grips even the most peaceful and hopeful social movements, and the chronic despair of a young generation who has given up on the idea that society will ever work for them.
There is, in all these things, a sense of hopelessness. It pervades all levels of society, from the highest institutions to the simplest human interactions. Hopelessness, partially a result and partially a prolonging cause of our current social malaise has infected everything.
While the challenges we face will not be met without painful adjustment and sacrifice — if we manage to meet them at all — this invasive hopelessness makes summoning the will to act into a Herculean feat. It is clear, then, that this epidemic of hopelessness must be regarded as a serious crisis and met face-to-face. And the only thing that can meet the crisis and still the rising tide of hopelessness is a renewed sense of hope.
Faith in decline
But where is that hope to be found? Traditionally, the Western world has found its hope in Christianity, the Christian message, and the Christian faith. That is hardly the case anymore. Rather, as the world grows increasingly secular and believers disappear from the pews, Christianity finds itself in a crisis of its own.
Church stalwarts may crow about how modern society’s thoroughgoing embrace of secularity has failed to pay dividends, but they have little to celebrate. The failures and frictions of a secular world have not driven people back into the welcoming arms of the Church.
Indeed, the reverse is true. A 2018 survey from the Pew Research Center found Christianity sharply in decline throughout Western Europe, with Christian affiliation hovering just over fifty per cent in many countries and below it in a few others. Belief in God is even worse; the same survey shows that small majorities in the United Kingdom and France (58 per cent and 56 per cent, respectively) express a belief in God, while only a little more than a third (36 per cent) of Swedes do.
Meanwhile, the 2021 Australian census confirms that Christianity is no longer the country’s majority religion, and an NCLS Research survey from 2018 found belief in some form of deity among Australians to be 56 per cent, equal to what Pew had found in France.
Even the United States, long the bastion of popular piety in the developed, democratic world, is also starting to exhibit these trends. While a Gallup poll released in June 2022 reveals that 81 per cent of Americans still believe in God, this is an 11-point drop from the 92 per cent of Americans who considered themselves believers a little more than a decade ago. Another report from December 2021 notes that Christian affiliation has reached a low point of 69 per cent (down from 78 per cent in 2011) while church membership has now sunk below the majority level, standing at 47 per cent.
In short, across the group of relatively stable and prosperous democracies traditionally termed “the West”, the Christian faith — and even faith in general — is in danger of becoming nothing more than a fringe belief.
The dangers of withdrawal
The general consensus is that Christianity is on the ropes, at least in the secular and developed “Western” world. What is to be done about this? This is an obvious and sensible question for Christians concerned about their faith's future. For many, the answer has been renewed evangelisation.
Another approach has been to turn the focus to the developing world, to places like Africa and China, where Christianity is growing, and the ground for evangelisation is still fertile. But no amount of new evangelisation seems to stem the tide of unbelief in the developed nations.
And while the new frontiers of Christianity in the “global South” and elsewhere are likely to become the lifeblood of the faith in the years to come, most Christians would prefer it if this did not require a full-scale retreat from those areas where Christianity has traditionally thrived.
Go and Hide - abandon the world?
Given the current state of evangelisation efforts, many Christians have turned to less optimistic answers about the faith’s future. Some have decided to stage a retreat of their own. Proposals such as the “Benedict Option”, which would see Christians stepping out of mainstream society to varying degrees, and setting up their own insular communities of faith, are now seriously discussed.
More troublingly, the religious right — particularly but not exclusively in the United States — seems increasingly comfortable with using anti-democratic methods to impose a narrow interpretation of Christianity on an unwilling nation. Taken to its greatest extreme, this trend leads to the Christian nationalism espoused by far-right extremists and would-be autocrats. So it is no surprise that such individuals have sometimes received winking support from official Christian institutions.
Turn inward?
The idea of an inward turn has a valued place in Christianity. It is, among other things, the source of the phenomenon of monasticism which has done so much to shape the faith. But however much its proponents might protest otherwise, the modern call for separate Christian communities untouched by the “corrupt” culture of society more often reveals a desire to escape that culture and the secular world it represents.
If it were fully carried out, such a withdrawal would benefit neither the Church nor the world. It seems to go against Christ’s injunction to “Go therefore to all nations and make them my disciples” (Matthew 28:19) and hardly accords with the heroic examples of the many Christians throughout history who have risked and received martyrdom to preach the gospel of Christ in societies far more hostile than our own.
More pragmatically, withdrawal would amount to admitting defeat, an avowal that Christianity cannot meet the needs of the modern world or that it only holds appeal to a limited subset of the population. Such an avowal would, at best, make Christianity seem esoteric and, at worst, aware of its own obsolescence.
Matthew S. Dentice
