The decline and collapse of Christianity in the West (excepting the U.S.) has many complex and inter-related factors which go back centuries. All these have been well documented and researched, but they don’t mean Christianity itself on a global scale is doing badly. In fact, Christian missionary activity has been remarkably successful in the developing world, and that is where most of the faith now resides; in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, and this trend will continue. Worldwide Christianity is in fairly good shape and is in my view, despite some challenges, adapting itself well to the current situation.
The decline of Christianity in the West can probably be attributed to three main developments; The Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment.
The Reformation broke the unity of Western Christendom under one Church and one ruler of the Church, the Pope. Before that, the Church was very effective in maintaining control over virtually all facets of religious life and also in maintaining a lot of influence and control over secular life and affairs (though not always perfectly). With the Reformation though, the authority of the Church as a single institution and ruled and controlled by a heirarchical authority was critically undermined. The problem was not so much that the Reformation destroyed the Catholic Church, but rather the Protestant emphasis on individual freedom and liberty in spiritual matters let the door open to the option of non-belief, and indeed, that is what eventually happened.
The Scientific Revolution, starting with Galileo and Newton, though growing out of medieval science, helped to fundamentally dismantle the medieval cosmos where the Earth was at the centre of a rather small universe which God had especially created for mankind to rule over. The progress of science undermined and eventually replaced both theology and philosophy as the key ways of understanding the sensible universe, and neither Aristotle’s philosophy or natural science nor Plato or any other philosophy or metaphysics could offer a coherent and complete picture of the universe. Theology also did not respond well to science, and generally the approach after Galileo was a mixture of defensiveness and retreat, mixed sometimes with cautious engagement and dialogue. Since the 19th century religious fundamentalism has aggressively tried to hit back and reclaim lost territory to science, though with little success outside the U.S. Christian theology is still struggling to keep up with scientific advances in areas from physics to biology to medicine, not always successfully.
The Enlightenment, representing the culmination of a great deal of work by many scholars, humanists and philosophers to recover and restore the Greco-Roman culture and its ideals and appropriate them for the situation of their time, in the end made many question whether God and Christianity were really necessary to answer age-old questions such as what is virtue, why does the universe exist, what is the state, and so on. David Hume and Immauel Kant can be regarded as the epitome of Enlightenment thought and Philosophy, as both ultimately and decisively divorced philosophy and theology from each other, and tried to answer key questions without appealing in any way to revelation, only to experience and reason.
All three developments, working together, helped free the individual from obeying and following authority and tradition to answer questions, and instead this was replaced with the ideal of the individual as an autonomous being, living in a society where he or she was free to find their own happiness, prosperity and meaning independently of being forced to obey a set of truths or ideas handed down without question from generation to generation. This was only made possible though by several key changes in the structure of society, including the rise of the Middle Class and the Industrial Revolution.
The result has been religion has become an individual and private choice, dictated a lot by ‘market’ forces whereby religious ideas and religions compete in each other in a free democracy against other ideas, secular and profane, and the individual is at liberty to choose and reject as they see fit, so long as they don’t commit unacceptable acts of disobedience to the state and its legitimate authority, or infringe on the liberties of others. As a result, at least in the West, Christianity and other organised religions have had to radically re-think and re-structure themselves to adapt to a complex, postmodern, and pluralistic situation where many different beliefs, ideals, and social practices, often contradictory and contrary to one another, co-exist.
What this means for the future is an open question, and will require I think a faster and more adaptive and evolutionary approach, rather than the conservative and static ones such as fundamentalism or rigid authoritarianism.
