The Death of Christianity Foreseen

A dying Pentecostal church in Mexico

My left-listing buddy Xerxes is convinced, as always, that Christianity is in decline, and “the agnostics are winning.” He presumably does not say this with any joy, being himself intimately associated with the United Church, the left aorta of Canada’s Protestant mainstream.

Rather, he seems to be consoling himself with the thought that everyone is going down with all hands, not just his own church. So it is not as though they might be doing anything wrong.

But I think saying “the agnostics are winning” is deeply misleading. Worldwide, atheism and “agnosticism” is on the decline. In North America, the real growth is in “spiritual but not religious.” I expect the reader has heard this phrase often, as I have.

The only way to make that oxymoron coherent, it seems to me, is to read it as “religious in principle but not affiliated.” 

Xerxes notes that megachurches still grow exponentially, but then they commonly decline when a particular pastor dies. This seems to illustrate the principle: people want religion, but no longer have brand loyalty.

The first obvious reason why this is so is that people increasingly think about religion like consumers. Partly, they have a greater range of choices, living more and more in larger urban centres. Partly, they have fewer existing family and social ties making them feel committed to a particular ecclesiastical community.

Another reason, it seems to me, although Xerxes is eager to deny it, is that mainstream denominations and clergy have lost their own faith, and so have little on offer. When you hear all the same things at church as you hear on TV or at the mall, why go to church?

Another reason, I suspect, is that, with growing prosperity and so growing sense of privilege, many people are less inclined to submit to a moral code of any kind. They want a purely “feel-good” religion that does not require anything of them. Moving from church to church tends to preserve that option—of not being bound by anything.

I see this in the growing interest in Eastern religions, or “New Age.” You just pick and choose what sounds pleasant, and leave whenever it gets hard.

The lower rate of Sunday attendance, I think, also involves a separate issue. There are just a lot more options for what to do with your free time today than there once were. Back in the day, listening to a good sermon was the high point of a Toronto weekend, and the best were summarized in the Monday papers. Year by year, more options have become available, while the quality of church services has barely changed in any way—with, at times, the exception of this or that megachurch. Of course attendance will have gone down. We have seen a similar decline in attendance at social clubs of all kinds, voluntary associations, bowling alleys, movie theatres. You name it. When I was a kid, the most fun was to go out and play scrub baseball until the sun went down. I can’t get my own kids to put down their tablets long enough.

But Xerxes is also wrong to maintain that all Protestant churches are declining.

“And don’t protest that congregations in Texas or Arizona still have packed pews and booming Sunday schools. They’re also declining. They just lag 40 years behind the Canadian experience, 70 years behind the U.K. and Europe.”

The basic assumption here is flawed: that the US and Canada are following a European trend, but lagging far behind. Since the Second World War, the US has been culturally dominant: while there are smaller waves that have moved in the opposite direction, most things start in California. This seems like much too big a wave to be moving in the opposite direction. And it seems wildly improbable for any cultural wave, in these days, to lag as much as seventy years in moving from continent to continent.

Rather, I think Europe and North America diverge here because Europe was profoundly dispirited by the two World Wars, and lost their cultural confidence in a way the US and Canada, far less affected, did not. Hence the more aggressive abandonment of the old cultural verities there—the entire continent seems to have been trying to commit suicide since 1918.

But even with the overall decline of Christianity in Europe, worldwide, the growth of Christianity is explosive. Pentecostalism, in particular, is growing, and even in North America, both Pentecostalism and officially “nondenominational” congregations are growing. It is only the Protestant mainstream that is in decline.