As a consequence of fighting back against the increasing number of worldviews, many writers assert that Christianity has been stripped of its title as the West’s heavyweight cultural influence. This worldview smorgasbord has led others to hail the arrival of the “Post-Christian West,” with Christian writers lamenting this transition as a harbinger of doom for both the West and the Church.
As the West experiences a proliferation of worldviews and cultural influences, there is growing consternation about the health and longevity of the Church. While this may seem like a cause for dismay, the history of the Church – especially in the pivotal Second Century – gives us encouragement going forward.
Since Charlemagne, Christianity (generally speaking) had been the preeminent intellectual and cultural force in Europe and North America (doubters are encouraged to examine early and medieval Christianity’s singular influence on western hospitals and health care). Yet from the outset, Christianity had to contend with other theistic systems (Judaism and Islam), as well as atheistic worldviews (Scientific Naturalism), and eventually hybrid systems (modern religious Liberalism).
With the coming of globalism, population shifts, and the emphasis on diversity, we see a myriad of eastern religions and revived pagan systems (just check the crowds at Stonehenge on the Summer Solstice!) joined by the most recent heavyweight contender, Post-Modernism, swarming into the western intellectual arena, all vying for supremacy.
As a consequence of fighting back against the increasing number of worldviews, many writers assert that Christianity has been stripped of its title as the West’s heavyweight cultural influence. This worldview smorgasbord has led others to hail the arrival of the “Post-Christian West,” with Christian writers lamenting this transition as a harbinger of doom for both the West and the Church.
Given all of this, how worried should Christians be about the Church in a Post-Christian environment that is dissolutely spending down its Reformation cultural capital and shoving Christianity over the cultural cliff? Certainly western Christians should be concerned, but we need not be despondent. True, transition periods are worrisome because of the outcome’s uncertainty. But Christians can have hope, because the Church’s situation in today’s pluralistic milieu is in many ways similar to the Early Church’s cultural context, and the historical record of Christianity in the Second Century shows that it did survive such cultural diversity and hostility.
