The Sea of Faith

An extract from Matthew Arnold's poem "Dover Beach" published in 1867

A friend of mine sent me this link to an article entitled "Christianity is Collapsing" by an atheist who is triumphant about the decline of Christianity in America as measured by statistics. These statistics are no surprise to me, of course, and any case we have a long term decline in the UK although it would be wrong to call it a "collapse" - that's hopeful rhetoric among some entrenched anti-Christians. Of particular interest to me is just how much some of the recent eccentric expressions of Christianity  are bound up with this decline (Viz: extreme right-wing fundamentalism, young earthism, geocentrism, flat earthism, Christian conspiracy theorism,  fideism, gnosticism, Covid denial, anti vaxxers, anti-climate change lobby, the Trump followers etc). Anyway here was my reply.

Thanks for the link to the article! V. V. interesting to read!

The overall stats are likely correct as it concurs with other stats I've heard about. Of course a vested interested atheist is going to use emotive terms like "collapse" to describe this trend, terms which really describe his hopes rather than what actually may come to pass in due course. These social trends tend to be chaotically cyclic as the relevant variables are coupled into non-linear feedback loops.

What is referred to as "Christianity" actually resolves into at least three groups; fundamentalist, non-fundamentalist evangelicals and liberal (Further sub divisions are possible, no doubt!*). Along with atheists we then have population flows between these groups plus kids growing up and identifying with one or the other group and people dying from all groups. What the net result and the true story is behind it all that would require a lot of stats studies to find out. 

If there is some kind of polarising trend going on with a net loss from a broad church of Christian persuasions then as often happens in a period of crisis of confidence fundamentalism tends to consolidate itself and become more extreme & self assertive by way of reaction. Fundamentalists gain from anti-establishment & counter-cultural feelings and the disaffection which goes together with a puzzling social milieu. For example there has been a recent growth in flat earth Christian fundamentalism; they might well portray that small increase as a recovery and restoration of the true faith, congratulate themselves and see it as the start of a success story! They will also likely blame Christians who don't follow their particular brand of fundamentalism for the decline in Christianity (as does Ken Ham for example). 

But just how can we measure the number of people these fundamentalist clowns, who see themselves as the epitome of true faith, are alienating, putting off and becoming hostile toward Christianity? They certainly put me off and I'm a Christian, so I guess they must also alienate a lot of people who might otherwise give at least a little space to the faith. There are some fundamentalist to atheist conversion testimonies out there telling us that young earthism and its scientific failure was their reason for converting to atheism. 

America (on which the article in based) seems to be a very passionately polarising sort of country, especially at the moment; the extreme right, including the Christian right, are thoroughly disaffected from the establishment, culturally & politically. The consolidation of a cranky fundamentalism which is a disparate mix of young earthism, flat earthism, conspiracy theorism and all sorts of eccentricities is to my mind likely to be one of the factors behind the general cultural run-down of the faith and its alienation from the wider populace. But coupled feedback relationships abound in society and fundies of all brands will be reacting to the extremes of the opposite side; extreme and unreasonable anti-theists, Marxists & postmodernists also have a culpability here. The only good news is that such cybernetic couplings usually involve cycles. So wait for a swing back! Let's remember, for example, that atheism welcomes one to a potentially empty, nihilist, meaningless, purposeless, postmodern and random world! There will be a reaction to that!

Footnote

* I suppose you'd have to include Catholics in this mix among many others (e.g. Mormons)