The Long Slow March Out of Organized Christianity

 I've been reading a book about the last days of the Roman Empire. The author and everyone else who writes about it admits we cannot know for certain every detail about what happened. There are only sketchy engravings, partial surviving documents and other bits of information. The broad outline, however, fits so many other historic events it is easy to see what must have happened. Ironic, too, is how similar that time is to the present when we watch the change from one dominant religion to something else.

Recently a professional writer summarized his life long experience of watching the influence of Christianity. It has gone from stores closed on Sundays and outlawing publications with nudes to increasingly rapid drops on religious affiliation and growth of no-religion adults. He reviewed the many explanations for the decline, we have discussed all of them here, but he summarized what polling has shown. People today are less likely to believe fantasies of resurrections, miracles, prophesies, life after death and sins of ancients who wrote the Bible. Add to those virgin birth and all the rest. Believing these things has moved out of reach. 

Added to that intractable problem is Christians pick out various groups and demonize them. The Romans did the same. The Nazis did it. It is a common weakness that we humans want to look down on some group and get pleasure from doing it. It's also human nature to observe this done by others and not approve. Women are not treated as equals in most of the faith. Today, a large swath of the U. S. and Europe does not approve of the way Christians demonize gay people. Perhaps some Christians realize this and have quickly moved on to demonize trans people. They will not gain support by jumping off the gay-demonizing bandwagon and jumping on another. 

Readers have seen that every year the size of the Christian faith in the western world declines. It is claimed some ground is being made up on other continents but that is problematic. I've yet to see a conference where the topic was, "It's not working. What should we do?" There are many gatherings which focus on sin and how preachers should be railing out against it. That's what is not working.

Smaller denominations and more unaffiliated churches are the future until someone comes up with and idea of how to change the downward path. The faith has alternatives to choose from. It could stop making claims about magical events and stop demonizing other groups. So far, the wrong choices have always been the ones chosen.