Is This the 500 Year Cycle in Christianity


The current things going on in Christianity, the drop in numbers and the Trump upheaval, have many people perplexed as to what is going on and where things are going. A few years ago a woman wrote a book claiming Christianity ran in 500 year cycles. Each cycle caused a "Period of Upheaval." At around 500 years Rome went Christian. About 500 years later the Roman and Orthodox split. Then 500 more years it was Martin Luther. 

It is now 500 years since Luther. The faith is experiencing plummeting numbers. The link author believes, as I have said many times here, the ultimate winner will be a liberal version of Christianity. This is because people have always needed a "sin" to resolve. The link author thinks the "sins" following this 500 year upheaval will be environmentalism, racism and income distribution. Believers will want forgiveness or resolution of these sins. This will be for focus of the next wave of Christianity. The "sins" the faith is obsessed with in 2021, homosexuality, trans and abortion, will be easily sluffed off as were working on Sunday, divorce, alcohol and dancing.  

The hints of what will follow this upheaval have been biting at the heels of the faith for 10 or 20 years. It is a brand of the faith based, not on denominations, but on the individual's direct access to the divine. The growth of Pentecostalism, where the individual has his own unique relationship with God, caught much of the faith by surprise. Today we see the internet as another form of Pentecostalism with each person building her own favorite library of reading about the spiritual life. 

All of this is fun to speculate about. Speaking for myself, I think it is a stretch to predict with confidence that because past upheavals have built new Christian brands that thrived we can predict a new thriving product will emerge from this one. Christianity may, or may not, survive. If it doesn't, human beings will live on as they did for 200,000 years before Christianity.


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