The West cannot survive without a re-energised belief in Christianity
Most British people seem to take it on faith that to have faith is stupid.
By Greg Sheridan, Spectator:
There is no faster way to get yourself classed as dim than by admitting that you hold religious belief, especially Christian belief. Anti-Catholicism used to be the anti-Semitism of intellectuals; now Catholics get no special attention. All believing Christians are regarded as stupid, eccentric or malevolent.
Some conservatives will make the case for the social usefulness of Christian values. The conservative asks: if society prospered with these traditions and customs, is it really wise to throw them away without a moment’s hesitation?
That is just what the West is doing, especially the Anglophone West. Britain, Australia and even the God-fearing United States are becoming atheist societies. Britain is more atheist than Australia, which is more atheist than the US, but the trend of radically declining belief is undeniable in all three.
This is historically new…Two explanations for how we got here predominate — the long story and the short. The long traces an evolution over centuries of disillusionment with faith, from the renewed emphasis on humanity in the Renaissance through philosophical challenges to gospel miracles, the discrediting wars of religion, the disassociation of faith and reason in the Enlightenment and on to our own times of mass affluence and church child abuse scandals.
The other explanation is more straightforward. The West was still widely religious, and religiously observant, until the end of the 1950s. The sexual revolution, the extreme disorientation brought about by the rapid spread of information technology, everything from television to ubiquitous pornography, through to the new conventions of simultaneous abuse and narcissism on social media, mean Christian belief has collapsed in a couple of generations.
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