Fall of the West

No culture lives forever; history shows us the rise and fall of cultures and empires and civilizations. We need not expect that our own culture will escape its own fall, in its turn. There are abundant signs now that the Western democracies are in decline. We are looking like the Roman Empire toward its end. Rome was plagued by the problems of an entitlement culture (the dole), arbitrary interference of government in commerce, unchecked influxes of barbarians, and a decline in patriotism and honor. The Christians, at the time of the Didache, and likely earlier, and certainly later, were unpopular for opposing infanticide, abortion and sodomy, and for saying that the secular state (the emperor) was not a fit object of worship.

Well then, it may be that our society shall shortly go down the same drain. What does that mean for the divided churches in the West? I tend to see it as a promising development for Christian unity, though a disaster in most other ways. Perhaps troubles will draw us together. Or perhaps, and I see this as more likely, the fall of the West will destroy the church world as we know it, and require us to rebuild our congregations and our relationships among congregations. Perhaps we will be given the wisdom to do it right.

Can, for example, Roman Catholicism exist apart from the culture in which it has played such an interwoven role? Can Presbyterianism endure the demolishing of the work ethic culture that spawned it? Culturally enmeshed religions fare ill when cultures fall. You likely know no one who sacrifices goats to the goddess Venus.

A likely scenario is that an intrusive, statist and overreaching social system will rise; we see clues of it already. The churches will find their money inflated away, their property and investments seized or nationalized. The vast organizations of Christendom will evaporate and believers will be left with the first century option of meeting from house to house.

Christianity's detractors are already celebrating the "post-Christian society," but I hope their joy is premature. During the new dark ages that are before us, Christians will have to reinvent the church. We may hope that they will look to what is good in church history while discerning and rejecting the bad.  We may hope that the church reborn will be one, holy, apostolic and this time, really universal.