Tuesday, October 16, 2018

Religion the Foundation Stone?

Originally I planned two blog posts here, but as my brain kicked into gear, I realized these are part of the same thought. I was going to write about an hypothesis that Christianity is the foundation stone of Western civilization. I have heard this discussed and the idea interests me but I haven't thought deeply about it, or looked for evidence pro and con. I was going to write a second post about the closure of a single church near my home. The essence of this second post was to be the decline of Christianity in the West. Further thought on this made me toss around the idea that we are seeing a change in Christianity rather than a decline. I decided that these thoughts are connected.

Is the decline of Christianity in the West merely part of the ages old dance of religion within society? Will the product of this dance, once the music stops, be an entirely different civilization? This lead to the further thought, was there ever a single 'Western' civilization?  And if so, when and how did it begin? Historians have delighted in dividing history into eras. Apparently we are entering or are already in 'post-modernity'. Modernity is held to have got going in the 15th century, so is about 500 years old (give or take a century or so). Prior to that was the mediaeval period and prior to that the 'ancient' world, or 'classical' civilization. All these periods belong to what is called Western civilization. This overarching theme (if I may call it that) is accorded a start with ancient Greece and the ideas of philosophers there and a form of early democracy, especially as found in the city state of Athens. Rome conquered the Mediterranean world and what is now western Europe (from which comes the label 'Western') and in its organized commercial and legal world spread these Greek ideas and thus was the midwife of 'Western civilization'. Western ideas died for a time when the Roman empire collapsed in western Europe and the western Mediterranean but revived in another sub-period labelled 'The Renaissance', the rebirth. The technology of movable type added a volatile fuel to this movement, et voilĂ  Western Civ.

Where does religion lie in all this?  Both the ancient Greeks and Romans were pagans of similar hue. The Greek gods and goddesses were more petty and human than the more powerful Roman versions, perhaps reflecting the differences in political power of the two cultures. Religion both reflected and supported the overall culture. But Christianity, a very different idea about the nature of existence was born and nurtured, albeit often violently in the Roman world. This is a mystery despite the number of studies done on this topic. History is mostly a story of gradual, glacial change, but every so often an event occurs that is seismic rather than organic. Christianity survived its first three centuries as an outsider faith where it was periodically and violently attacked by both state and populace. Yet it emerged as the official religion of the Roman Empire.  Nietzsche once famously pronounced the death of God. A fourth or even fifth century Nietzsche would have proclaimed the death of gods as Christianity gradually supplanted the old gods even among the general populace.

I don't really know what Nietzsche meant and I am not alone in that,  but the image below of pews being sold off in a Presbyterian church in Canada in 2018 gives a hard face to the surface meaning of his comment. This congregation was formed in 1905 and they built a very plain, serviceable building for their worship and for the community that is at the core of all Christian groupings. Dare I say, community is at the core of most religions, though not all. Certainly it is for the 'peoples of the Book' (to borrow from Islam): Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Even those religions where community is not emphasized by their religious professionals, the ordinary followers organize themselves into small communities: the Buddhists, Taoists, neopagans and so on. Christianity too has a foundation stone called the equality of the individual person before God, regardless of social status.  Yet people are social animals and we need fellowship. As this blog post is about Western Civilization and thus Christianity, I will reel my thoughts into focus here. As I started this paragraph, this church community began in 1905. In 1921, they expanded and renovated their building, then in 1967 built a new place beside the old. It is the new  you see being disassembled in the photo below.

I mentioned that history usually changes organically but sometimes with an earthquake. This congregation had the money and the optimism to build an entirely new church in 1967. At that time in Canada, the generation who had fought the second world war were at the apex of their earning. The economy was booming with low unemployment and low inflation. Wages were going up at a greater rate than costs. This congregation used their old building as a Sunday School and for meetings and communal activities such as pot luck dinners and scouts and guides. This was also the era of the baby boom. Churches were filled with adults and even more so with their children.  Families often had three, four, five or more children. Yet just over fifty years later, there were only a few adults remaining and even fewer children. One generation is all it took for Christianity to collapse into insignificance in Canada. This congregation has moved in with another and sold their buildings to a developer. For three hundred years Christianity grew slowly from a breakaway sect of Jews in the ancient world, to becoming the officially sanctioned religion of the entire Western world. Over the next five to six hundred years it came to encompass the tribal societies that had displaced the Roman empire in the west. There it consolidated for another five hundred years. Then for four hundred years Christianity expanded with European commerce and military might based on technology to all parts of the world.

In fifty years, this all dissolved. And here is a picture of a small part of that dissolution.

2 comments:

  1. The speed of the collapse is incredible beyond any reasonable doubt. As a general statement, people of the west simply don't attend church anymore. No longer part of their lives in any meaningful sense. The transition I suppose was morphing from regular attendee's to some sort of Xmas/Easter Christians, and then not even that. It's a grim outlook with little chance of any sort of 'revival' in the near to mid term future. Falling away from faith in the latter days as predicted?

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  2. I see it directly in the classes I teach. These are religious history courses and the vast majority of students taking these are not hostile to religion, just uninterested except as an interesting issue from the past. I do get one or two atheists and probably 10-20% religious, mostly Christian but a sprinkling of Sikhs, Muslims, Jews, and Hindus.

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