Plenty of folks view the history of Abrahamic religion like this:
Before Christ, shepherds unthinkingly followed the Old Testament.
After Christ, peasants unthinkingly followed the Old and New Testaments.
In our modern age of science, reason and rationality, religion is in decline. It’ll stay in decline until it fades away, becoming little more than a historical oddity.
(Yeah, because the 1970s – when most families went to church on the regular – were so ancient, primitive and pre-science…)
I’ll admit I used to believe this.
But it’s wrong. The first clue is that history doesn’t move in simple arcs. Every trends sets up its own counter-trends. That doesn’t keep everything perfectly in balance – that, too, is too simplistic – but it undermines steady progressions.
What, you think this is the first era of human history to have reason? To have freedom? Prosperity? Please. Civilisations have risen to great heights before. Those heights attract envious foes from without and decadent corruption from within. Those and a few other trends eat those civilisations alive.
The historical truth is that cycles are more common than arcs. It’s even right there in the Old Testament. The ancient Israelites didn’t uniformly believe in it. It feels as though half its chapters talk about the endless multi-generational loop the Israelites found themselves in:
They believe in God.
Their righteous beliefs and habits make them prosper.
Their prosperity creates arrogance.
They turn from God.
Everything starts going badly for them.
They repent and turn back to God.
Run that cycle a few times and that’s the Old Testament for you. It kept going until Jesus came down to Earth and replaced the old, fragile cycles with new, better, more resilient ones.
Anyone who thinks the West is historically exceptional enough to escape this cycle has missed the point. We’re in this right now. The West is disbelieving God and things are starting to fall apart. This isn’t new. This ancient atheism is much, much older than Christ. It was part of why he had to manifest in human form – no Kingdom of Israel could last forever, but Christ’s kingdom could.
It’s nothing that hasn’t happened before, only this time we have smartphones.
And it’s sad. All those folks who say religion isn’t relevant anymore are about to learn how wrong they are. Christianity will rise again. Whether we embrace it by choice or turn to it during disasters of our own design is yet to be seen.
That’s all rather gloomy.
The good news is that smartphones aren’t irrelevant. We’re better educated, better informed and better able to organise than earlier iterations of the cycle.
So is the Enemy, of course.
But we can take action to shift this cycle onto a happier path. We’ve seen just how fragile society is without Christian ideas bolstering it. A few generations without it and everything is eroding.
That makes the solution clear.
Be the best Christian you can be.
Read your Bible, avoid sin, pray, study and go to church.
And read, reread and apply this: