The Decline Of Established Christianity In The Western World

While Church attendance in the West is often cited as being in decline, it is argued that this applies primarily to the older established forms of Christianity. Other expressions of the faith are, in fact, stable or even growing. This volume provides multidisciplinary interpretations of and responses to one of the most complicated and controversial issues regarding the global transformation of Christianity today: the decline of "established Christianity" in the Western world. It also addresses the future of Christianity in the West after the decline. Drawing upon historical research, sociology, religious studies, philosophy and theology, an international panel of contributors provide new theoretical frameworks for understanding this decline and offer creative suggestions for responding to it. "Established Christianity" is conceptualized as historically, culturally, socially and politically embedded religion (with or without official established status). This is a dynamic volume that gives fresh perspective on one of the great social changes taking place in the West today. As such, it will be of great interest to scholars of religious sociology, history and anthropology, as well as theologians.

Christendom lasted for over a thousand years in Western Europe, and we are still living in its shadow. For over two centuries this social and religious order has been in decline. Enforced religious unity has given way to increasing pluralism, and since 1960 this process has spectacularly accelerated. In this 2003 book, historians, sociologists and theologians from six countries answer two central questions: what is the religious condition of Western Europe at the start of the twenty-first century, and how and why did Christendom decline? Beginning by overviewing the more recent situation, the authors then go back into the past, tracing the course of events in England, Ireland, France, Germany and the Netherlands, and showing how the fate of Christendom is reflected in changing attitudes to death and to technology, and in the evolution of religious language. They reveal a pattern more complex and ambiguous than many of the conventional narratives will admit.

Global Christianity has been experiencing an unprecedented historical transition from the West to the non-Western world. The leadership of global Christianity has taken on a new face since the twentieth century. Christendom in Europe and America has experienced a great decline while there has been a rise in Majority World Christianity. Churches in the Global South have given their voices to global Christianity through their leadership, world mission movements, and theology. The phenomenal church growth has risen from the Pentecostal and Charismatic movement. Pentecostalism has become the dominant force in global Christianity today. The Rise of the Global South examines the significance this shift has had on global Christianity by going through the history of Christianity in the West and the causes of the shift.

This is a short, accessible analysis of Christianity that focuses on its social and cultural diversity as well as its historical dimensions.

'Religion's Sudden Decline' provides evidence of a major decline in religion in most of the world, based on surveys of over 100 countries containing 90 percent of the world's population, carried out from 1981 to 2020 - the largest base of empirical evidence ever assembled to analyse mass acceptance or rejection of religion.--

Spengler's work describes how we have entered into a centuries-long "world-historical" phase comparable to late antiquity, and his controversial ideas spark debate over the meaning of historiography.

In this magisterial work, leading cultural critic Mary Eberstadt delivers a powerful new theory about the decline of religion in the Western world. The conventional wisdom is that the West first experienced religious decline, followed by the decline of the family. Eberstadt turns this standard account on its head. Marshalling an impressive array of research, from fascinating historical data on family decline in pre-Revolutionary France to contemporary popular culture both in the United States and Europe, Eberstadt shows that the reverse has also been true: the undermining of the family has further undermined Christianity itself. Drawing on sociology, history, demography, theology, literature, and many other sources, Eberstadt shows that family decline and religious decline have gone hand in hand in the Western world in a way that has not been understood before—that they are, as she puts it in a striking new image summarizing the book’s thesis, “the double helix of society, each dependent on the strength of the other for successful reproduction.” In sobering final chapters, Eberstadt then lays out the enormous ramifications of the mutual demise of family and faith in the West. While it is fashionable in some circles to applaud the decline both of religion and the nuclear family, there are, as Eberstadt reveals, enormous social, economic, civic, and other costs attendant on both declines. Her conclusion considers this tantalizing question: whether the economic and demographic crisis now roiling Europe and spreading to America will have the inadvertent result of reviving the family as the most viable alternative to the failed welfare state—fallout that could also lay the groundwork for a religious revival as well. How the West Really Lost God is both a startlingly original account of how secularization happens and a sweeping brief about why everyone should care. A book written for agnostics as well as believers, atheists as well as “none of the above,” it will permanently change the way every reader understands the two institutions that have hitherto undergirded Western civilization as we know it—family and faith—and the real nature of the relationship between those two pillars of history.

28 short essays describing Christianity's development in Asia and Africa from the 16th century to the present.