To Stop the Rapid Decline of Christianity, We Need to Return to Fundamentals

In a recent essay discussing the rapid decline of the Catholic Church, Crisis Magazine editor Eric Sammons sounded the alarm among Catholics and most Christians today. Going over the numbers of a new Pew survey, Sammons writes that “for every 100 people who join the Catholic Church, 840 leave.” Membership at Protestant churches is also decreasing, though at a slower rate: “For every 100 people that become Protestant, 180 leave.”

The great majority of those leaving go on to become “nones” — people with no religious affiliation. Not exactly atheists, most “nones” are the types to say that they “were raised Catholic,” are “spiritual, but not religious,” and “don’t believe in organized religion.” Most of them ascribe to the conventional morality of the day and try to be nice people.

Ironically, both progressive and conservative Christians would seem to agree about what accounts for this exodus: the Sexual Revolution. During the 1960s, attitudes about marriage, sex, and family formation radically flipped. Divorce, premarital sex, contraception, abortion, and alternative sexual orientations were all recast as empowering and good while marriage, chastity, and having children were presented as oppressive.

This paradigm shift precipitated a mass fallout from institutions like the Catholic Church, which opposed this philosophy on every point. Writer David Carlin’s book Three Sexual Revolutions explains at length how this dealt a critical blow to modern Christianity.

Where progressives and conservative Christians would disagree is how to address the change the Sexual Revolution wrought. Progressives, many of whom now make up Church leadership, hope to accommodate these new views by watering down the Church’s teachings on sexual morality and “building bridges” with the LGBT community and pro-abortion feminists. Conservatives, many of whom make up most of the young men now entering the priesthood, hope to double down on Church teachings and call out the failures of the Sexual Revolution, which are legion.

For what it’s worth, each new headline validates the conservative position and discredits progressive project. The tenets of the Sexual Revolution have led to a depopulation crisis in the developed world, widespread social unrest, and an epidemic of loneliness. Meanwhile, the people who have resisted the siren song are much more likely to lead productive, happy, and fulfilling lives.

As conservative Christians, and even sympathetic agnostics like Jordan Peterson, will often point out, the choice seems pretty obvious: believe and be happy, or refuse to believe and be miserable.

Forgetting the Basics

Of course, the reality of this dynamic is more complicated. First, there are plenty of exceptions to the personal success that comes from being a Christian — not all Christians are the Flanders family in The Simpsons. Second, there are many other variables to the faith besides its stances on sex. Third, despite clearly outlined teachings on such matters, most Church leaders rarely go into much depth about it. In my experience, most Catholics don’t know enough about the Church’s teachings to take offense to them.

Therefore, it becomes counterproductive to fixate on the Sexual Revolution or try to organize a counterrevolution. At best, it’s rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. The problems afflicting Christianity go deeper.

Perhaps because it is so basic, a subject that surprisingly few Christian apologists and leaders seem to discuss is the salvation of souls — the biggest reason that one should become a disciple of Jesus Christ is because he wants to go to Heaven when he dies. Even though they can learn from the abundant wisdom of Christian thinkers and feel inspired by the saints, most Christians will attend church on Sunday because they will die someday and they want God to judge their immortal souls favorably.

In the past, this fear of God’s judgment was common, but people today usually assume they will end up in Heaven because they’re not literally Hitler. But Jesus has plenty to say about what will happen to people who break God’s commandments, such as,

“Amen, I say to you, what you did not do for one of these least ones, you did not do for me.’ And these will go off to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.”

Somehow, this pronouncement is interpreted to mean that short of committing genocide, most people will probably be fine in the afterlife.

Although some of this ignorance is a consequence of poor catechesis, most of it has to do with the receding presence of death in modern culture and the ubiquity of bad theology. Two recent books that speak to these problems are, respectively, From Here to Eternity by theology professor Randall Smith and Deadly Indifference by Eric Sammons (I reviewed both books here and here). Taken together, their arguments paint a picture of a vapid populace that thinks little about death and assume Heaven automatically awaits them.

Shaking Off Complacency

Rather than countering this view with sophisticated apologetic arguments (which have their place, but not here), it might be better to challenge this indifference with something akin to Pascal’s Wager: embrace the inconvenience of becoming a practicing Christian in order to minimize the risk of eternal damnation. As Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft has explained, this argument isn’t intended to prove God’s existence to the stubborn atheist, but shake the complacency of the noncommittal agnostic (i.e. today’s “nones”).

The salvation of one’s soul has to serve as the core of Christian belief and practice. Otherwise, Christian churches will come to resemble pre-Christian religious institutions like the mystery cults or philosophical schools, which largely turned their back on the wider culture. Beyond the incalculable evil this decline ushers into the world in a spiritual sense (so many lost souls!), the popular abandonment of Christianity will effectively mark the end of Western civilization and bring about a chaotic Dark Age filled with death, exploitation, and insanity.

Bad as this sounds, we should remember that it’s not as bad as ending up in Hell or Purgatory because we didn’t go to church when we could have. For this reason, beyond giving up sweets and going on social media fasts this Lent, Christians should reengage with their faith and invite their friends (at least nine of them) to come with them to church.

Auguste Meyrat is the founding editor of The Everyman, a senior contributor to The Federalist, and has written essays for Newsweek, The American Mind, The American Conservative, Religion and Liberty, Crisis Magazine, and elsewhere. Follow him on X and Substack.

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