“We have not yet taken into account the major transformation that is upon us,” writes the French philosopher Chantal Delsol. What she calls “the end of a civilization sixteen centuries old” is, in her view, nothing less than the end of Christendom.11xChantal Delsol, La fin de la Chrétienté (Paris, France: Les Éditions du Cerf, 2021), 9. All translations by Firmin DeBrabander.
The bleak religious landscape across the West suggests it may not be an exaggeration. Of course, in broad intellectual, political, and institutional respects, Europe has advanced far down the path of secularization, but in recent decades we have witnessed a dramatic acceleration of what many scholars of religion call a vast “dechurching,” a process involving entire populations, not just intellectuals, radicals, or other members of the so-called secular elite.
Americans have a reputation for being very devout—and publicly devout—certainly in comparison to their European peers, who are appalled, for example, when the US president invokes the divine and asks that “God bless the United States of America.” The Christian right, furthermore, enjoys immense social and political power, recently flexing its muscles with the overturning of Roe v. Wade. And yet recent studies by the American scholar Ryan Burge and others reveal that dechurching has not only arrived on our shores but is advancing with remarkable speed. As theologian and sociologist Stephen Bullivant puts it, “This is a genuine watershed moment: a grand socio-religious Reset.”22xStephen Bullivant, “The Demise of Christian America,” Catholic Herald, March 1, 2023; https://catholicherald.co.uk/the-demise-of-christian-america/.
Toward a Post-Christian Society
Across the West, people en masse are leaving organized religion, particularly Christianity. In the relatively brief span of a generation or two, they have discarded faith traditions that have formed the backbone of society and culture for nearly two millennia. Writers, scholars, and commentators seem to compete to convey the profundity of this development. The French sociologist Guillaume Cuchet reviews a list of ominous titles by his countrymen of late: The Disenchantment of the World, The Post-Christian Era, The End of a World.33xGuillaume Cuchet, Comment notre Monde a cessé d’être Chrétien (Paris, France: Le Seuil, 2020), 22–23. All translations by Firmin DeBrabander. We should add Cuchet’s own book: How Our World Stopped Being Christian. In the United States, in his widely read contribution to the genre, The Benedict Option, journalist Rod Dreher gravely intoned that “The light of Christianity is flickering out all over the West. There are people alive today who may live to see the effective death of Christianity within our civilization.”44xRod Dreher, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation (New York, NY: Sentinel, 2017), 8.
While there are good reasons to argue that such obituaries for Christianity are misguided or premature—and I shall do so—facts on the ground certainly suggest a fatigue with church institutions, a feeling that they no longer offer inspiration or clear and certain guidance. Ninety-one percent of youths in the Czech Republic, home to the “Infant Jesus of Prague” statue that graces many Catholic households, have no religion, making their country the winner in Europe’s secularization sweepstakes.55xHarriet Sherwood, “‘Christianity as Default Is Gone’: The Rise of a Non-Christian Europe,” The Guardian, March 20, 2018; https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/21/christianity-non-christian-europe-young-people-survey-religion. In Sweden and the Netherlands, that number hovers around 80 percent of the youth, while 60 percent of Spaniards, a once defiantly Catholic people who eagerly (and, yes, often violently) spread their faith all over the world, report never going to church.66xIbid.
Christians are a minority in England and Wales “for the first time since the Dark Ages, back when the Romans were replaced by Woden-worshipping Anglo Saxons,” as journalist Katie Rosseinsky puts it.77xKatie Rosseinsky, “Young Christians on Life in Secular Britain,” The Independent, September 3, 2023; https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/christian-uk-atheist-britain-young-secular-b2403282.html. And the number of practicing Muslims has surpassed that of Catholics in France, the reputed “eldest daughter” of the church, which earned its title as the home to historic religious and monastic orders as well as to theologians and philosophers who practically defined the faith.88xHelene de Lauzun, “Practising Muslims Outnumber Catholics in France,” The European Conservative, April 8, 2023; https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news/practising-muslims-outnumber-catholics-in-france/. Facts and figures such as these inspire declarations of Europe’s relentless “march toward a post-Christian society.”99xSherwood, “‘Christianity as Default Is Gone.’”
In the United States, the “nones,” who report no religious affiliation, stand at 28 percent of the population and are the “largest cohort…more prevalent among American adults than Catholics (23 percent) or evangelical Protestants (24 percent).”1010xJason DeRose, “Religious ‘Nones’ Are Now the Largest Single Group in the US,” NPR, January 24, 2024; https://www.npr.org/2024/01/24/1226371734/religious-nones-are-now-the-largest-single-group-in-the-u-s. This number has risen from 16 percent of the population since only 2007. This development is especially prominent among the youth, a bad sign for the future of faith, but it afflicts every sector of the population to some degree. “Data shows that every birth cohort—or five-year birth window—is more likely to be nonreligious today than it was 14 or 15 years ago,” Burge explains. “So, every group is leaving religion, even among conservatives and Republicans, the group that is typically tied to religion. They are becoming less religious at the same time. It’s everyone. Everyone is less religious than they were 15 or 20 years ago.”1111xRyan Burge, interview with Walter Kim for Today’s Conversation, a podcast hosted by the National Association of Evangelicals, October 15, 2023; https://www.nae.org/burgepodcast/. The United States, in short, may face a similar future to England’s, that is, a post-Christian future. Ninety percent of Americans identified as Christians thirty years ago. Today that has fallen to 60 percent.1212xMichelle Boorstein, “More Americans Are Nonreligious. Who Are They and What Do They Believe?” Washington Post, January 24, 2024; https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/01/24/nones-no-religion-study/. Christians will soon be a minority here, which was for most of this nation’s history unthinkable.
Why are people abandoning religion in the West? The likely causes are several and well known. There is our rapacious individualism, of course, the joy people take in being free to think and act for themselves, amass their own private fiefdoms of comfort and convenience, and shrug off overbearing communal pressures. Democratization was always going to spell trouble for Christianity, which had, though wrongly perhaps, assumed authoritarian manners of command and control. In liberal, materialistic societies, people are happy to buy and consume and indulge what they want, with little guilt or regret. Notably, this includes sexual freedoms, which Christian churches of all sectarian stripes traditionally frowned upon. The Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo argues that Catholic teachings on sexuality are what people find most upsetting and objectionable.1313xGianni Vattimo, After Christianity, trans. Luca D’Isanto (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2002), 114. The American scholar Paul Elie has an interesting way of putting it: People are unclear or split on “what the Catholic Church is for, but everybody knows what it is against.”1414xPaul Elie, “The Reinvention of the Catholic Church, The Atlantic, December 11, 2022; https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/01/catholic-church-changes-roe-v-wade-pope-francis/672235/. This highlights a major problem for faith in liberal democracies, which, as the name suggests, are busy liberating people, or guarding their freedoms; religion, on its face, looks to be working against that agenda, telling us what to avoid, what to sacrifice, what to spurn. That is a losing proposition.
Interestingly, and perhaps surprisingly, a majority of American “nones”—a sizable majority at that—report they “believe in God or another higher power.”1515x“Religious ‘Nones’ in America: Who They Are and What They Believe,” Pew Research Center, January 24, 2024; https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2024/01/24/religious-nones-in-america-who-they-are-and-what-they-believe/. A similar percentage of them believe in a personal soul and a transcendent or spiritual realm beyond the physical world. In Europe, the data vary by country, but, by and large, a prominent portion of the religiously unaffiliated report similar beliefs.1616x“Being Christian in Western Europe,” Pew Research Center, May 29, 2018; https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2018/05/29/being-christian-in-western-europe/. Burge observes a further curiosity in America: While the number of worshippers has plummeted, the percentage of people identifying as evangelicals has held strong “because non-attenders are taking on the label.”1717xRyan Burge, “So, Why Is Evangelicalism Not Declining? Because Non-Attenders Are Taking on the Label,” Religion in Public (blog), December 10, 2020; https://religioninpublic.blog/2020/12/10/so-why-is-evangelicalism-not-declining-because-non-attenders-are-taking-on-the-label/. He ascribes this to changes in political conservatism. People who consider themselves very conservative, whether they go to church or not (and, indeed, whether they are Christian or not), increasingly identify as evangelical. The label clearly is now as much a political-tribal signifier as it is a religious one.
Pushing Church Out of the Picture
We witness a somewhat similar appropriation of religion for political ends amid the surge of populist nationalism in Europe. There, many professed nationalists who never step foot in a church claim to be highly concerned about protecting Christian heritage and identity against the cultural shifts associated with Muslim immigrants. Éric Zemmour, the far-right presidential candidate in France’s 2022 election, posed as the defender of the thousand-year-old French Christian culture to rally the Catholic vote, even though he himself is a non-practicing Jew.1818xAude Mazoue, “Spooked by Immigration, Islam and ‘Woke’ Ideas: Who Are Éric Zemmour’s Supporters?” France 24, March 29, 2022; https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20220329-spooked-by-immigration-islam-and-woke-ideas-who-are-éric-zemmour-s-supporters.
In their book, The Great Dechurching, Ryan Burge, Jim Davis, and Michael Graham argue that religion is a casualty of our twenty-first-century lifestyle dominated by a compulsive “workism” that eats into and consumes our daily lives. “Contemporary America simply isn’t set up to promote mutuality, care, or common life,” writes Jake Meador in The Atlantic. “Rather, it is designed to maximize individual accomplishment as defined by professional and financial success. Such a system leaves precious little time or energy for forms of community that don’t contribute to one’s professional life or, as one ages, the professional prospects of one’s children.”1919xJake Meador, “The Misunderstood Reason Millions of Americans Stopped Going to Church,” The Atlantic, July 29, 2023; https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/07/christian-church-communitiy-participation-drop/674843/. Weekends, including Sunday mornings, are dominated by children’s sports and activities, because their schedules are otherwise so full of the various activities that are intended to help them get ahead, stand out, gain acceptance to prestigious colleges, or earn scholarships. Exhausting weeks and frenzied weekends push church out of the picture.
One would be remiss to understate the crisis of religious authority that has besieged the West. In the Catholic Church, which has been especially devastated, that crisis was hugely aggravated, if not largely caused, by the seemingly endless succession of sex abuse scandals brought to light in recent years—with new allegations still coming forth—and, just as much, by the church hierarchy’s attempts to cover up or minimize the abuses. Together they have destroyed the moral standing of the church, a crippling blow for an institution that fancies itself an ethical bedrock and teacher, indeed, the preeminent one. In America, prominent evangelical churches have been recently visited with high-profile sex scandals, too, as well as complaints of corruption and abuse of power among church leaders.2020xDavid Brooks, “The Dissenters Trying to Save Evangelicalism From Itself,” New York Times, February 4, 2022; https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/04/opinion/evangelicalism-division-renewal.html.
The result has been a slew of church closings. In my hometown of Baltimore, the historic center of the Catholic Church in America, the oldest and first archdiocese, birthplace of the famed Baltimore Catechism that instructed millions of young people in the faith, the archbishop released plans to consolidate sixty-one parishes into twenty-three, and close thirty churches in the process.2121xJonathan M. Pitts, “Final Realignment Plan Cuts Baltimore’s Catholic Parishes from 61 to 23,” The Baltimore Sun, May 22, 2024; https://www.baltimoresun.com/2024/05/22/archdiocese-catholic-church-baltimore/. The proximate cause was the archdiocese’s declaration of bankruptcy in the face of sex abuse allegations; but the decision was also overdue, since many of the churches had been emptying out for years. I see this, too, as a precipitating cause of the collapse of religion. Consider the message that closed, empty, or repurposed churches send the faithful, those struggling with faith, those intrigued or interested or in need of religion but who are unsure. It’s not an encouraging sign, to say the least.
On the subject of empty churches that abound in Europe, the Czech theologian Tomáš Halík observes, “Maybe the empty church buildings stand as a symbol for the emptiness in the churches. If the church makes no serious attempt to allow the world to see a completely different face of Christendom, the future of the church will be empty.”2222xAs quoted by Remmelt Meijer and Peter Wierenga in Herkerken: De Toekomst van de Geloofsgemeenschappen (Amersfoort, the Netherlands: Uitgeverij Vuurkamp, 2021), 29. All translations by Firmin DeBrabander. Across Europe, there is a widespread feeling that the church is tired, old, outdated, and irrelevant. Liturgies are unimaginative, boring, somber, and dutiful. Many people indicate they are still in need of faith, even hankering for it, but they are unimpressed or dissatisfied with what is on offer—or repelled by an institution weighed down by shameful scandals.
A Propitious Time for Christianity?
While the rapid emptying of the churches has given rise to countless obituaries for Christianity, it is important to note that no such obituary applies to the Southern Hemisphere, where Christianity is booming. Indeed, when European and American scholars lament the death of faith, it seems terribly myopic, even Eurocentric. The fact that Christianity thrives outside the West offers a strong rebuttal to emboldened secularists who have written off religion and concluded it is useless and obsolete. They might glance southward. Most people on earth—by a huge majority—still find meaning, inspiration, and guidance in religion, and it does not look like that will change anytime soon. Quite to the contrary.
Overall trends for Christianity, it turns out, are rather auspicious. It is projected to remain the largest religion worldwide through 2050, capturing the same percentage of the world population as today. This is noted in a prominent study by the Pew Research Center with the compelling subheading, “Why Muslims are rising fastest and the Unaffiliated are shrinking as a share of the world’s population.”2323x“The Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projections, 2010–2050; Why Muslims Are Rising Fastest and the Unaffiliated Are Shrinking as a Share of the World’s Population,” Pew Research Center, April 2, 2015; https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2015/04/02/religious-projections-2010-2050/. European and American secularists, confident as they are the future, will be vastly outnumbered. And the French Jesuit Paul Valadier questions the premise of Islam’s ascent: “[Contrary] to a tenacious prejudice, it is not Islam that is advancing in the world (it is divided and torn by murderous extremists…) but indeed Christianity.”2424xPaul Valadier, Bienheureux sommes-nous d’être minoritaires! (Paris: France, MAME, 2023), 39; https://www.mameeditions.com/9782728932122-bienheureux-sommes-nous-d-etres-minoritaires-du-catholicisme-en-france-group.html. All translations by Firmin DeBrabander. Many Muslim strongholds, he observes, threaten punishment for people who convert to a different faith—not a strong and clear sign of growth. Christianity, meanwhile, no longer needs to convert on pain of death; millions do so willingly.
Those observations raise an interesting question, prompting what would seem to be in the West a startling supposition: Is this actually a propitious moment for Christianity? That may sound absurd in light of the figures surveyed above. Europe is a religious wasteland, it seems. And yet, the brute population of global Christians has not been greater. Perhaps the faith is migrating to a new center, a more welcoming one.
We might also consider that Christianity never had a proper heyday, anywhere, ever. It never knew a lost and lamented prime, which some now mourn. That is an illusion.
Might it even be possible that Christianity is now primed for rebirth? Or even birth?
That Christianity never had a golden age is an inescapable conclusion to any who peruse the tumultuous history of Europe, the former stronghold of the faith from which it was exported around the world. Many will say the Middle Ages was the apex of Catholicism, when its most spectacular cathedrals were erected heavenward, its greatest philosophers and theologians (“Doctors of the Church”) addressed fundamental disputes and laid out central doctrines, and its most powerful and esteemed religious orders (Benedictines, Dominicans, Franciscans) were founded. There is enough irrationality and horror in this period to disabuse you of this notion. How could anyone think this a Christian heyday when the church was split between feuding papal factions (echoing Muslim division today) and purported heresies were crushed in great orgies of blood?
The Catholic Church might have been chastened by the Reformation, which was instigated by its shameless corruption. Instead, the Inquisition and its brutality ensued, as did Spain’s violent conquest and conversion of the Americas, which Rome applauded and justified in its greed for gold and power. The rest of Christian Europe joined in wars of religion that raged for many decades, cutting down millions of lives. And “Christian” empires directed the slave trade for centuries afterward, effectively repopulating vast portions of the earth and eradicating native cultures and peoples, typically under the guise of Christianization.
Was the more recent past any better? Cuchet, in his study of the French Catholic decline, notes thriving church attendance throughout the 1950s. This plunged after the Second Vatican Council, which he cites as the obvious point of transition. Conservative Catholics who hail the health of the pre–Vatican II church ignore the very reasons the council was convened, and the reforms that followed. The church “unleashed a broad relativization of ancient obligations,” Cuchet writes, “often perceived by contemporaries as evangelical progress and a necessary crisis to achieve a form of faith that was freer and more mindful.”2525xCuchet, Comment notre Monde a cessé d’être Chrétien, 155.
One of the most secular nations on earth, the Netherlands, was until recently quite devout. The period from 1860–1960 is dubbed the “Rijke Roomse Leven,” the Rich Roman Life, when Catholic organizations abounded and prospered, and one of every ten missionaries worldwide was Dutch. During a 1947 visit, the future Pope John Paul II wrote that he was impressed by the vigor, the thriving and expansive organizations of Catholic social life in Holland. He “also noticed that something was lacking,” Dutch Cardinal Eijk explains, “which is a personal spirituality among people.”2626xCardinal Wim Eijk, interview by Edgar Beltrán, The Pillar, October 30, 2023; https://www.pillarcatholic.com/p/cardinal-eijk-i-dont-give-up. As in France, Cuchet claims, this spiritual vacuum was soon exposed. Vatican II left religious observance up to people’s decision—and they exited in droves.
There is another powerful response to any who pine for a pre–Vatican II world when churches were packed, seminaries overflowed, children filled parochial schools, and the faithful dutifully observed the sacraments, including Confession. I am speaking, of course, of the clerical abuse scandals, many of which date to this period. Was this a better, fuller, purer church? Clearly not.
The Lonely Core of Faith
To all the doomsayers who declare Christianity ill beyond repair and mourn its flourishing past, we might ask, “What’s new?” When was the church ever not in crisis? Isn’t its history a long series of schisms and conflicts and disputes, if not over dogma, then over territory, peoples, and power? Historians say there never was a Pax Romana. It was a useful fiction promoted by Rome’s emperors, far from the reality. We might say the same about a Pax Christiana of the long Middle Ages. Sure, Christian values may have held sway, religious rulers were respected, and people meekly obeyed the prescriptions of the church, but at what cost? And with what sincerity or virtue? The often-disappointing history of Christendom suggests few took the faith to heart—if it was effectively transmitted or taught at all.
The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard was appalled that his homeland, by broad metrics today a deeply faithful place in his lifetime, would be deemed a “Christian Nation.” In his stringent view, his fellow Danes were so far from practicing the true faith as laid out in the New Testament that the church could hardly impress upon them its real requirements, lest it cause people to rebel or throw up their hands in frustration and despair when they saw how very far off the mark they were. Better to keep them lulled to sleep in the quiet conviction that they were devout, upstanding, and blessed.
In fact, Kierkegaard argued, a Christian Nation is an impossibility. After all, he noted, the Gospel says, “The way that leadeth unto life is straitened, the gate narrow.”2727xSøren Kierkegaard, “The Attack Upon ‘Christendom,’” in A Kierkegaard Anthology, ed. Robert Bretall (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1946), 442. Faith is, by definition, for the few. Christendom offends Christianity by watering it down, turning it on its head. “[It] takes away from Christianity the offense, the paradox, etc., and instead of that introduces probability, the plainly comprehensible”—the familiar and the comforting.2828xIbid, 445. Christian culture, which many can claim to be part of without any inner conviction or awareness of the faith’s deep challenge, suggests that many may be saved, that many already are. Properly understood, Kierkegaard insisted, the Gospel is scarcely comforting. Humans have always run away from that uncomfortable fact.
“The spiritual man,” according to Kierkegaard, knows the isolation recommended by the Gospel, the inevitable isolation which “consists in loving God, in hatred to man, in hatred of oneself, and thereby of other men, hating father, mother, one’s own child, wife, etc.”2929xIbid. He invokes the galling passage in Luke’s Gospel, which too many supposedly faithful skim over, ignore, or explain away. Indeed, how can American evangelicals take seriously the proposition to hate your father, mother, and child? Whither “family values,” which, in their eyes, are synonymous with their faith? “Jesus’s attitude to the family is one of implacable hostility,” Terry Eagleton puts it bluntly. “[Jesus] has come to break up these cozy little conservative settlements…” because “movements for justice cut across traditional blood ties, as well as across ethnic, social, and national divisions. Justice is thicker than blood.”3030xTerry Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 31.
Love of neighbor, for that matter, is not what most people think. We tend to think it means being kind to our neighbors—which conjures images of the people next door—who are likely similar in many regards. But of course, this is not what the Gospel enjoins. “Neighborly love” is outrageous—an abomination. Why? Because the Gospel does not specify who my neighbor is and simply instructs that I tend to those near me (the literal meaning of the word “neighbor”), at any time, in any place. I am called to love an inscrutable, opaque, ambiguous, and sometimes objectionable Other. How? By pouring myself out to them, no less, by giving them the shirt off my back. “The morality Jesus preaches is reckless, extravagant, improvident, over-the-top, a scandal to actuaries and a stumbling block to real estate agents,” Eagleton says.3131xIbid., 14. For “civilized” minds, Christianity is horrendous, unacceptable. Thus, it is lonely for any who dare practice it.
This is curious, even problematic, in a way. Many people, including me, are drawn to faith for community, solidarity, and the company of others. When we practice faith traditions, we affirm our society with ancestors dead and gone, as well as generations to come. For each of us, our plight on this earth, this strange existence, is troubling. We take heart knowing that we are not alone but suffer with others together, and together hold out hope for higher things.
Nevertheless, there is a lonely core to faith when it is sincere, focused, serious. In the company of others, in their comforting, affirming presence, one’s faith risks losing its terrifying edge and inherent precarity. “Everyone knows that there is no truly intimate conversation except between two or three people,” Simone Weil writes. “Christ did not say two hundred, or fifty, or six. He said two or three.” Of the many promises Christ made to us, Weil argues, “none…have the power of the expression: ‘Your Father who is in a secret place.’ The Word of God is a secret word. Whoever has not heard this word, even if they adhere to all the dogmas taught by the church, is not in touch with the truth.”3232xSimone Weil, Autobiographie Spirituelle (Montrouge, France: Bayard, 2023), 62–63. All translations by Firmin DeBrabander.
This may be worrisome for those who hunger for faith. Who can reach this rarefied state? Who can strain to detect or decipher God’s secret words? Who will know they are His? Faith and doubt are inexorably paired, however. They regularly switch places in the minds of sincere and self-aware believers. “Oftentimes, the individual does not really know, in his soul or conscience, if he has faith or not; or he is a believer in the morning and agnostic in the afternoon,” Chantal Delsol writes. “Those who research the number of believers navigate a vague landscape.”3333xDelsol, La Fin de la Chrétienté, 29. Belief is elusive and uncertain, even—or especially—for those who have it.
What Does the Minority Church Look Like?
I can go with Kierkegaard and Weil only so far. As a Catholic, I am deeply attached to communal forms of faith, the sacraments and ceremonies that define my religious culture. As a political philosopher, furthermore, I am sympathetic to the need for a church institution to articulate and organize common teachings, and to rein in potentially dangerous superstitions and sects when possible. I fully admit these communal aspects of the faith are liable to corruption, but I don’t see how faith is possible without them.
And yet, these philosophers helpfully remind us, as we survey a barren religious landscape in the West, that signs of faith are not often (if ever) as apparent as we think. This may buoy the faithful. What we think is barren may not be so—it may be a beginning as much as an end.
Valadier urges French Catholics to embrace their minority status and recognize its virtues. As a minority, the church lacks power, influence, and esteem, and while this is demoralizing to many, it can also be cause for relief, even joy: Who lacks all this cannot abuse it. This is a crucial recognition, according to Valadier. The pedophilia scandals and subsequent cover-ups put the church’s abuse of power on full display. The church deserves to be brought low—it needs to be humbled. This is its rightful corrective, its rightful place. This new reality may “provoke a purification of the faith,” Valadier writes, “and a more real sense of obligation than when there was unanimity, which was always more or less equivocal, in mass religious adherence.”3434xValadier, Bienheureux sommes-nous d’être minoritaires, 38.
What might this purified faith of a minority church look like? How might people practice it in societies that are thoroughly, defiantly secular, dismissive of the Word, scornful of those who would minister it? Otherwise put, how shall they practice the faith when the church is humiliated, reduced, and resented? The answer, I think, lies in the counsel often attributed to Saint Francis, to “teach the Gospel always, sometimes with words.”
We might, in that regard, take heart in the acts of a priest in Belgium who has repeatedly opened his historic and chronically empty church to undocumented migrants. On two occasions, Father Daniel Alliët allowed migrants to occupy the building and wage hunger strikes to protest their lot. When it came time for the priest to retire, his bishop wanted to close Alliët’s church and turn it into a “museum of religion.” Alliët disapproved: “I told him that is not how you connect with people.”3535xAs quoted by Monika Pronczuk, “He Sees Migrants as ‘Modern Slaves,’ and Has Devoted His Life to Helping Them,” New York Times, October 1, 2021; https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/01/world/europe/belgium-migrants-alliet.html. The bishop’s decision is precisely the kind of message that indicates religion is dead—worthy of nothing more than being memorialized as a museum. Alliët insisted on keeping the church as a living, breathing place and community, even if it included few worshippers. So, he opened the church to those who needed it, the migrants, this time as a shelter. Hundreds proceeded to huddle on the floor, pushing aside pews, laying down sleeping bags, setting up tents. This church no longer celebrates Mass, and its residents are not Catholic (most are Muslim). Alliët is not worried. “Jesus mainly did social work as well,” he explains. Saying Mass is “not essential.”3636xIbid.
Alliët is on a mission to advertise the dire predicament of undocumented migrants in Belgium, whom he says are treated no better than “modern slaves.” Hunger strikes are no doubt a jarring sight in Belgium, a rich and stable democracy, headquarters of the European Union and NATO alike. Many of his fellow countrymen do not appreciate Alliët’s efforts. The burgeoning nationalist movement is outraged. Church leaders, weary of attracting still more controversy, are uncomfortable with his confrontational approach. Alliët offers a stirring reminder of the radical good the church can do—should do. It is not here principally to offer comfort to believers, comfort that rich Belgians are less in need of today. They certainly do not clamor for the respite that heaven offers when this life is done. In Alliët’s view, the church must work for justice, quietly, diligently, and seriously, with no fanfare, as Saint Francis recommended. The church has plentiful resources to perform this work. Its empty edifices serve perfectly well.
Some years ago, invoking what would be a common theme, Pope Francis said the mission of the church should prioritize a “mercy that seeks to be on the margins or ‘peripheries.’”3737xChristopher Lamb, “Pope’s Mission: Church Must Not Become Closed, but Go to the Margins,” The Tablet, February 13, 2015; https://www.thetablet.co.uk/news/1744/pope-s-mission-church-must-not-become-closed-but-go-to-margins#google_vignette. This is a fitting call. It aligns with the immediate future of Christianity in the West. Which is to say, the church already finds itself on the margins. Banished from the center of society, it has been relegated to the border, where it must do its work, with those who have been similarly marginalized.
Dechurching, then, may presage an august period for Christianity, forcing the remaining faithful to be self-conscious and serious in their devotion—all the better for them to understand the terms and wages of faith, and to reckon with their commitment to the grave teachings of the Gospel.