Not So Fast

The Myth of Religion's Extinction

In the nineteen sixties sociologists were confidently predicting the end of religion as a social phenomenon.  It would be most certainly replaced by secularism.  Here is sociologist, Peter Berger's take in 1968 writing in the New York Times:

[By] the 21st century, religious believers are likely to be found only in small sects, huddled together to resist a worldwide secular culture. . . . [T]he predicament of the believer is increasingly like that of a Tibetan astrologer on a prolonged visit to an American university.  [Rodney Stark, The Triumph of Christianity: How the Jesus Movement Became the World's Largest Religion (New York: Harper One, 2011), p. 369f.]

How foolish and naive.  Yet to his credit, Berger retracted.  Stark provides this account:

In 1997 Peter Berger was interviewed by Christian Century.  Among the questions he was asked was: "What is your sense of whether and how secularization is taking place?"  Keep in mind that Berger had long been a militant, if eloquent, proponent of the secularization theory.  He answered: "I think that what I and most other sociologists of religion wrote in the 1960's about secularization was a mistake.  Our underlying argument was that secularization and modernity go hand in hand.  With more modernization comes more secularization.  It wasn't a crazy theory.  There was some evidence for it.  But I think it's basically wrong.  Most of the world today is certainly not secular.  It's very religious"  And so it is.  (Stark, ibid., p. 373f)

 The twentieth century witnessed overt attempts to expunge religious belief by force, in Russia, Eastern Europe and China.  It has not worked.  The more repressive states become, the more precious and vital religious belief becomes. So, Christianity is flourishing in Russia: the most recent data is that atheist numbers in Russia have fallen to four percent.  The growth of the Christian church in China under Communism is one of the great church growth stories in the annals of the Christian era. 

"Soft-secularism" in the West has not fared much better.  And the more hard Western secularism becomes, the more the faith will ignite and spread.  That's the oft-repeated historical pattern.