Will Christianity Survive?

As Easter nears and as militant atheism seems to creep across the face of Europe and much of our nation, the question "Will Christianity survive?" is one which many Americans must be asking. If Christianity is true then it is indestructible, but leaving metaphysics aside, what are the objective historical prospects of Christian survival?

Europe is scarcely Christian today, but most critics of Christianity seem not to know that Europe has long been scarcely Christian. The 1932 book, The Catholic Church in Contemporary Europe, notes the French government in the early part of the last century refused to recognize for purposes of entering the civil service graduates from Christian universities in France and "...the new brand of lay school teachers [in France], male and female, formed in these schools have been loud atheists." In 1927, Adolph Keller and George Stewart in their book, Protestant Europe: Its Crisis and Outlook, noted that only about a quarter of the French were practicing Christians. Gustave Combes, writing in 1938, agreed with that figure, and in 1929 Sisley Huddleston wrote: "Nominally France is a Catholic country, but in reality France has always been in conflict with the Church." One third of the parishes in France had no priest. Ohm, in his 1948 book on Christianity in Asia, noted that a Chinese student told him: "I have been in France for five years and have never met a Catholic student." Father Perrin, jailed by the Nazis, acknowledged to an inspector at the jail: "I did not deny that I thought France very ill, weakened by centuries of slow de-Christianisation."

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What was true in France was true in Germany too. In 1838, Foreign Quarterly Review wrote that the Germans "...certainly have succeeded more effectively, so far is their own national belief is concerned, in evaporating all that is solid and substantial in Christianity, in taking away beneath our feet all that is real and historical in the faith of centuries." The article notes empty churches in Germany and the indifference of most Germans to Christianity. The German philosopher Treitschke wrote in 1862 about young Germans who "pay lip service to a religion which has become alien in their hearts" Edward Williams in his 1896 book, Christian Life in Germany, described theology departments in Germany:

"In the Universities no theological professor thinks of opening his lectures with prayer, as in our seminaries for the training of young men for the ministry. Nor in the great schools are there, even for theological students, anything like the 'prayers' of our college or social meetings for the cultivation of one's spiritual life."

Williams went on to describe the utter godlessness of other parts of German academia:

"Life in other departments of the University, as well as professional and technical schools, though not openly infidel, is yet practically godless. Neither teacher nor student expresses religious faith, if he cherishes any, in religious worship, nor, except on rare occasions, is he seen in the house of God."

Academic disdain for Christianity was not limited to Europe. Professor Helmut Kuhn, who fled the Nazis and taught at the University of North Carolina wrote in 1943:

"The American college youth of today is largely unacquainted with the Bible. The Old and New Testament, to the mind of the average student, rank with the Bhagavad-Gita and Lao-tse among the venerable, but wholly unreadable works of Antiquity. Thousands of undergraduates have not even heard of the Sermon on the Mount."

Today the Christianity, which with Judaism and Greek philosophy are the cornerstones of our civilization, is not only neglected in college courses but as Tim Larsen noted in 2010, it is dangerous for students seeking good grades to even source or quote the Bible. So will Christianity fade into a tiny sect? Take out theology and look only at history: will Christianity survive? Forget the comfortable and smug in the elitist salons of Europe and America. What is happening today and every day in the world? Christians are suffering much worse than bad grades in college classes or sneers from the entertainment establishment. Christian martyrs today are suffering torture, imprisonment and death as one can see here or here and yet Christians continue to go into strange lands quietly building hospitals and schools despite suspicion and threats. Christians, like Jews, have endured hatred and venom for many centuries and yet both, miraculously one might say, are very much alive today. So on Easter, as well as on Passover, which is very close to Easter this year, it surely seems as if some Powerful Goodness has decreed that Christians, like Jews, will survive.