The Christian Response to the "Post-Christian" Moment

by Fr. Roger J. Landry - November 9, 2007

Many today in the Church are grappling with the consequences of a massive paradigm shift in the relationship between faith and society and between churches and government. In many parts of western Europe and the United States, in the span of only two generations, popular culture has shifted from viewing religious practice as a great blessing to perceiving it as a curse. Legislatures, court systems and public school systems that formerly were happily cooperative with churches for their work in forming good and law abiding citizens and caring for the poor and marginalized have, in many places, become hostile.

The capacity of the Church, both faithful and clergy, to serve as the salt, light and leaven of their societies has dramatically waned, as evidenced by the failure of the faithful in places even with a statistical majority of Catholics from stopping pushes to create and destroy embryonic human beings for medical research or to redefine marriage to make it a husband-less or wife-less institution.

This sudden seismic shift in the culture has led many to conclude that we are living in a "post-Christian" moment, with the Church's glory days are past tense not future. Some wonder whether all efforts at re-evangelization, therefore, will prove to be nothing more than shifting deck chairs on sinking luxury liners, or at most small eleventh-hour battle victories in what seems a lost war. If the Church cannot even get Catholics to come to Mass in large numbers, how can she possibly hope to transform society?

Into this conversation has entered a prophetic voice from the Rocky Mountains, that of the Archbishop of Denver, Charles Chaput, OFM Cap. In a series of recent speeches, both in Australia and in the United States, he has been asnwering this question head-on, and, with the help of history, charting a path for the Church ahead.

He first has been seeking to illustrate how the "post-Christian" world "morally, intellectually, spiritually and even demographically" is "uncomfortably similar" to the "pre-Christian moment," the world the first Christians faced after Jesus' ascension.

Drawing on the scholarly work of Rodney Stark, an agnostic sociologist at Baylor University who has written a fascinating book called "The Rise of Christianity," Archbishop Chaput describes how the Greco-Roman world at the time of Christ was advanced in arts and science, had a complex economy and strong military, and featured various religions that mainly were practiced privately or in pro-forma civic ceremonies. But as society began to prosper, several problems began to ensue that began to weaken society's fundamental building block, the family. Fertility rates fell seriously below replacement levels, a sign of focusing on the present rather than the future, on parents instead of kids. Promiscuity and prostitution became widespread, as did homosexuality and bisexuality. Birth control and abortion were legal, common and supported by the elites.

Chaput next tries to learn from how the first Christians responded successful to those cultural challenges to guide Christians in facing similar issues today. He notes that he early Christians "did such a good job that within 400 years Christianity was the world's dominant religion and the foundation of Western civilization. If we can learn from that history, the more easily God will work through us to spark a new evangelization."

According to Stark's analysis, the Rise of Christianity happened because of two factors: Christian doctrine and the fidelity of Christians to it. The early Christians believed and practiced what they preached. To be a Christian meant not merely accepting a set of propositions, but to change radically one's whole way of thinking and living. They adhered to this truth they enfleshed even at the cost of their life.

One of the most notable areas in which Christians distinguished themselves from others, Stark describes, was with regard to marriage and the family. The Christians believed that marriage and sexual activity were sacred and therefore rejected the widespread practices of fornication, homosexual activity, marital infidelity, polygamy, birth control, abortion, infanticide, and divorce.

"The early Church had no debates over politicians and communion," Archbishop Chaput notes. "There wasn't any need. No persons who tolerated or promoted abortion would have dared to approach the Eucharistic table, let alone dared to call themselves true Christians. And here's why: The early Christians understood that they were the offspring of a new worldwide family of God. They saw the culture around them as a culture of death, a society that was slowly extinguishing itself. … snuffing out its own future."

That is lesson number one the early Christians teach: the need to oppose the various manifestations of the culture of death with the light of living fully according to the Gospel. "We need to find the courage those first Christians had in challenging their culture," Chaput says. "We need to believe not only what they believed. We need to believe those things with the same deep fervor."

The renewal of the Church and society both, Archbishop Chaput maintains, will come when "all of us who claim to be 'Catholic' recover our Catholic identity as disciples of Jesus Christ and missionaries of his Church," proclaiming and living our faith "authentically, with our whole heart and whole strength."

In short, the first Christians teach us that "if we want our lives to be fruitful, we need to know ourselves as God intends us to be known -- as his witnesses on earth, not just in our private behavior, but in our public actions, including our social, economic and political choices."

"If pagan Rome could be won for Jesus Christ," he concludes, "surely we can do the same in our own world. What it takes is the zeal and courage to live what we claim to believe."

Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.