Fin de siècle, Part I
Assessing the decline of Christian culture and the rise of digital religion
What does it mean to be religious? Or spiritual? As we bathe in the New Year’s light of 2022, conservative Christians are acknowledging the acceleration of the secularization trend. One piece of evidence from late 2021: A recent guest essay by Christopher Caldwell in the New York Times Opinion section, “Is the West Becoming Pagan Again?” Caldwell is a senior fellow at the conservative Claremont Institute, which has become the primary intellectual hub of populist social conservatism. His essay, however, concerns a topic that has serious implications for politics in the remainder of this century and beyond: The dawn of the post-Christian era with the advent of the Millennial generation. This is the generation that I call my own, and the first in American history in which self-identified Christians are a minority, according to new demographic figures released at the end of 2021.
Falling into History: A dirge for a Christian era that never existed
The proximate cause of Caldwell’s essay is the publication of a book by French political theorist Chantal Delsol called “La Fin de la Chretiente,” which Caldwell translates as “The End of the Christian World.” Per Caldwell, Delsol argues that what is ending is not the Christian religion with its dogma and rites and celebrations, but the world or culture that it produced: One in which art, philosophy, lore and governance have been shaped for over a thousand European years by the Christian message, however schismatic that has been in practice. Delsol also penned an essay for The Hungarian Conservative called, appropriately, “The End of Christianity,” in which she explores what she means by this concept.
This concern is not a new one for America’s Christian intellectuals. And their concerns are grounded in demographic realities that have already yielded new fruit: By any reasonable measure, Donald Trump was the most irreligious president in post-war American history, if not ever. He was a boon to the Christian right only in the sense that their transactional relationship with him yielded a comfortable majority on the Supreme Court and an even stronger stamp in the lower federal courts. They stand on the cusp of overturning the bete noire of Roe v Wade, and with it decades of federal protection for abortion rights. Incidentally, Delsol or Caldwell or both, it is not clear, measures the rise and fall of the Christian epoch by the Roman rout of pagan holdouts in the fourth century on one end and Vatican II and legalized abortion in the West on the other.
For Christian conservatives, legalized abortion is the high water mark of the post-Christian era. This may say something more about their current concerns than it does for Christianity; the Catholic doctrine that life begins at conception was only forcefully and formally articulated in 1869. In the 1869 document Apostolicae Sedis moderationi, Pope Pius IX declared the penalty of excommunication for abortions at any stage of pregnancy. In earlier eras, abortion may have been morally repugnant, but it did not constitute homicide until the infusion of the fetus with a human soul. The implantation of the soul took place some time after the implantation of the embryo inside the uterus, with Thomas Aquinas teaching, in the footsteps of Aristotle, that the soul was not infused until about forty days after conception.
Catholic dogma on abortion is intimately tied to other doctrinal positions that distinguish it not only from Islam and Judaism, which also allow for abortion in the early stages of pregnancy, but most crucially from Protestantism. Very few Protestants believe in the Immaculate Conception of Mary, but the pronouncement of that dogma in 1859 is no doubt the proximate cause of Apostolicae Sedis moderationi. While the Church (including Aquinas) always prohibited abortion as a violation of natural law, early abortions were prohibited as evidence of sexual sin, not homicide. It took well over a thousand years for the Catholic Church to develop its teaching on abortion as a form of homicide from conception, and it is not a process that was replicated in Judaism, Islam or Protestant Christianity. The reason for extending ensoulment to conception is primarily theological: In Christianity, the doctrine of the Incarnation holds that Jesus was fully divine and fully human from the moment of conception, and the extension of the Immaculate Conception doctrine to Mary as the Mother of God requires belief in her soul existing at the time she was conceived, as a matter of logical consistency.
The historical development of the Catholic teachings on abortion is only important insofar as it demonstrates an elision of at least one vital piece of the historical picture being painted by the conservative Cassandras of post-Christendom. When Caldwell and Delsol (and others) juxtapose pagan and Christian Rome, they are often retroactively reading the contemporary moral fault lines into the historical record. In order to accuse the modern West of a pagan revival, it is necessary to first define and separate the Christian and the pagan, and various culture war topics serve that purpose: Abortion, yes, but also suicide and homosexuality. Things we are assured were once universally abhorred, and are now, if not praised (the authors’ contempt for homosexuality most often emerges in the suggestion that it has passed from abominable vice to celebrated virtue), then at least tolerated and legally protected.
The fundamental problem is this: Christianity is not the special snowflake the authors imagine it to be. When I was sixteen, my pastor introduced me to the work of Jon Levenson, a professor of Jewish studies at Harvard Divinity School, where she had earned her masters in divinity. This was early 1999 or late 1998, in any event many months before the release of the first Matrix film, a point which I will explain later. The first book in question was The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The transformation of child sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity. It was a fascinating deep dive into the textual evidence of a topic conservative Christians would no doubt find abhorrent to contemplate: The possibility that Judaism, and therefore Christianity, grew out of traditions that embraced not simply human sacrifice, but the sacrifice of first born children as part of the early cult of Yahweh.
Sacrifice is at least arguably intrinsic to religion as a social phenomenon, even if it is not an essential component of any divine institution. Until the destruction of the Second Temple, animal sacrifice was a ubiquitous feature of the Yahweh cult. This was a trait it shared with its hated enemies, be they Egyptian, Greek or, much later, Roman. Nor was the cult averse to violence against humans of every age, in the name of divine decrees: The books of Exodus and Joshua record and celebrate the massacre of infant foreigners in the name of Yahweh’s demands for purification. The highest holy day in Judaism celebrates the massacre of innocents during Passover, and most Christians recreate a divine/human sacrifice in the weekly, sometimes daily, Eucharist. Whatever one believes about the claim that Islam is a religion of peace, this much can be said: It cannot match the bloodlust of its Abrahamic forerunners in rhetoric, at a minimum. If one is to believe the records of Exodus, Joshua and the like, the opponents of Jews were treated much as Jewish descendants were treated by the Nazis: A war of ethnic extermination and conquest did not allow for mass conversion.
Around the time that Christianity emerged out of the Greco-Roman cauldron of ancient Palestine, there was also a shift to interior sacrifice in religious life. In part this can be attributed to the loss of the Second Temple, the focal point of sacrifice in Jewish life at the time that Christianity emerged. Once the Romans had destroyed the center of Jewish religious life, the Christian movement quickly became divorced from the remnants of the Jewish religion, which was no longer as centered on Jerusalem. The first major work of rabbinical Judaism, the Mishna (Hebrew for “study by repitition”) was edited at the same time that the Christian New Testament was being compiled and edited, a process referred to by scholars in the field as redaction. This process created a parallel track of canonization for the religions that would become Christianity and Judaism, with both communities using their respective texts as an interpretive key to the earlier Hebrew scriptures.
The historical record is clouded by the success of the movements that became accepted as orthodox as well as ongoing modern disputes between academic experts of the period. Before the temple was destroyed, there were Roman citizens, and others, who sympathized with Jewish religious beliefs and practices, and counted themselves as converts or something approaching converts, but the only known missionaries to non-Jews were the first Christians, including, famously, the Christian saint Paul. The Christian texts, and others, suggest that the controversies over conversion and participation in Jewish life centered not on rites of sacrifice, but diet, circumcision and sexual ethos. Before the religious leadership of the Sanhedrin was destroyed along with the temple, these disputes were presumably more important outside of Jerusalem than within it, and in any event did not lead to formal separation between the two communities until after the temple was destroyed and Jewish leaders began formulating rules to distinguish themselves from the Christian movement and its zeal for downplaying barriers to conversion.
Modern Christianity and Judaism emerged through a complicated process over the course of centuries. During this time, there were significant divisions between the two groups, as well as conflicts with the pagani, the catch-all term that included adherents of non-Abrahamic traditions as well as agnostic opponents, particularly in the upper classes. There was also a third group that intersected Jewish, Christian and pagan circles, known today as the Gnostics. There is very little about Gnosticism as a religion that is not contentious. Its origins, beliefs and practices are obscured by the veil of history and the dominance of what became “orthodox” Christianity, although vestiges of Gnosticism can be found among certain religious groups that remain in the Middle East, including the Druze and Mandaeans. The latter revere John the Baptist and view Jesus as a false messiah, which suggests the possibility if not probability that Gnostic beliefs predated the early Jesus movement. In speaking of Gnosticism here, I am not referring to a particular belief system, but a kind of epistemic spiritual mode, one that is characterized by a belief in a hidden, transcendent divine reality opposed by malevolent forces that have either corrupted this world or are responsible for its creation and the imprisonment of souls in the evil material world. Sometimes, the leader of these dark forces was identified with Yahweh, the god of the Jews.
For centuries, very little was known of the Gnostics outside of what their orthodox Christian opponents wrote about them. This changed with the discovery of texts in the Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi in 1945, a collection that came to be called the Nag Hammadi library. While most of these texts are dated later than the Christian gospels, an important exception is the Gospel of Thomas, a collection of esoteric sayings of Jesus that overlap with the sayings contained in the Synoptic Gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke. The contents of these works were popularized beginning in 1979 by the American historian of religion Elaine Pagels, a Gnostic specialist who, with others, has argued for an early dating of Thomas and the existence of schisms at the very start of the Christian movement.
There is one additional historical point that makes this argument more compelling: The authentic writings of Saint Paul were key to the gnostic interpretation of the Jesus event. Paul even uses language that is eerily reminiscent of subsequent gnostic writings, describing the “god of this world” and various “powers and principalities” ruling over a dark historical era, set to be liberated by the light of Jesus. And while it may at first strain credulity to the breaking point to imagine a Jew describing Yahweh as a force of darkness, as some gnostics did, the gnostics, along with other early Christian groups, believed that there were both esoteric or secret teachings of Jesus, reserved for his inner circle, as well as the exoteric teachings transmitted to the crowds. That there was at one point an esoteric and exoteric distinction is undeniable: Not only is it recorded in the writings of the church fathers from the second century, it also appears in the text of Mark’s gospel. Subsequent “orthodox” Christians argued that these esoteric doctrines were limited to the messianic secret and the sacramental teachings related to the Eucharist, but nothing in the text themselves suggests any such limitation, and the writings of the later heretics provide ample ammunition for the argument that the gnostic hermeneutic key to Paul unlocks a higher transmission of spiritual truth for the believer who has been initiated into the inner circle’s mysteries.
In truth, what is at stake with the decline of Christendom is not changing beliefs. Christianity has existed alongside pagan remnants, gnostic epistemic modes and outright challenges from new religious movements, ideologies and internal schisms since its painful birth in the first century. There is no greater testament to its failure to cohere than the existence of the gnostic movements and various other heresies, the early schism between East and West and the Ethiopian Orthodox, the failure to hold its historic territorial gains against Islam, the Protestant Reformation and of course the recent onslaught of the Enlightenment era. Today, the fastest growing version of Christianity, the Pentecostal movement, is a strange fusion of Protestant fundamentalism, animism and mystical experience that rejects the authority of Christian tradition even as it celebrates a return to an imagined primitive Christian practice.
The conservative Christian intellectual class, above all else, is modernist and rationalist. It accepts market and modernist logic, to the point that it imagines the great loss is not belief in the Incarnation or the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, but the consensus on abortion and homosexuality. Having accepted the moral revaluation of every past vice, from divorce (or easy annulment in the case of Catholicism) to usury and heresy, it stands against those current proxies for its political enemies. Stewing in the world of sensory indulgence that late capitalism has created, the Christian intellectual class is fixated on easy enemies, not the kind of soul searching that would be called for if the class held to the actual, historic beliefs of Christian tradition. Medieval believers were cognizant enough of their sinfulness to realize that they were content with partaking in the Eucharist only a few times each year, following confession and penance. Today, traditionalist Catholic usurers do not even recognize their economic exploitations as a sin, much less one that would bar them from the weekly consumption of the body and blood of Christ.
Changing beliefs and mores do not define the Christian conservative. Instead, what is at stake is a loss of authority. They are not defenders of traditional Christianity, but defenders of those institutions that were infused with Christian claims to authority. This more than anything else explains why, in traditionalist Catholic discourse, the topic of Catholic sexual abuse scandals is quickly conflated with liberalism and tolerance of homosexuals, even as the growing demands for Catholic accountability from the outside focus on the abuses of authority that enabled the scandal to begin with.
The picture on the Protestant side differs only slightly, in the sense that the clerical class is distributed across ever splintering denominations and reconstituted versions of various fundamentalist institutions. And while Catholic decline is a fait accompli in the historic centers of Catholic power, the loss of American Christian social and political clout is a dagger into the heart of global Protestantism. Soon, the global centers of Protestantism will be Nigeria and China, not the United States. And despite conservative attraction to Eastern Orthodoxy as a potential holdout, the divided Orthodox world is beset by ethnic nationalism and collaboration with the formerly atheistic powers of Russia and its client states. The conservative Protestant and Orthodox movements are handmaidens of irreligious, even anti-religious secular powers, and little more. While the conservative Christian intelligentsia may celebrate the draconian anti-gay laws of modern Russia, it is the world leader in elective abortions. Even using the dubious measures advanced by the likes of Caldwell and Delsol, the centers of Orthodoxy are post-Christian.
Still, there is much that Delsol does seem to get right about the modern moment. In describing the end of Christian era, she focuses on the similarities between the current era of Christian decline and the sharp fall of paganism in the Fourth Century. And there are similarities, certainly when examining that modern heir of the Roman Republic, the United States of America. As in the fading days of pagan Rome, the demographic centers of the old religion are found in the rural, declining hinterlands of the empire and not the increasingly post-Christian urban centers. The ideological superstitions of rural Christians are given about as much deference by the elites in the commercial centers as were the pagan practices under Justinian. But what Delsol and the conservative Christian intellectual class cannot admit is the striking failure of their beloved Christian institutions.
The Rise of Modern Gnosticism
For a political orientation that purports to accept personal responsibility for one’s failures, modern conservatism almost uniformly blames dark, elite forces for its misfortunes: Academics, Jews, gays and so forth. The usual suspects are lined up: French egalitarianism and the Revolution of 1789, the radicalism of the New Left in the 1960s and of course the supposed pinnacle of such trends in the form of Marxism. The sexual revolution and its supposed victims. The rise of racial ressentiment. Socialism in any form.
But the world we actually live in is as much a product of the 1990s as it is the 1960s. And crucially, it is the 1990s that witnessed the beginning of the current decline of Christianity in the United States. This was also, paradoxically, an era defined by the rise of religious forms of nationalism and the growth of conservative flavors of Christianity. And culturally, particularly in America, it was defined by the return of certain gnostic modes of spirituality and politics. To which I now turn.
Although conservative religious denominations grew the fastest in the 1990s, the wider culture was characterized by religious experimentalism and deconstruction. The academic search for the so-called “historical Jesus” became a popular topic for news coverage, as did religious movements focused on apocalyptic revelation. The popular Left Behind series, while largely constrained to the conservative Christian market, advocated for the imminent return of Jesus and the idea that we were living in the “End Times.” There were also non-Christian and secular beliefs that the Millennium represented some kind of revelatory period in world history. Francis Fukyama’s “End of History” thesis became popular, and it was well received in a culture where the Cold War ended in the apparent victory of the capitalist West. The decade was also marked by the rise of new conspiracy theories, including the popular belief in alien visitation that reached a cultural high water mark with the X-Files franchise. The looming potential of biotechnology, in the form of genetically modified foods and the cloning process, sparked utopian and dystopian ideas about the prospects of genetic engineering. Finally, the transhumanist movement, and the related belief that the world might be the equivalent of a computer simulation, were largely products of the 1990s, although there were of course historical precursors.
I believe that these cultural trends point to a flaw in the conservative Christian intellectual class’ assessment of modern religious belief and identity. In the 1990s, changes in information technology brought these ideas to the fingertips of every American. Similarly, advances in computer technology made visual representation of these ideas more lucrative, believable and tangible. It was not merely possible to imagine in the Mind’s Eye that scientists could resurrect dinosaurs with the magic of genetic engineering or that the world was a vast computer simulation. One could now point to fairly complex visual narratives of these concepts in the form of Jurassic Park and The Matrix.
Most crucially, these ideas were now capable of dissemination without the mediation of traditional gatekeepers. Pastors and priests were confronted not simply with books that proclaimed the truth of, say, the Gospel of Thomas, but also questions from lay believers who happened across films like Stigmata. As an institution, the Catholic Church not only found itself on the defensive, but its pope became well known for issuing apology after apology for past moral wrongs: From Jews, women, heretics and on down the line, the pope issued apology after apology to the victims of historic injustices wrought by Catholicism and Catholics.
At the same time, the growth of Pentecostalism pointed to a Christianity that arguably has a stronger resemblance to gnosticism than traditional orthodoxy. Pentecostals eschew talk of creeds for stories of personal conversion and spiritual experience, and in this way resemble the potpourri of beliefs and practices associated with the New Age spirituality movements. They are adept at attracting indigenous converts because they emphasize personal experience with spiritual forces, as well as material gains from conversion. And unlike the Catholic Church, they are open to married and female clerical leadership.
It should come as no surprise that the conservative Christian flirtation with gnostic modes of spirituality manifests in political ideologies as well. The Q Anon phenomenon is popular with evangelical Christians, and particularly those who are attached to charismatic or Pentecostal spirituality. The movement, which posits that Donald Trump is opposed by a dark cabal of Satanic pedophiles who sometimes literally drink the blood of children, has become a kind of “choose your own adventure” conspiracy theory that refuses to day even more than a year after Trump’s decisive electoral loss. This phenomenon is not limited to charismatic Christians in the United States; in Africa and South America, Pentecostals have characterized various mundane political conflicts as forms of spiritual warfare. In Brazil, President Bolsonaro has a messianic following that is similar to the Q cult in America, with Covid 19 conceived of as a conspiracy to de-Christianize the country and force a socialist agenda.
Critics of Q Anon are quick to note the similarities it has to long discredited anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, but a larger point of overlap is more modern: The Satanic panic of the 1980s-1990s and the more current belief in large sex trafficking rings that prey on women and children. Movements to curb the imagined vast pedophile conspiracy are often led by women, much as the gnostic movement enjoyed the support of female leadership. There is also crossover with feminist groups, and the anti-trafficking movement has enjoyed political success by leveraging Republican support for funding anti-trafficking initiatives. Victims of human trafficking even enjoy a special immigrant visa in the United States, even though many victims of sex trafficking are simply exploited adult sex workers.
As an epistemic mode, gnosticism is surprisingly versatile and democratic. It empowers individuals and small groups against the “powers” of a given age, and casts them into the role of despotic villains hiding malevolent truths behind the veil of ordinary life. When Delsol et al critique “le woke” or “gender ideology” as modern resurrections of the gnostic spiritual mode, they do have a point. Where they fail, however, is in their attempts to distinguish the gnostic mode from traditional Christianity. Consider, for example, a January 2021 essay decrying the new forms of gnostic heresy by Edward Feser, a conservative Catholic philosopher at Pasadena City College. What is most revealing about this essay are the painful contortions Feser must make to distinguish (and therefore, exempt) traditionalist Christianity from the ancient and gnostic heresies he decries. And while he rightfully identifies the Q Anon movement as a right wing example of this gnostic mode, he is at great pains to explain that we can forget about Q Anon because, after all, it does not enjoy the same levels of elite support that, say, critical race theory does.
But of course it does. Claiming otherwise requires being blind to the pervasive acceptance of the sex trafficking panic among elites, as measured by the existence of, inter alia, the aforementioned trafficking visa, the existence of human trafficking legal clinics (including at that bastion of progressivism, the University of Michigan) and most importantly, a bipartisan consensus on the evils of sex trafficking in particular, leading to initiatives against sex trafficking by state attorney generals, local prosecutors and of course law enforcement. To sustain their existence, these institutional realities require belief (or at least significant public lip service) in a vast network of sex trafficking rings that threaten the virtue and/or autonomy of women and children. Q Anon offers little more than an apocalyptical, populist and partisan re-interpretation of the same set of facts.
In order to imagine that Abrahamic orthodoxy (be it Christian, Jewish or Islamic) offers a decisive alternative to this epistemic mode of gnosticism, proponents of Abrahamic orthodoxy point to two primary characteristics they believe distinguish gnosis and orthodoxy: The first is the essential goodness of creation and the second is the stabilized and essentialist sexual order in Abrahamic patriarchy.
With respect to Christianity, the first claim is misleading to the point of being an intentional misrepresentation. Anyone who reads the New Testament and follows it up with a review of early Christian history will be left with the profound sense that its authors and the early church fathers believed the current world was corrupted beyond repair in the absence of direct divine intervention. Traditional Christianity may indeed affirm the original, primordial goodness of the world, but the present age is corrupted and evil and has to be redeemed with a recurring human/divine sacrifice in the form of the Eucharist. Humans must resist an inherently sinful nature in order to become sanctified, in cooperation with the Holy Spirit. And for the vast majority of Christians, this process of sanctification will continue after death, in purgatory. What’s more, to believe any of it as presented in the gospels and the writings of Paul requires massive re-interpretation in light of modern geology and biology. Even if the first humans were biologically perfect and immortal, that was over a hundred thousand years ago. According to traditional Christian orthodoxy, evil has ruled this world far longer than any human civilization has existed. Any distinction drawn between Christian Gnosticism and orthodoxy on this point is a matter of definitional hand waving.
Similar problems surround the second proposed distinction. Paul’s writing makes it clear that the Body of Christ draws no spiritual distinction between the male and the female, which is a position that the gnostics shared, as reflected as early as the Gospel of Thomas. Moreover, if sex is indeed fundamental and essential, it precedes conception as much as it is formed at conception. By slowing and segregating X-Chromosome and Y-Chromosome bearing sperm, researchers can manipulate the sex-outcomes of fetal development in mammals without resorting to selective abortion. Nor do all fetuses develop with the typical chromosomal binary that determines sex. Are we to believe that Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, which results in a human with XY chromosomes who nonetheless appears male, is a product of the Fall and Original Sin? If so, why does it not remit after baptism? And since eunuchs can become priests, or have in the past, why can’t a “woman” with XY chromosomes? These are of course silly theological questions, but the line drawing is no more arbitrary than the lines drawn over fetal viability. Catholic traditionalists will be hard pressed to offer answers that are not as arbitrary as the ones offered in support of abortion access.
But the primary problem is simply historical: There is no longer any reason to credit the authority of traditionalist Christianity, even on its own terms. A gnostic interpretation of Christianity is as historically plausible as an orthodox interpretation, and both come with considerable contradictions and deviations from what is most historically plausible. By its own behavior, including its apologies, the Vatican has ceded sufficient moral ground to its critics to call its current pronouncements into question.
The Religious Impulses of the Current Year
What does it mean to be spiritual or religious in 2022? I believe that the primary problem we encounter in answering this question is that we carry within us an unwarranted belief in the stability of religion and spirituality as identities or behavior. Whether or not that stability once existed, we have entered an era where religion and spirituality exist without the gatekeepers that once regulated both doctrine and communal expression of religion. Although this trend predates the rise of the internet and social media, the rise of digital culture has touched every aspect of human society, and religion is no exception.
Although the technology in question is new, the reality of the social impact of technology is not. In the history of the West, changes in technology have produced massive social shifts in our religious experiences, from the turn from scrolls to codex to the printing press and improved literacy and access to translations of the scriptures. But just as the internet and social media create webs of social network for information exchange in politics and other current events, they also create alternative sources for religious and spiritual information, including sources that bypass previously cumbersome obstacles to learning about alternative religious and spiritual practices. If you did not live in a major American city in the year 1950, you were very unlikely to have access to much information about Buddhism outside of the local library. With the advent of platforms like YouTube, Facebook and MeetUp, you can learn meditation techniques from Tibetan monks free of charge, and even join a variety of online Buddhist communities. If you have a question about the finer points of Catholic doctrines concerning conscience, you have access to the Vatican’s own material as well as educational materials from a number of outlets, with different ideological perspectives and functions. The ongoing Covid pandemic has accelerated existing trends that sever the relationship between geography and religious identity as well, forcing religious institutions to offer a wider variety of services online.
In an earlier religious epoch, geography was destiny. With notable exceptions, one’s religious and spiritual sensibilities were largely determined by place of birth and heritage, two variables that were often or even usually dependent on each other. New spiritual and religious modes, whether newly created or imported from elsewhere, were socially disruptive and treated as such. Even religious conversion was centered in locations where it was socially feasible, both in terms of a political and legal environment conducive to it as well as those locations where communal religious expression in a new mode was possible as a result of migration or immigration.
The connection between geography and belief has weakened over the course of centuries, but the rise of instantaneous global information networks is a qualitative shift unlike anything else in the past. Barring a breakdown in this new form of information exchange, the link between geography and beliefs will presumably continue to weaken. When coupled with the loss of effective gatekeepers, religion and spirituality resemble open source coding, and even the communal aspects of spirituality and religion become crowdsourcing phenomena.
To be sure, there are rites and practices that cannot be extricated from their religious settings. If you desire the Catholic Eucharist, you can only find it in a Catholic mass. But surveys consistently reveal that few people even understand the significance of the Eucharist from a Catholic theological perspective. And based on declining attendance records, not many people care enough about those rites to sustain them, at least not in the same way they did in the past.
To summarize, what is being lost is not Christian culture per se, but the authority associated with Christian institutions. In future posts, I will explore gnosticism more in depth, including the historic and modern Christian critiques of it, as well as the other trends that are driving spirituality today and the other problems associated with critiques of emergent spirituality and religion.