Time and Christianity. How it is vulnerable and not immortal. See it on an axis of social change.
The Christians like to say Christianity has been around for 20 centuries, but that is look at time like a physicist. Looking at time against a social change axis, the end of Christianity can be seen.
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Christian bragging about being around 20 centuries.
Christianity is now in its 21st century and that gives Christians great confidence that they will be around for a lot longer. However, the Christians are looking at time like a physicist does, which is surprising for a religious movement.
Institutions, movements, nations, species face extinction when they can’t adapt to change. Surviving in a static environment is one thing, surviving in a changing situation is another.
Social Change versus time.
Social change, in terms of the construction of society, its material basis, its relations in society. Yes, one place might change their set of rulers, but there might not be any real change in terms of how the society works.
Western society and the modern world can be thought of having change. This is an exponential curve put together to represent aggragate change in society, which would be multiple factors, and it is somewhat just a general idea. Precisely what would be a proxy for social change would be hard to define, but we do see that society has changed a lot more in the present and is changing ever faster.
Imagine this is a plot of Change vesus Time.
You can see almost all the social change is happening after 1500, and half of that will occur in the 21st century.
Another way of looking at the same data is by swapping the X and Y axises.
However, this bar chart makes it clearer. In terms of social change, the first 17 centuries of Christianity are very little on the axis of social change. Since the 18th century Christianity has been in decay, first losing intellectuals during the 18th century Englishment, then losing credibility with broader segments of the public. With this plot of social change, Christianity is going to face more change in the 21st century than it has in its entire previous history.
Perhaps I am too aggressive in plotting social change and so lets use a power function.
You can see most of the social change occurs after 1500.
As a horizontal bar graph. The 15 centuries of Christianity don’t mean much in terms of surviving social change. Whether Christianity will survive the future is revealed by how well it has been doing since 1700. As social change has accelerated since 1700 religion and religiousity has been declining and more rapidly. It is strong where society has changed less, where the economies are less advanced.
The Catholic church was Christianity for centuries and had successfully suppressed dissident religious beliefs and individuals. Then the printing press is invented and Protestantism is born as Luther’s theses can be printed and distributed.
When you only look at time as a physicist, the talk of 20 centuries of the Christians is impressive, but surviving in nearly static societies isn’t so impressive. When when you look at Christianity surviving against a scale of social change, you see the first 15 centuries don’t count for so much. You can see that for the majority of the bar chart of change, Christianity is declining.
The reality is that instead of 20 centuries proving Christianity will exist, we have three centuries showing an accelerating decline with change.
We can defeat Christianity. It only looks eternal against a timeline of static societies.
Christianity isn’t immortal, it isn’t invulnerable. Again, we need not think that it is, because it has lasted centuries in static societies.
We shouldn’t be complacent though. Social change might drive new and different trends for Christianity in the future. We just need to realize that Christianity is a human phenomenon like any other and it can come to and end, especially if we help the decline of Christianity along.
We should realize that not only Christianity is invulnerable, now is our chance to bring it down.
