Has Christianity Lost Its Stickiness? Paul Kingsnorth & Bijan Omrani Debate Faith’s Future

Christianity has been in declining health for years; however, rumors of its death have been greatly exaggerated. While it has often looked as if it could barely walk, there are signs that it may still have some spring in its step. Historian Bijan Omrani, author of “God is an Englishman,” and acclaimed writer and recent convert to Orthodox Christianity, Paul Kingsnorth, met on Unbelievable? to explore the reasons behind Christianity’s decline and why we might be seeing a revival. 

Adhesive remover

Omrani believes that the decline of Christianity has been a relatively recent phenomenon, while Kingsnorth believes it has been sporting a death rattle for centuries.

Omrani suggests that the decline began in the 1960s when rapid advances in technology, along with radical shifts in how we address mental health issues, made the church irrelevant. 

“It’s not that society chose to discard Christianity. I don’t think it had anything to do with the rise of rationalism in the age of enlightenment in the 18^th century. I think it was much more about this perfect storm of technology in the 1960s, combined with the change in the way we see psychology.” (Omrani)

Historically, the church served as the glue that held society together. However, with the rise of new technologies, we became more self-reliant. This growing independence forced us to carry the psychological burden of being responsible for meeting all our needs. This trend has only accelerated over time. Our material, emotional, and spiritual needs are now easily satisfied by ordering from Amazon, listening to an Oprah podcast, or downloading Deepak Chopra books on Kindle. With everyone having a smartphone and a mental health professional on speed dial, the church, instead of being a social glue, had become a snare preventing people from becoming their “authentic selves.”

The combined non-stick properties of modernism and postmodernism dissolved the church’s once-powerful ability to mobilize itself for social good. The technological advances brought by modernism acted as an adhesive remover, which was appropriated by the postmodernists and liberally applied to the culture to further their deconstructive agenda. The church became an obstacle to social “progress” because it was perceived to be anti-science, and the inherited wisdom it tried to pass down just sounded like the scolding of a grumpy old man. 

Starting in the 1960s, the church was placed in a cultural Hadron Collider, shattering the Body of Christ into countless particles, each sporting a bit of a God complex. Omrani summarized it like this;

“I think that those two things together, this technology which makes for the capacity of atomization, combined with this new ideological notion that atomization of the individual is a good thing, then, suddenly, the transmission and respect given to inherited wisdom, slow wisdom, breaks up, and societies break up.” (Omrani)

Great Divorce

The host, Andy Kind, pointed out a similarity between the atomization described by Omrani and the depiction of hell in C.S. Lewis’s book, “The Great Divorce.” In one especially memorable scene, a ghost riding on the bus from hell to heaven describes hell to a fellow passenger as a place where people are constantly moving farther and farther away from one another, partly because they find their neighbors irritating, but more importantly, because they no longer need a community since all their needs are met.

“The trouble is, they have no needs. You get everything you want (not very good quality, of course) by just imagining it. That’s why it never costs any trouble to move to another street or build another house. In other words, there’s no proper economic basis for any community…It’s scarcity that enables a society to exist.” (C.S. Lewis - The Great Divorce)

I find this description quite prescient, as today we can get whatever we want, whenever we want, and however we want, with just a click of a mouse or a tap on a phone. We can buy food, find love, and even attend a church service without bumping into someone in a grocery aisle, mingling at a singles bar, or sharing a greeting at a church gathering. We have a plethora of opportunities, but what we need is scarcity to form a community. We treat the internet as if it were the seventh heaven, but it’s starting to feel more like the tenth circle of hell. It makes you wonder if the Antichrist’s plan all along was to make life on Earth as hellish as possible by transforming it into an anti-community so he could slip in unnoticed.  

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Christian anorexia

Kingsnorth pushed back on Omrani’s timing of the Christian decline, noting that if it ever was a glue, it lost its stickiness long ago, and that the Christian edifice we have been rallying around has been in ruins for centuries. 

“I would probably disagree with you (Omrani) when you say that 25 years ago Christianity was the guiding moral force. I don’t think it has been a guiding moral force for a very long time. I think that what’s been going on for a long time is that there has been a hollow version of Christianity, which has just been standing like the columns in a ruined Roman temple, and the columns have finally fallen down.” (Kingsnorth)

Kingsnorth acknowledges that “Christianity was the founding basis of what we now call the West” but points out that its decline had begun far earlier than the 60’s, “I would trace it back to the Reformation to be honest with you. As an Orthodox Christian, I would trace it back to the Great Schism of 1054.”

Kingsnorth pointed out that part of the problem with these discussions is how we define Christianity. He worries that we have confused Christianity with the cultural infrastructure it erected and not the Christ who died to make it possible. 

“I think the question here…is what you mean by Christianity…Are we talking about the teachings of Christ or are we talking about a useful version of those teachings that can hold a culture together, because those are two very different things.” 

Christianity deserves recognition for its significant contributions to Western culture, as documented in excellent books like “Dominion” by Tom Holland and “The Air We Breathe” by Glenn Scrivener. However, Kingsnorth worries that these are just the skeletal remains of a faith that has been lifeless for centuries. Christians have tried over the years to breathe life into those bones, but they mistook the spirit of the age for the Holy Ghost. They ended up creating an anorexic Christianity that was so fixated on how culturally sleek it appeared in the mirror that it failed to see it was wasting away. If we don’t make Jesus the reason for this spiritual season, then the church will remain nothing more than an ossuary filled with the brittle bones of cultural Christianity. Let’s hope that the church’s recent brush with death sparks a “come-to-Jesus” moment. 

Low-hanging fruit

Both guests acknowledged that the spiritual revival we are currently experiencing has a particular Christian flavor to it. However, we need to remind ourselves that just because someone casually says “Lord, Lord” and spends all their time building and maintaining Christian culture, that doesn’t mean that Jesus knows them. 

We get excited when Richard Dawkins calls himself a cultural Christian, Jordan Peterson shares psychological insights from the Bible, and Douglas Murray calls himself a Christian atheist. However, just because a few intellectuals waltz around the edge of Christianity doesn’t justify a victory dance. Maybe we should rethink our evangelistic approach if we make the fruit of the Spirit so low-hanging that even Dawkins is tempted to take a bite. 

What will the church do with this spiritual revival? Will it focus all its energy on building up the infrastructure of Christian culture or on introducing people to Christ? 

“Maybe the real question that we’re honing in on here is what the relationship between the church and the world should be… how much does Christianity basically compromise the teachings of Christ in order to try and create this thing called a Christian society?” (Kingsnorth)

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Summer of Love, Winter of Discontent

Christians tried to hang tinsel on the skeletal remains of the church to attract young people, which was a tacit admission that it wasn’t competing for spiritual attention but cultural attention. Pop religion, as it turns out, was no better than pop culture. John Lennon, in a 1966 interview with the London Evening Standard , infamously said;

“Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue about that; I’m right and I’ll be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first – rock ‘n’ roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.” (John Lennon)

I don’t think he was bragging about the Beatles’ popularity as much as he was pointing out that Christianity is just as shallow as popular music, and both will eventually fade away; it was just a matter of which one goes first. Interestingly, Lennon thought “Jesus was all right,” but he didn’t like how His “thick and ordinary” disciples ruined it. Sadly, the church accused him of blasphemy until someone came up with the great idea that a “Yellow Submarine” themed Vacation Bible School would bring kids to Jesus. Kingsnorth noted how young people have grown tired of pop Christianity. 

“They don’t want a Christianity that looks like a dodgy version of pop culture, they don’t want a Christianity that tells them what they want to hear. They want the truth of the faith, they want the mystical power of the faith…That’s what people are looking for when they go to Buddhism or Hinduism or anything else; they’re looking for a powerful spiritual truth that is beyond the world and will transform them. They don’t want the Beatles with a bit of Jesus [thrown] in.” (Kingsnorth)

Our children have grown up and left the warmth of the church camp summer of love with their Jesus T-shirts and now find themselves freezing to death in the winter of their discontent with precious little to keep them warm. We handed them Sunday school hand warmers to make the cold, cruel world a bit more tolerable, but what they really needed was a refiner’s fire. We thought they wanted to take the path of least resistance, but it turned out they wanted a spirituality that was “beautifully hard.”

One of the criteria Kingsnorth used for choosing a church was the one that was least “bent by the world, the church that has least changed its teachings.” He ultimately selected the Eastern Orthodox church because “it hasn’t changed itself to suit the world.” He believes that this is one reason why ancient traditions have become so attractive to young people. The good news is that while this spiritual revival draws on age-old wisdom, it is also drinking from a fountain of youth, which bodes well for the future of the church. 

Raising a faith

After a season of spiritual decay, we are experiencing a rebirth of belief in God that has the nose, toes, and eyes of the Body of Christ. However, since we are still in the newborn period, we can’t know for certain if it will grow up to be a favored son or a prodigal child. Therefore, the church must not neglect its parenting duties and become preoccupied with gaining political favor, remodelling sanctuaries, or upgrading sound systems. It must not entrust the care of this newborn faith to the nanny state, or a cultural au pair, but must diligently train it up in the way it should go so that even when it is old it will not depart from it. (Proverbs 22:6) 

Erik Strandness is a physician and Christian apologist who has practised neonatal medicine for over 20 years and has written three apologetic books. Information about his books can be found at godsscreenplay.com