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The whole thread, for me at least, is about confirming the Guardian article, that Christianity is declining in Europe. I'd say especially in NW-Europe. I'm not

The whole thread, for me at least, is about confirming the Guardian article, that Christianity is declining in Europe. I'd say especially in NW-Europe. I'm not talking about deist intellectuals and their opinions, or academic theology, or about places other than NW-Europe (New Mexico?), or a few big tourist tickets like Santiago. I'm talking about the popular Christian day-to-day practice of regular people of NW-European communities, of which I can witness the last strange hours in my own community. It's hard for me to come up with numbers beyond the kind of polls shown in the Guardian article or the drop in callings. It's not like we have centuries of headcount records for all the local events, cults and customs that used to exist here, the amount of tresses tied to chapel walls, or logs detailing the time and effort the local farmers, notables and grandmas spent decorating chapels. There have been no double blind control studies of how going to the village church made people's daily behavior slightly more mellow or made the community tighter here. By now there's mostly old pictures, living memories (less every year) and a rapid dwindling of what little remains today. The edited stuff you refer to was a sarcastic quip along the lines of "Now that Christianity is gone, I'm sure celebrities or the state will tell us what to do." I removed it because, reading it back, I thought it detracted both in style and content from my main point. Namely my prediction that future people in my community will regret current people having turned their back on this heritage so recklessly. They may try to reconstruct some of it, but it will be hard without continuity. I can see that happen even if Christian belief itself never bounces back. (Which would actually put such efforts at risk, by making them prone to political recuperation.)

eesmith 9y ago
Well, yes, Christianity had been on the decline in NW (and N) Europe for a long time. What's new is "as default is gone." I'm from the US. My experience with pilgrimages is in the US context. I lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where the local big pilgrimage is to El Santuario de Chimayo. Not a big ticket pilgrimage. Because of this discussion, I remembered that there's also the pilgrimage to San Juan Capistrano, https://www.rcbo.org/year-of-mercy/pilgrimage-oc-sites/ https://www.rcbo.org/year-of-mercy/pilgrimage-oc-sites/ . You say now that you are not talking about "places other than NW-Europe". Thing is, you brought up "20 centuries of Christianity", and since it took a few hundred years until Christianity reached NW Europe, I think it's fair to believe you were talking about all of Christendom. I understand that you are talking about the practice. My point was that you see importance in the connection to 2,000 years of religious faith, but that faith has not been constant over the years. I'll quote again what I quoted earlier: > In the late Middle Ages the congregation sat down on the job and there was a drastic change in Christian worship—perhaps the most important in history. People, in effect, became custodians of individual spaces which they occupied throughout the service, and social distinctions made some spaces more privileged than others.” NW Europe is mostly Protestant, and it's only been 500 years since Luther. Sure, it's connected to the older Catholic faith, but that's then connected to the Jewish faith, and that is connected to the Canaanite and Babylonian religions. Your last paragraph is absolutely true. Look at the modern druids or the Asatru, who lack the continuity with the ancient Celtic and Norse religions, or the Slavic Native Faith. I wonder why we don't have that continuity, or even good records of what it was like then. Could it be that the Christians fought hard to expunge alternate (and ancient) religious practices, and didn't want to make and preserve those records over the centuries? Or, perhaps you could you tell me about the preservation efforts that Christians did during most of those 2,000 years, for the cultures that it replaced? By comparison, the current secular world seems much less likely to destroy traces of what came before. There will be books, movies, art, blogs, recorded sermons and more, by the bucket-full, for those trying to understand what a late 20th century NW-European Christian life was like.
- unknown_apostle 9y ago
  -> 16 vs 20: I said in the beginning (talking about Europe) "rapid destruction of a cultural heritage that has co-evolved together with the European peoples and even their secular institutions for at least 16 centuries." co-evolved. I understand that Christianity became big in Europe only centuries after Christ. And that it has changed and fluctuated a lot in its history. But I think there was never a discontinuity of the sort we see since ~2 generations. "20 centuries" came into play when I deplored a modern fashion in which we're supposed to take the vastness of 2 millennia of highly complex history involving millions or billions of people, strip it from all context, compress it to a few soundbite sized low points and say: "this is Christianity". -> About continuity and pre-Christian paganism: one of the things that fascinates me endlessly about the christian traditions of my community, is how many aspects of it are obviously echoes of pagan times. Many saints that used to be popular here, are not historical figures but thinly disguised pagan deities. A nearby community has (= used to have) a big tradition of Marian worship, which is almost certainly a continuation of an older cult devoted to a pagan fertility goddess. A nearby Christian chapel built next to a well, located beautifully in a forest in the middle of nowhere, was a place of worship in pagan times. Lots of Roman coins were found around the chapel. People used to walk there and tie strips of clothing from sick relatives to the chapel door. I can go on like this for quite a while. I would argue that the transition to christianity, despite its implicit intolerance at the time, does not seem abrupt but rather "organic". Same for theology. (Btw, with some exceptions, this topic doesn't interest me much personally. Just like I don't care much for all the pseudoscience in secular academia.) But anyways, a lot of christian theology is obviously classical philosophy in a Christian jacket, with influences from Platonism to stoicism. In fact, christianity did something antiquity failed to do: in antiquity, becoming literate and trained in classical philosophy was very much a "1 percenter" thing. Early christianity brought a "pop version" of this literacy to a much broader public. To conclude, I'd predict the exact opposite of what you said. To me, the current secular world actually seems more likely to destroy traces of what came before. Turning a church into a hipster lounge is so much more drastic than turning a pagan shrine into a church, or a church into a mosque. The French revolution or the various socialist regimes didn't seek to adapt, echo, continue, soften, change, transform, absorb or even abuse Christianity. They aimed to root it out. The sudden and rapid abandoning of all things Christian suggests the secular revolution is finally succeeding in Europe. It's Brumaire of Year I. Or rather, Germinal of Year L. Obviously, in all our secular glory and freed from the irrational, time consuming habits of our grandparents, Europe may never know wars or bigotry or superstition or pseudoscience or corruption again. And this time I will leave the sarcastic quip in :-)

eesmith 9y ago

Well, yes, Christianity had been on the decline in NW (and N) Europe for a long time. What's new is "as default is gone." I'm from the US. My experience with pilgrimages is in the US context. I lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where the local big pilgrimage is to El Santuario de Chimayo. Not a big ticket pilgrimage. Because of this discussion, I remembered that there's also the pilgrimage to San Juan Capistrano, https://www.rcbo.org/year-of-mercy/pilgrimage-oc-sites/ https://www.rcbo.org/year-of-mercy/pilgrimage-oc-sites/ . You say now that you are not talking about "places other than NW-Europe". Thing is, you brought up "20 centuries of Christianity", and since it took a few hundred years until Christianity reached NW Europe, I think it's fair to believe you were talking about all of Christendom. I understand that you are talking about the practice. My point was that you see importance in the connection to 2,000 years of religious faith, but that faith has not been constant over the years. I'll quote again what I quoted earlier: > In the late Middle Ages the congregation sat down on the job and there was a drastic change in Christian worship—perhaps the most important in history. People, in effect, became custodians of individual spaces which they occupied throughout the service, and social distinctions made some spaces more privileged than others.” NW Europe is mostly Protestant, and it's only been 500 years since Luther. Sure, it's connected to the older Catholic faith, but that's then connected to the Jewish faith, and that is connected to the Canaanite and Babylonian religions. Your last paragraph is absolutely true. Look at the modern druids or the Asatru, who lack the continuity with the ancient Celtic and Norse religions, or the Slavic Native Faith. I wonder why we don't have that continuity, or even good records of what it was like then. Could it be that the Christians fought hard to expunge alternate (and ancient) religious practices, and didn't want to make and preserve those records over the centuries? Or, perhaps you could you tell me about the preservation efforts that Christians did during most of those 2,000 years, for the cultures that it replaced? By comparison, the current secular world seems much less likely to destroy traces of what came before. There will be books, movies, art, blogs, recorded sermons and more, by the bucket-full, for those trying to understand what a late 20th century NW-European Christian life was like.

unknown_apostle 9y ago
-> 16 vs 20: I said in the beginning (talking about Europe) "rapid destruction of a cultural heritage that has co-evolved together with the European peoples and even their secular institutions for at least 16 centuries." co-evolved. I understand that Christianity became big in Europe only centuries after Christ. And that it has changed and fluctuated a lot in its history. But I think there was never a discontinuity of the sort we see since ~2 generations. "20 centuries" came into play when I deplored a modern fashion in which we're supposed to take the vastness of 2 millennia of highly complex history involving millions or billions of people, strip it from all context, compress it to a few soundbite sized low points and say: "this is Christianity". -> About continuity and pre-Christian paganism: one of the things that fascinates me endlessly about the christian traditions of my community, is how many aspects of it are obviously echoes of pagan times. Many saints that used to be popular here, are not historical figures but thinly disguised pagan deities. A nearby community has (= used to have) a big tradition of Marian worship, which is almost certainly a continuation of an older cult devoted to a pagan fertility goddess. A nearby Christian chapel built next to a well, located beautifully in a forest in the middle of nowhere, was a place of worship in pagan times. Lots of Roman coins were found around the chapel. People used to walk there and tie strips of clothing from sick relatives to the chapel door. I can go on like this for quite a while. I would argue that the transition to christianity, despite its implicit intolerance at the time, does not seem abrupt but rather "organic". Same for theology. (Btw, with some exceptions, this topic doesn't interest me much personally. Just like I don't care much for all the pseudoscience in secular academia.) But anyways, a lot of christian theology is obviously classical philosophy in a Christian jacket, with influences from Platonism to stoicism. In fact, christianity did something antiquity failed to do: in antiquity, becoming literate and trained in classical philosophy was very much a "1 percenter" thing. Early christianity brought a "pop version" of this literacy to a much broader public. To conclude, I'd predict the exact opposite of what you said. To me, the current secular world actually seems more likely to destroy traces of what came before. Turning a church into a hipster lounge is so much more drastic than turning a pagan shrine into a church, or a church into a mosque. The French revolution or the various socialist regimes didn't seek to adapt, echo, continue, soften, change, transform, absorb or even abuse Christianity. They aimed to root it out. The sudden and rapid abandoning of all things Christian suggests the secular revolution is finally succeeding in Europe. It's Brumaire of Year I. Or rather, Germinal of Year L. Obviously, in all our secular glory and freed from the irrational, time consuming habits of our grandparents, Europe may never know wars or bigotry or superstition or pseudoscience or corruption again. And this time I will leave the sarcastic quip in :-)