DISAFFECTION WITH CHRISTIANITY - A HYPOTHESIS
I need some help in advance of a lecture I’m giving in France next month. The group I am with is looking to understand and react to the radical changes in religious attitudes in Europe.
Can anyone test the following hypothesis for me?
During the century and a half until around 1970, the vast majority of the populations of Europe and Russia faced two new and traumatic constraints.
The first was the forced movement of a large part of the population from the countryside to the cities and to factory work, very controlled and with very little space for personal initiative. The second was the First World War, where these same people became cannon fodder in indescribable conditions.
In other words, a large part of the population found itself more or less trapped in dehumanizing systems. Of course, as always with trauma, it adapted, in order to continue to live. But at the same time, like all trauma, it remains buried, in this case in the general subconscious - until the moment it could dare surface, often with considerable force and anger.
A possibility that started to be available, around 1970, with an atmosphere of greater personal freedom, linked to changes in industrial structures, better education, birth control, etc.
This is where Christianity was caught short: finding itself on the side of the 'system', a system this system which corralled families into the working-class neighborhoods and huge factories of big cities, and then sent their men to war. A system it supported by generally taking the side of those holding power, and telling people how to live their lives. Making it, in due course, the obvious target of cooped-up anger.
Anger which has sought its revenge against the church-system, by pointing the finger at sexual offenses committed in and by it (as if they did not exist elsewhere - among the scouts, in businesses, etc.).
By extension, the Church and the Christian gospel are still seen in many cases as constraining, diminishing - what a friend called another tax - rather than forces of liberation and human expansion.
If and how Christianity can move beyond this, at least without radical changes of both structures and thought processes, is still far from clear. Something will happen, as God is not going to forsake man, his creation.
And perhaps where I have the largest question mark is Russia. God will not forsake Russia, but it would be hard to blame Him for forsaking the Russian Orthodox Church in its present mindset.