If Decline Can Happen Here, It Can Happen Anywhere

Yet the gates of hell will not prevail

Yesterday my favorite theologians and my favorite novel intersected. The home of St. Gregory of Nyssa, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, and their sister St. Macrina the Younger, Cappadocia means the land of “all the pretty horses.” I explored several cavernous churches in Cappadocia carved into volcanic rock, their walls lavished with frescoes depicting the life of Christ. Dissidents during the iconoclast controversy of the eighth and the ninth centuries held that such eikons trespassed the primal commandment; therefore, they scratched out many of the faces of Jesus and his Mother Mary. Not coincidently, Islam emerged in this part of the world during the same approximate time period. Mohammad and his disciples rejected any form of piety that employed images just as many Christians in the East rejected what they perceived to be their abuse.

Today, the ancient churches of Cappadocia comprise an open-air museum in a land that is now ninety-nine percent Muslim. Like so many of the bones of martyrs and shards of wood from the true cross in these churches, the faith of fathers like Macrina’s brothers is largely now a relic in this place. Long after the Holy Roman Empire fell in the West, Christendom continued— even flourished— in the Byzantine East, yet it too eventually fell and became an item of history. Just as Cappadocia makes the question of Christianity’s relation to Islam inescapable, so too does the passing of epochs invite consideration of Christianity’s present-day decline in the West.

As the journal First Things asserted as recently as their Christmas issue, “As we survey the twenty-first-century landscape, at least in the West, we can see that our founding religion is now defunct as a cultural force and moral guide.” Such sentiments are multitudinous among the conservative Christian commentariat, and the demographic data does not dispute the conclusions which lead them to lament.

While only one percent of the people of Turkey are baptized with the saving flood and cleansing bath of the sacrament, there is nonetheless nearly a million of Turkey’s citizens who worship Jesus. This is no small number for a LORD who needed only twelve to fell an empire.

Just so:

Should Christians in the West feel anxious about the future?

Should we allow ourselves to become entangled in— and disheartened by— narratives of decline?