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Today, the Western world has been dominated for the last thousand years by the Abrahamic religions, most notably Christianity... despite the fact that most people, including most Christians, don’t actually believe in Christianity, in their hearts, for all that they might like to protest that they do. In fact, most modern people don’t even know what real “belief” really is, and however they may protest, their actions speak louder than their words. In fact, the Western world has long been too hypocritical in its belief to be considered to be truly in a “state of grace.”
In fact, for most middle class people, Christianity is largely a religion of conscience, professed not out of belief in Christianity itself, but rather in its principles. While many may still call themselves Christian, it is easy to tell that the real religions of the Western world, the things that people actually act as if they believe in, are Science and Greed. Throughout Europe, the High Churches have been in decline for the past hundred years. Even in Italy, the laws of the country run contrary to the holy laws of Catholicism, and most people who call themselves Catholic nonetheless disagree with the Pope on some of the Church’s most vital doctrines, and think nothing of breaking the Church’s laws in such matters as divorce, premarital sex and birth control. In America the High Churches have long been in similar decline, and although Americans have many charismatic and evangelical forms of enthusiastic Christianity that have been flourishing amongst the common people, nonetheless the separation of church and state is strictly maintained as the law of the land, and such practices as praying or teaching religion in schools are forbidden. On the other hand, many schools have sports teams that are named “Devils” or “Demons,” and allow children to go to Hallowe’en parties dressed up like Satan. None of these ambiguities would be allowed in a more sincerely Abrahamic society, such as conservative Islaam.
In general, we are not comfortable talking about our religious beliefs or the hypocrisy of our religious behavior, and don’t like to be questioned on such subjects. However, when it can be gotten out of us, the idea in our heart of hearts is that Christianity is a good thing, at least for proper marryings and buryings, a good guide for community and family, at least as good a belief for our children as Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, and a necessary civilizing force without which we would be savages. In other words, the real significance of Christianity in the modern Western world is not religious at all, but social. For us, Christianity is not generally so much a religion as a lifestyle choice. On the other hand, what has unquestioning power over our souls is rarely Christianity at all, but Science, and of course the God of Greed. Especially, when the two are combined to make Technology, there you have our real unofficial unstated religion; Consumerism.
If this is the case, then, we might ask why keep Christianity around at all, if so few respectable people actually believe in it? But again, that reason is not far to seek either. It is because everyone also knows that that real all-powerful God we actually believe in is Mammon, and although we unquestioningly believe in Him, we still don’t trust Him. Mammon’s real gospel, after all, is Dow Jones, and the competitive dog-eat-dog free market, with its priesthood of white collar criminals. What we all hope something like Christianity does is put the brakes on that a bit, and keep it from running completely wild. And this is something more than mere old fashioned superstition. Today people see more and more terrible things happening to society, with its increasing sensationalism and senseless violence, and they have a suspicion that our Consumerism, our Materialism, our Mammon, is somehow behind all that. That doesn’t make us give up our consumerism, of course, because in fact we can’t; belief is belief. We still believe in Mammon as unquestioningly as a child believes in the bogeyman under the bed. But in that sense we also fear it, and hope that in the end there is some salvation from its worst evils, and it is in that sense that we like to keep Christianity around, with its non-materiallistic values system. We may not feel very Christian ourselves, in our hearts, but nonetheless we always hope that our neighbor at least is a better Christian than we are. Our putative professed Christianity is our way of hedging our social bet.
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