Has Secularization Hurt Christianity?

Logic and common sense might tell us that the secularization of society would hurt Christianity. However, as society has gone more away from the faith, this has not seemed to hurt the faith. If anything, it has made those of the faith stronger in the faith. There are a few reasons for this.

The first is the way that the French Revolution took the church, or began to take the church, out of any political power.^[1] This would remove the possibility of the state influencing the church so that the church would simply be the church.

This departure of the church from the state lead to the beginnings of secular influences within the state. This caused Christians to think differently, or to be more accurate, more theologically. Apologetics to counter the thinking of the age became a focus and skillset for many Christian scholars and even lay people.^[2]

A third positive outcome is that Christians realized that controlling the culture by dominance would not be the answer or the way to truly win hearts and minds. To win the culture they would first need to transform the culture.^[3] This is something that we should be more mindful of today. Controlling the culture accomplishes nothing if it is against their will. We must transform the culture. This is precisely the point Mark Ward makes when he talks about the need to contend with a culture that does not see the divine in everyday life.^[4] What we are seeing today is a continuation of the societal secularization.

A final benefit of societal secularization, and perhaps the greatest benefit to Christianity, is the expansion of global missions that was seen as a result. During the time of Christendom, there was no real focus on global missions, everything was, for the most part, centralized to Christian Europe. With the demise of Christendom, the church now had reason to branch out. This expansion resulted in a huge expansion of the Christian faith. Noll writes, “the nineteenth century was experiencing the greatest increase ever recorded in the number of Christian believers and a greater proportional increase than at any time since the fifth century.”^[5]

While the fall of Christendom and the rise of a secular society may have seemed bleak, we can see that the impact on Christianity was positive. It moved the church out of its comfort zones of control and centralization to theological precision, cultural transformation, and global expansion.

^[1] Mark A. Noll, Turning Points: Decisive Moments in the History of Christianity, Third Edition (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2012), 244.

^[2] Noll, 251.

^[3] Alister McGrath, Christianity’s Dangerous Idea: The Protestant Revolution: A History from the Sixteenth Century to the Twenty-First (London: SPCK, 2007), 318.

^[4] Mark Ward, “Review of The Doctrine of Creation: A Constructive Kuyperian Approach by Bruce Riley Ashford and Craig G. Bartholomew,” ed. Kyle C. Dunham, Detroit Baptist Seminary Journal 26 (2021): 143.

^[5] Mark A. Noll, Turning Points: Decisive Moments in the History of Christianity, Third Edition (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2012), 245.