The salvation of one’s soul has to serve as the core of Christian belief and practice.
In a recent essay discussing the rapid decline of the Catholic Church, Crisis Magazine editor Eric Sammons sounded the alarm among Catholics and most Christians today. Going over the numbers of a new Pew survey, Sammons writes that “for every 100 people who join the Catholic Church, 840 leave.” Membership at Protestant churches is also decreasing, though at a slower rate: “For every 100 people that become Protestant, 180 leave.”
The great majority of those leaving go on to become “nones” — people with no religious affiliation. Not exactly atheists, most “nones” are the types to say that they “were raised Catholic,” are “spiritual, but not religious,” and “don’t believe in organized religion.” Most of them ascribe to the conventional morality of the day and try to be nice people.
Ironically, both progressive and conservative Christians would seem to agree about what accounts for this exodus: the Sexual Revolution. During the 1960s, attitudes about marriage, sex, and family formation radically flipped. Divorce, premarital sex, contraception, abortion, and alternative sexual orientations were all recast as empowering and good while marriage, chastity, and having children were presented as oppressive.
This paradigm shift precipitated a mass fallout from institutions like the Catholic Church, which opposed this philosophy on every point. Writer David Carlin’s book Three Sexual Revolutions explains at length how this dealt a critical blow to modern Christianity.
Where progressives and conservative Christians would disagree is how to address the change the Sexual Revolution wrought. Progressives, many of whom now make up Church leadership, hope to accommodate these new views by watering down the Church’s teachings on sexual morality and “building bridges” with the LGBT community and pro-abortion feminists. Conservatives, many of whom make up most of the young men now entering the priesthood, hope to double down on Church teachings and call out the failures of the Sexual Revolution, which are legion.
For what it’s worth, each new headline validates the conservative position and discredits progressive project. The tenets of the Sexual Revolution have led to a depopulation crisis in the developed world, widespread social unrest, and an epidemic of loneliness. Meanwhile, the people who have resisted the siren song are much more likely to lead productive, happy, and fulfilling lives.
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