By Selwyn Duke

Western Christianity has long been in decline. This makes the Occident very much an outlier as, unbeknownst to many, the faith is growing robustly worldwide. But while the latter reality gets precious little press, much has been written in recent times about the West’s waning faith and the possible reasons for it. But what may be the main reason is almost universally missed.

The COVID-19 situation and how the church has reacted to it (Cult of the Body style) in the West hasn’t helped its cause. The bigger picture, in the United States, is that the number of self-identifying Christians has declined 12 points since just 2012 while (ir)religious “nones” have picked up 10 points, Pew Research Center reported last month. Even more recently, on Sunday, Deutsche Welle (DW) ran a piece entitled “Churches in Germany need a change in outlook”; it informs that while the nation’s Christian majority was taken for granted for centuries, members of Germany’s two main churches (Catholic and Protestant) will at some point this year finally constitute less than half the country’s 83 million population.

Article author Christoph Strack points out that 1990 Germany still boasted “58 million church members … two-thirds of the population.” Now, along with there being 4.5 million Muslims in the nation, “the biggest new religious buildings arising close to Berlin are a prestigious Buddhist temple and the ‘House of One,’ where Christians, Jews and Muslims will worship and pray under one roof,” he writes. (Will they share the same dogmas, too?)

And one roof may be all they’ll soon need

Read the rest here.