I’m puzzled by those who think it wise to be Christians without having a way to think of God’s Creation on its own terms but from a Christian viewpoint. They worship and then move back into a society more skeptical than pagan. The big problem is that we modern men have piled up huge mountains of empirical facts, some of those mountains being put in the context of greater maps, but not from the viewpoint of Christian believers.
Many have retreated, perhaps from personal preference, to magical views of reality. Despite the recent claim by a Cardinal of the Catholic Church that C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien taught magic leads to evil, their books were filled with good wizards and evil wizards. Magic, in their view, is like anything else in that it can lead to evil, but — far more importantly — they taught that magic is a fundamental part of the world in which we live. Magic is a way of — supposedly — making things behave according to our desires or needs, good or evil. Unfortunately for those who hold to that viewpoint, magic is false to what we know know of the workings of this world. When there’s a conflict between verifiable knowledge of God’s world and the preferences of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, I’ll go with that verifiable knowledge.
Before all else, a Christian has to be honest. Certainly, he has to be honest in perceiving the world God did create rather than some world we might prefer. He also has to be honest in trying to make sense of that world, first on its own empirical terms and then in the light of revealed truths.
When we allow non-Christians or even Christians in their secular roles to have a monopoly on interpreting modern empirical knowledge, we let them shape our minds and the minds of our children for most of our hours and in most of our activities. Our Christian beliefs retreat into a ghetto of sorts inside our own minds. (See the sample chapters for A Man for Every Purpose, one of my Unpublished Novels for the opening pages of a tongue-in-cheek treatment of our modern ability to build walls between different ‘parts’ of our own selves.)
We modern Christians live in two realms of truth, a realm of Christian truths for a few hours a week and a realm of knowledge interpreted in non-Christian or anti-Christian ways for the remainder of our hours. This situation will erode our faith and that of the children we drag along behind us. Most adults and children will decide, “Why bother?”
Why bother? Indeed. As matters stand, my qualified sympathies go with those who’ve decided it isn’t worth getting out of bed to attend Mass or any other sort of Christian services. They’re willing to make a break with an unjustified habit when they’ve got other, more important things to do.
In our modern situation, for which we and our parents are largely to blame, we need strong and positive reasons to remain Christians and a listing of doctrines isn’t going to do it when we see reality in non-Christian or anti-Christian terms. We need to be able to perceive reality as being truly and fully part of the Creation of the God of Jesus Christ. We need well-formed minds and sane imaginations. We need to consider modern empirical knowledge, the history of the Holocaust and of modern warfare as well as quantum mechanics and genetics, and revealed truths. We need to use our minds and imaginations to see this as all one body of truth, most plausibly by extending the story of salvation in the Bible outwards to the entire world, backwards to the so-called Big Bang, and forwards to the end of this universe which is more likely to be a whimpering heat death than a fiery confrontation between angels and demons.
Some are searching for the reasons that so many are leaving Christianity, but that’s looking at things backwards. We should be asking why those many, and all the others, have no strong and positive reasons to be part of a form of belief and practice which places heavy demands on us. The obvious answer is that practicing Christians haven’t given them those reasons. Christianity is a faith in which witnesses go out and catch the attention of God’s lost children so that their attention might be directed to the lamb. It seems miraculous to me that some are still being brought to Christ though the evangelists and preachers, the teachers and writers, no longer have a coherent account of this world. They also have no strong argument that it belongs to the God of Jesus Christ.