The Church Was Never Supposed to Win a Census
Gabriël Moens, writing in The Spectator Australia, (link below), presents a sombre picture of the de-Christianisation of Australia and the wider Western world. Churches are closing, attendance has declined, traditional Christian moral teaching has lost much of its authority, and political and cultural institutions increasingly operate according to assumptions that would have been alien to earlier generations of Australians. Moens also argues that church leaders have themselves contributed to the problem by embracing fashionable secular political causes while becoming strangely hesitant about defending Christianity's own moral and civilisational inheritance.
There is much in this diagnosis with which a traditional Christian can agree. Australia is plainly less institutionally Christian than it was. Moens points to the closure and deconsecration of churches, declining attendance and the declining role of churches in major life events. He argues that Australia is moving towards a secular society in which basic Christian principles possess progressively less public currency. Yet Christians should be careful about interpreting these developments entirely through the language of decline. Christianity is not ultimately a demographic competition, a political party or a civilisation-maintenance program. Christ did not promise that Christians would constitute 70 per cent of the Australian census, control Parliament, dominate the universities or indefinitely possess the cultural institutions of the West. Indeed, the New Testament repeatedly prepares Christians for something quite different.
The distinction that matters is between nominal Christianity and living Christianity. For much of Western history, identifying oneself as Christian was socially conventional. People were baptised because everybody was baptised. They married in churches because that was where marriages occurred. They described themselves as Anglican, Catholic, Presbyterian or Methodist because these identities were inherited along with family names, football loyalties and national traditions. Some possessed deep Christian faith. Others believed vaguely. Still others participated because Christianity supplied the cultural architecture of the society into which they happened to have been born.
When that architecture collapses, Christianity can appear to suffer an enormous numerical defeat. But something else may simultaneously be occurring: the distinction between cultural Christianity and committed Christianity becomes clearer. Christ himself repeatedly warned against confusing large numbers with genuine discipleship. In Matthew 22:14 comes the famously severe statement: "For many are called, but few are chosen." The Sermon on the Mount is no more reassuring to anyone who imagines that salvation is determined by majority vote. Christ speaks of the narrow gate and difficult way that leads to life, contrasted with the broad way followed by many. Christianity therefore contains within its foundational texts a warning against using popularity as the measure of truth.
This changes the way Christians might interpret de-Christianisation. Suppose a country once records 80 per cent of its population as Christian, but enormous numbers among that 80 per cent rarely pray, seldom attend church, know little of Scripture and accept Christian teaching only when it coincides with prevailing social opinion. Suppose decades later only 30 per cent identify as Christian, but a much larger proportion of that smaller group consciously believes what Christianity teaches and attempts to order life accordingly. Has Christianity necessarily become weaker? Numerically, certainly. Spiritually, the answer is considerably less obvious.
There is an uncomfortable possibility that the age of nominal Christianity inflated the apparent strength of Christianity while concealing its actual weakness. Churches were full partly because Christianity possessed social prestige. Political leaders invoked God because voters expected them to. Schools taught Christian ideas because Christianity remained culturally dominant. None of this was necessarily bad. Christian civilisation produced extraordinary achievements, and Moens is right to emphasise Christianity's profound contribution to Western law, morality and institutions. But social respectability carries its own spiritual danger. When being Christian costs nothing, it becomes difficult to distinguish faith from conformity.
De-Christianisation changes that calculation. Increasingly, particularly on contested moral questions, identifying publicly with orthodox Christianity can impose social costs. The young Christian who rejects fashionable doctrines concerning sexuality, abortion, euthanasia or the nature of the human person may discover that his beliefs are not merely regarded as incorrect but morally suspect. A professional may learn to keep religious convictions private. A student may discover that traditional Christian positions are treated quite differently from other expressions of diversity. That environment can reduce Christian numbers while increasing the significance of Christian identification. Those who remain may increasingly remain because they actually believe.
There is considerable biblical precedent for thinking in terms of a faithful remnant rather than a triumphant majority. Israel repeatedly falls away while a remnant remains faithful. Elijah believes himself virtually alone before learning that others have not bowed to Baal. The early Christians themselves were a tiny minority living within an overwhelmingly pagan Roman Empire. They possessed no favourable census numbers, government subsidies, Christian universities or sympathetic mass media. They nevertheless transformed the civilisation around them. The first Christians did not look at Rome's temples and conclude that Christianity had failed because Jupiter possessed better attendance figures.
This is why Christians should resist despair. Christianity makes claims about truth, salvation and eternity. If those claims are true, their truth does not fluctuate with Australian census results. Christianity was true when twelve apostles followed Christ. It was true when Christians were persecuted. It was true when cathedrals dominated European cities. It remains either true or false today independently of how many Australians tick "Christian" on a government form.
There is therefore a quality-versus-quantity question that discussions of de-Christianisation sometimes miss. A million nominal Christians may contribute enormously to maintaining Christian cultural institutions, and losing them has serious social consequences. But from the standpoint of Christianity itself, the decisive issue cannot merely be how many people retain the label. The question is what people actually believe and how they live.
This is not an argument for retreat. Christians should not respond to cultural decline by abandoning politics, education, law or public debate. Moens raises an important criticism when he argues that some church leaders have become enthusiastic about contemporary political fashions while becoming reluctant to defend distinctively Christian teachings. If Christianity simply repeats whatever secular progressive institutions already believe, people can reasonably wonder what Christianity is adding. A church frightened of being different eventually provides no compelling reason to enter it.
The appropriate Christian response to de-Christianisation is therefore neither panic nor accommodation, but fidelity. Churches should teach Christianity. Christian schools should unapologetically teach the Christian intellectual tradition. Christian leaders should defend the sanctity of life, marriage, family, forgiveness, personal responsibility, charity, humility and the intrinsic dignity of the human person. They should do so regardless of whether these positions are temporarily fashionable. Indeed, cultural adversity may force Christianity to rediscover precisely what made it powerful originally.
The early Church conquered no territory with armies. It possessed very little political power. Christians built communities, cared for one another, rescued abandoned children, tended the sick, accepted martyrdom and proclaimed a message that pagan society frequently regarded as absurd. Their strength came from conviction rather than cultural dominance. Modern Western Christianity may have to relearn that lesson.
There is another reason not to confuse Western secularisation with the disappearance of Christianity from the world. The geographic centre of Christianity has been shifting dramatically. Christianity has expanded enormously across parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America even while Western European Christianity has contracted. The decline of Christianity among affluent Western populations is therefore not identical to the death of the global Church. Perhaps Western Christians became accustomed to assuming that their particular civilisation and Christianity itself were almost synonymous. They are not. Nations rise and fall, cultures change and political systems disappear. Christianity claims allegiance to something transcending all of them.
None of this makes Australia's de-Christianisation desirable. A society can consume inherited Christian moral capital long after abandoning the theological beliefs that generated it. Even contemporary defenders of secular liberalism frequently rely upon assumptions about human dignity, equality, conscience and moral worth whose historical development cannot easily be separated from Christianity. The concern that the West wants the fruits of Christian civilisation after cutting down the tree that produced them deserves serious consideration. Moens makes essentially this point when discussing the erosion of Australia's Christian heritage.
The mistake is moving from that legitimate concern to despair about Christianity itself. Christianity has survived Nero, Diocletian, revolutions, communist dictatorships, wars, schisms, intellectual fashions and repeated predictions of its extinction. It can survive an Australian census. Perhaps the coming period will be harder. Christians may lose institutions. Churches may close. Public morality may continue moving away from Christian teaching. Believers may increasingly find themselves strangers within a civilisation constructed partly from their own inheritance. But Christianity has been there before.
The deeper Christian response is therefore not to ask desperately how we can make everybody call themselves Christian again. It is to ask how Christians can become more Christian. Better a smaller Church that knows what it believes than an enormous nominal Church embarrassed by its own doctrines. Better congregations capable of transmitting the faith to another generation than institutions possessing impressive buildings but uncertain why they exist. Better Christians prepared to stand peacefully against the spirit of their age than millions who retain Christianity merely as an entry on a census form. Many may indeed be called, while comparatively few truly answer. Christianity has never promised otherwise.
The secularisation of Australia is therefore a serious cultural event and perhaps a civilisational tragedy. But Christians should distinguish the de-Christianisation of the state from the defeat of Christianity. They are not the same thing. The Church does not ultimately live or die according to opinion polls, census percentages or parliamentary majorities. Its measure of success is fidelity. If an increasingly secular age strips away nominal adherence while leaving a smaller body of men and women who actually believe, worship and live the faith, Christianity may become numerically weaker while becoming spiritually harder to extinguish.
Perhaps the future belongs not to a Christianity everybody professes because everybody else does, but to a Christianity consciously chosen despite the fact that everybody else does not. That would certainly be de-Christianisation of the old social order. It would not be the end of Christianity; perhaps only a new beginning!
https://www.spectator.com.au/2026/08/the-de-christianisation-of-the-nation/
