One of the reasons for the decline of Christianity after 1675 can be seen as the consequences of the Protestant Reformation. The enormous power to govern people’s lives and the concentration of control in the church could not help but arouse discontent among the congregation. People found it no longer possible to tolerate the clergy exercising control over their freedom. Once Christians were able to interpret Scripture for themselves, they placed even less trust in the institution of the church and in papal authority. Their thoughts became more liberated, and they started to trust their own reasoning for what Christians should be.
The Enlightenment dictated that people question everything familiar and comfortable to them. The object of criticism was not only the institutions of the church but also the structure of society and the state. All this led to a revolution whose purpose was partly to overcome the church’s control of the people. Secular humanism dictated a new morality without the participation of God. A huge number of scientific discoveries in the 19th century made science conventionally the new religion (Nickens 2020, 128). People realized what tremendous power they had to transform the world. Progress could be made not by praying hard but by industrial achievement. In addition, science served as a catalyst for improving people’s standard of living and was therefore held in great esteem.
By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution was sweeping much of Europe, changing the economy and affecting all life. There was a mass migration of people looking for work in the industrial centers. These relocations weakened traditional ties between relatives in large families. Such households typically had their own traditions and values, passed down from generation to generation. Many people held that true happiness could be found in searching for wisdom and knowledge of the world around them. Accordingly, religion only hindered people’s pursuit of a better life. Under the influence of the new worldview, the church began to lose a significant portion of its parishioners. However, the response to the abandonment of faith was the twentieth century, a time when people learned how scary a world is where moral norms mean nothing. The shock of what people saw may have been why the late twentieth century was a period of a gradual return to religion, especially to Christianity in Europe.
Christianity has become obsolete for many people in the EU and is gradually turning from a religion into a cultural tradition. People in Western Europe attend church less frequently these days (Ferreira and Chipenyu 2021, 2). Certainly, one reason for this is the high pace of life that is typical in the modern world. However, due to the other circumstances outlined above that contributed to the decline of religion, church attendance is becoming a rare event for Europeans. Nevertheless, as Christianity vanished from Europe, it did not disappear from the world’s religious map but gradually moved to Latin America, Africa, and Asia. On the contrary, there, the biblical precepts are more strictly enforced, and the liberal nature of Western Christian culture is less prevalent. Due to the decline of Christianity in Europe, there may be a religious upheaval in other regions of the world.
References
Nickens, Mark. 2020. A Survey of the History of Global Christianity. B&H Academic.
Ferreira, Ignatius, and Wilbert Chipenyu. 2021. “Church Decline: A Comparative Investigation Assessing More Than Numbers. In die Skriflig/In Luce Verbi 55, no. 1: 1-10.