Doom And The Benedict Option

This is the third in a series of posts responding to Rod Dreher's The Benedict Option wherein Rod lays out a plan for remaining faithful to orthodoxy in a culture increasingly hostile to religion. So far, we have:

• Things were more morally confused for the Church in Antebellum America
• Gay marriage is not the crisis some are making it out to be

Major shifts in the way the world works are coming. Many of them will be quite unpleasant. Almost none of them are related to religion, save as it applies to Islam. My argument here is that while things seem to be bad right now, 20 years from now things will be wildly different and that will have unknown effects on the Church. Forces larger than the ones we typically associate with faith are at work.

The West is aging. Japan is in really bad shape with more adult diapers being sold than children's diapers. Europe, including Russia, have birth rates well below replacement, except in the Muslim subculture where the population is growing. Nations and institutions we think of as solid are slowly fading away. Larger and larger portions of Europe will become Islamic over the next 20 years.

The global financial system is quite literally living on borrowed time. I've blogged ad nauseam about this, so suffice it to say that nations with low birth rates plus Muslim growth plus crazy levels of debt will resculpt what used to be the Christian West in far-reaching and unpredictable ways in the next 20 years, none of it for the better.

It may be that the future of Christianity will be found in Africa. Yes, they've got problems, but maybe they're coming out of some of the worst of them instead of going into a maelstrom like Europe and Japan. Statistics on religious behavior in Europe and the US may say one thing, but say something else entirely in Africa.

Note that this is almost entirely orthogonal to the points that Rod tries to make because he's dealing with America. What I'm trying to suggest is that there is energy and activity elsewhere. The enervated state of the Church in the West is matched by its economics and demographics. Are those issues similar or related in some way not unique to faith?

Once upon a time, North America imported religious teaching and evangelization in the form of missionaries from across the sea. Having met some African priests, I could see that happening again.

It would be way cool if the next Pope was one of these guys.