Michael Matheson Miller
The Decline of Christianity, the Rise of the “Nones” and Philosophies of the Person that Shape Unbelief
Photo by Shashi Chartuvedula on Unsplash
This episode of the Moral Imagination Podcast is a talk I gave at AmPhil’s Center for Civil Society conference in November, 2023 on the “Rise of the Nones.” According to Pew Research, those who declare no religious affiliation - None - are now the largest religious category in the United States.
In this talk I address several overarching reasons for the decline of Christianity and address how five dominant visions of the human person including person as a cog or scourge, transhumanism & transgenderism, plastic anthropology, and the person as a commodity — also play a key role not only in despair and anxiety, but contribute both to the decline of Christian belief and the rise of secularism and pantheism/new paganism.
This talk is a thematic overview and distillation of two longer lectures I give on five false anthropologies and 10 reasons for unbelief and the decline of Christianity. Some of the topics I address include
Breakdown of the Family - specifically decrease in fatherhood participation, and its impact on religious practice
Sexual Revolution - disorients the person and relationships between men and women
Feminism & Smashing the Patriarchy — “Flight from Woman”
Egalitarianism and Pantheism - Tocqueville’s prediction of the rise of pantheism in democratic societies
Technology + Technological Society:
Practical: use of technology and propaganda
Theoretical: Empiricist rationality is incoherent and severs relationship between affectivity and reason
Scientism: vision of a technical solution to evil, sin, suffering
Humanitarianism and what I call “Almost Christianity”
Failures of the Church: scandal, corruption, assimilation, and failure to teach and catechize
Loss of non-linguistic catechesis
When people are leaving Christianity today, do they know what they are leaving?
Confusion about the nature and destiny of the human person and what it means to be an embodied person
Plastic Anthropology —malleable based on feelings
Transhumanism / Transgenderism - combination of biology and technology
Person as Cog
Person as Scourge
Person as Commodity — Everything becomes an object of trade. Del Noce’s concept of Pure Bourgeois
Conclude with several suggestions to address the loss of faith and confusions over anthropology
Re-affirm that Being is good and intelligible - Our bodies are good
Each person is a subject and not simply an object
Defend Reason and Freedom
We are embodied and Embedded Persons— our bodies are not accidental
Thinkers I address include Augusto Del Noce, Joseph Ratzinger, C.S. Lewis, Henri DeLubac, Carrie Gress, Karl Stern, Christopher Palmer, Jaron Lanier, Max Scheler, Joseph Pieper, John Paul II
See www.themoralimagination.com for book links and related podcasts.
Resources
Related Podcasts include
Carlo Lancellotti on the thought of Del Noce
Mary Eberstadt on Primal Screams
Some of the books I mention in the talk include: