“Post-Christian” is the term increasingly used to describe the West.
It connotes a people’s movement beyond Christianity toward another destination. Christianity and its beliefs were fine for a time, it argues, but are no longer applicable at this stage of the civilizational journey. Ironically, the question facing the post-Christian West is the same asked by its Greek forefathers: What is our telos? What is our purpose?
A storm is brewing in the post-Christian West as the cultural value of upholding all belief systems as equal buckles under the weight of men and women’s desire for purpose.
Related to this growing dilemma is the need for leadership. Leadership requires a variety of things, not least of which is vision. If it lacks vision, it is not leadership. Vision focuses a people on their purpose. The leader’s task goes beyond managing the status quo to take his or her people from where they are to where they should be. Where a dearth of leadership exists, a scarcity of purpose follows. The cousin of this aimlessness is chaos, and in few Western nations are the birth pangs of such chaos as evident as in France.
In 2024, France has undergone two major nationwide changes. In April, the French parliament overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment enshrining abortion as a constitutional right, with 780 of the 925 senators and members of parliament voting in favor of the change.[1] Two months later, French president Emmanuel Macron dissolved the National Assembly, France’s lower chamber of parliament, and called for snap national elections. The move was considered a serious political gamble, producing a new face to the country’s governance for the remaining three years of Macron’s term.[2]
Beneath the turbulence of these recent convulsions flows a longer and steadier current of equally powerful developments within France. Laïcité, or “secularism,” is considered a national value, having its roots in France’s 19th century struggle with the Catholic church.[3] The resulting 1905 Loi de Séparation (Law of Separation) institutionalized secularism and the idea that public and private morals can and should exist separately in France. A 2018 Pew Research Center survey underscores the effects of this distinct sociological model. Using belief in God, attendance at religious services, and prayer as three measures of religious commitment, it compared spiritual beliefs in Europe to those in the US and found that “American ‘nones’ [those without any religious adherence] are as religious as—or even more religious than—Christians in several European countries, including France, Germany, and the UK.”[4] The major changes taking place in France today are not anomalous or simply the product of democratic politics; they are the side-effects of decisions made over a century ago.
These decisions—premised on the belief that a society’s public morals can be separated from its citizens’ private beliefs—have their critics, including the late Lesslie Newbigin. As he explained, the West, instead of drawing its public morality from its populations, has increasingly sourced its morals from its scientists. The issue with this approach, he said, is the removal of purpose: “A scientific understanding of the world of phenomena must exclude the idea that there is a given purpose running through all things, about which one may be in truth or in error.”[5] Values, however, “are based on some vision of the ultimate nature of things.”[6] Historically, that vision has been captured in religion.
Charles Taylor’s analysis of the post-Christian West defines religion in terms of immanence and transcendence—what is material and “within” human life, and what is spiritual and “beyond” it.[7] Societies have long considered the spiritual and material as dyads that only make sense when paired together, such as north and south or left and right.[8] The separation of these two halves is a uniquely modern notion. Unlike our modern “buffered” selves (Taylor’s term), people in pre-modern societies held a porous view of the spiritual, and the line between the transcendent and immanent was accepted as blurry.[9] Today’s exclusive humanism stands in stark contrast to this pre-modern norm and seeks to entirely remove the spiritual element from Western man. It is “a humanism accepting no final goals beyond human flourishing,”[10] arguing that “ends beyond human flourishing [have] to fade from view.”[11] The wide acceptance of this purely self-sufficient humanism is uniquely unprecedented.[12]
France’s steady progression toward an exclusively humanist society truly encroaches upon a brave new world. Legitimate questions about this experiment’s viability, however, remain. Can man really bear the weight of being his own end? Has due consideration been given to precedence? Are France and the West prepared to utterly forsake God?
A world without purpose beyond man is a world in which nobody actually wants to live. It is a world of chaos, and history is replete with examples of the human toll such lofty theories produce when put into practice.
So, who should care about France? Those who genuinely care about human flourishing and the kind of world they desire for themselves, their children, and their neighbors. The outlook in France and the West is bleak. Yet Christ-followers in the post-Christian West are presented with not just a grave challenge but an immense opportunity. The need for leadership is now.
For this reason, my wife and I have decided to follow God into the fray and move to France. Our mission is to serve the people of France by displaying the love of Jesus to those who do not know him, while training and exhorting those who do, so that all may encounter the Truth personally and follow him eternally. This mission does not have to be ours alone; people throughout Western Europe need to hear the gospel, and meeting that need will require others to also answer the call to go. Whether a nation is termed post-Christian or otherwise, in the final analysis, there are only two kinds of people: those who know Jesus and those who could. With God’s provision, we aim to impact both. Will you join us?
[1] Kim Willsher, “France makes abortion a constitutional right in historic Versailles vote,” The Guardian, March 4, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/mar/04/france-to-hold-final-vote-on-enshrining-abortion-as-a-constitutional-right.
[2] Lily Radziemski, “Macron sends shock waves through France with snap decision to dissolve government,” Courthouse News Service, June 10, 2024, https://www.courthousenews.com/macron-sends-shock-waves-through-france-with-snap-decision-to-dissolve-government.
[3] “What is French laicite? The Economist explains,” The Economist, November 23, 2020.
[4] Pew Research Center, “Being Christian in Western Europe,” May 29, 2018, 47.
[5] Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture, 38.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, 15-16.
[8] Charles Taylor, “The Religious-Secular Divide: The U.S. Case,” March 5, 2009, The New School, New York, NY, https://youtu.be/Rd6ad7jCCFA?feature=shared.
[9] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, 27.
[10] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, 18.
[11] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, 261.
[12] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, 18.
