I read a recent article about the decline of Christianity that attributed this decline primarily to the secularization of formerly Christian societies. However, I think secularization is better understood as a shared explanation for the decline of religion in general rather than as a sufficient explanation for the decline of Christianity in particular. The same forces of modernity and secularization have affected other faiths as well, yet Christianity’s decline is especially pronounced in Europe and North America. This suggests that something additional is occurring—something to which other religions appear more resilient.
I believe Christian theology, together with the nature of identity formation in Christianity, is the core reason. In Christianity, religious identity is largely grounded in assent to specific metaphysical beliefs, relatively less in ritual practice, and almost never in ethnic identity. Rituals certainly exist: Christianity has sacraments, liturgical calendars, and communal practices. However, these are not as constitutive of Christian identity as belief itself. One need not participate in rituals regularly to remain socially identified as Christian, provided one is initially baptized as a Christian and later affirms core metaphysical claims such as the virgin birth, the miracles of Christ, and the resurrection. Christianity also does not come attached to any particular ethnic or geographic alignment.
In Islam, Judaism, and Hinduism, by contrast, ritual and regional alignment play a more central role. Islam combines strong doctrinal commitments with clearly prescribed ritual obligations that are widely understood as normative for Muslims. Islam also has a regional--linguistic alignment: one must learn to read the Qur'an in Arabic. Hinduism contains philosophical schools that are highly metaphysical, but it also comes with a strong regional alignment to the Indian subcontinent. A similar situation applies to Judaism. For individuals in the twenty-first century who hold a modern, scientific outlook, sustaining a religious identity grounded in ritual or ethno-regional lines may be easier and more accommodating than sustaining one grounded primarily in metaphysical belief, which can feel epistemically strained under modern standards. Rituals and ethno-regional identities operate in a different category: they do not compete with science in the way metaphysical truth claims do.
This is why I find it more common to encounter ''ex-Christians'' among those who hold liberal or progressive views but were raised in Christian households. Such individuals often find themselves unable to accommodate what is arguably Christianity’s primary identity-anchoring feature—its metaphysics—in light of a modern worldview, and thus come to identify as agnostics or atheists. I include myself in this group, though I sometimes fluctuate in this regard. By contrast, a liberal Jew may say, ''I don’t know if God exists, but I am Jewish.'' A liberal Hindu may say, ''I don’t take the metaphysics literally, but I am Hindu.'' A liberal Muslim may say, ''I struggle with belief, but I am still Muslim.''
All religious metaphysics—Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism, Islam—are all challenged by the modern worldview. It's not a question of which metaphysics survive, it's a question of which religious identity formation mechanism can survive relatively well, despite the challenge to it's metaphysics.
Religions can be understood as comprising four dimensions: a moral system, a metaphysical framework, ritual practices, and demographic identity. Each contributes differently to an individual’s sense of attachment to a religious tradition. Metaphysics, demographic identity, and ritual appear to carry the greatest weight in anchoring religious identity, while morality carries the least, since moral principles often overlap across religions and secular philosophies. Rituals are most potent when they take the form of embodied involvement, such as circumcision; characteristic forms of dress; symbols placed on the body in semi-permanent ways; or prescribed ways of wearing facial hair. By contrast, purely verbal or passive observances—such as reciting a sacrament—lack the same binding force and may not fully function as rituals in this stronger sense. Embodied rituals serve at least two functions: they reinforce belief in a shared metaphysical framework, and they anchor identity to a community, creating a durable sense of belonging. Demographic identity, by contrast, is often built into one’s ancestry and physical appearance.
Historically, in many faiths, these four dimensions were tightly coupled. In Christianity, however, only three—ritual, metaphysical belief, and morality—were tightly coupled, and over time ritual gradually became less central, particularly after the Protestant Reformation. In other religions, when metaphysical claims were challenged by modernity, ritual, ethno-religious identity, and moral practice often remained bound together and continued to sustain religious identity. When Christian metaphysics came under sustained pressure from modernity—and given Christianity’s comparatively weak ritual anchoring—what largely survived was morality alone. Morality by itself, however, provides the weakest foundation for religious identity.
In other words, Christianity, as it is socially recognized, ties identity primarily to metaphysical belief; modernity undermines metaphysical belief; Christian rituals are insufficiently binding to compensate; Christianity has no ethno-regional anchoring; morality alone survives, but morality cannot anchor identity.
That is why a person is not typically identified as Christian for being generous, forgiving, or merciful; such traits merely qualify one as a ``good person.''
This emphasis on belief over ritual and ethno-regional identity is not merely a historical accident but is arguably inherent to Christianity itself. Jesus consistently prioritized internal purity over ritual observance. His disputes with the Pharisees over Sabbath laws and ritual purity illustrate this orientation. He emphasized universal virtues such as love, forgiveness, mercy, and justice over strict adherence to external practices. Christianity was therefore predisposed from its origins to prioritize interior belief and moral orientation over ritual. These were fundamentally moral and epistemic teachings, not ritual teachings.
In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus explicitly divorces faith in God from any particular nation or ethnic group when he says, ``Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.''
At the same time, Christianity was not founded by Christ alone but also by Paul and other apostles. They emphasized the metaphysical commitments and moral and epistemic teachings of Jesus, along with certain rituals, thereby giving rise to what we now call Christianity.
After the Protestant Reformation—which coincided closely with the early Enlightenment—rituals became progressively less important, while greater emphasis was placed on faith in metaphysical doctrines and adherence to the moral and epistemic teachings of Jesus Christ, as well as those of later Christian philosophers and saints such as Aquinas. These epistemic and moral principles became ingrained in institutions, laws, and civic organizations.
For this reason, one could argue that Western culture itself—especially in places such as Germany and the Nordic countries—is the unnamed surviving Christian culture, having disassociated itself from Christianity as a named religion. Western civilization’s ethics, values, and modes of reasoning, shaped by Christian natural theology together with its moral intuitions—constituting what we call modernity—are deeply Christian in origin. This influence emerged through Protestant traditions in England and Germany and Catholic traditions during the Renaissance. It includes the intelligibility of nature, the law-like regularity of the cosmos, and the moral obligation to seek truth. Figures such as Galileo, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, and René Descartes were not operating in a secular vacuum; they were formed by Christian education, metaphysics, and moral expectations.
This does not imply that modern science, technology, or morality are identical to Christianity in a dogmatic sense, nor that those who participate in modernity have unwittingly become Christian. Rather, it traces the historical development of modernity through a cultural ecosystem shaped by Christianity.
The intellectual and institutional yields of modernity that emerged from this Christian cultural ecosystem gradually separated themselves from religion as such. In the process, religious culture was clarified into two components: social, cultural, and moral practices on the one hand, and religious symbols and metaphysical claims on the other. Only the former survived and continues to coexist comfortably with a modern outlook. This was not a simple matter of extracting ethics directly from scripture. Rather, philosophers and intellectuals educated within this Christian cultural environment increasingly reasoned independently, arriving at moral frameworks that often coincided with Christian ethics. Importantly, these moral conclusions also converge with those found in Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, and secular traditions, suggesting that they emerge as much from reflection on human nature and social life as from any particular religious doctrine.
Today, many—particularly in conservative circles—fear that immigration may erode ``Christian ethics.'' From this perspective, such fears appear misplaced. Christian culture is not fragile, because Western culture itself, now global in scope, is a secularized form of Christian culture. It is Christian not by virtue of metaphysical commitment but by virtue of its historical development within an ecosystem infused with Christian ethics and embedded in Christian institutional structures, including the church--state alliances characteristic of many Enlightenment-era European societies. Even figures such as Isaac Newton lived within this framework; at Cambridge, scholars were required to take vows of celibacy in preparation for religious service, though Newton himself ultimately declined ordination, likely due to his heterodox theological views.
This cultural inheritance underlies modern science, moral frameworks, social organization, and political institutions. These worldviews demonstrably function, and much of the world benefits from them. Societies do not abandon frameworks that deliver tangible benefits.
None of this implies marginalizing other faiths. Secularized forms of many religions increasingly converge on similar modern frameworks. The ethics of reciprocity underlying many contemporary moral norms are not exclusive to Christianity, even where they were historically influenced by it.
The deeper concern expressed by many conservatives, if there is one, is not the preservation of moral systems, social organization, economics, or science, but the problem of meaning and purpose. For adherents of many faiths, meaning is sustained through ritual and ethno-religious cohesion that can coexist with modernity. For many Westerners, however—those who embrace modernity without inherited metaphysical structures—meaning is more fragile. The unspoken anxiety is that humans inevitably seek meaning and that, in the absence of their own symbolic and ritual anchors, Western societies may eventually turn elsewhere not for moral systems but for existential grounding.
The current condition of the West, and perhaps its central problem, is the presence of an existential vacuum once filled by Christian metaphysics. No clear consensus exists on how to address this vacuum. Some prefer not to confront it directly and instead displace their anxiety onto new waves of people from other regions, framing them as a threat. While adherents of other faiths often inhabit modernity alongside robust meaning-making systems rooted in ritual and communal identity, the modern Westerner frequently stands alone before an indifferent cosmos—fully equipped with modern knowledge, yet sustained by fragile and improvised sources of meaning.
At this juncture, I think a revision of the term ''westerner'' is appropriate. I believe it is historically loaded, even though some aspects of it remain applicable. Historically, a westerner meant someone from a European society with a white complexion and a post-Enlightenment progressive worldview, embedded in an ecosystem influenced and shaped by Christianity, as well as by certain Jewish philosophers and intellectuals. That definition may be too constraining today. Where, culturally and intellectually, does someone with those same views, but of non-white descent, belong? I would like to use the familiar term secular liberal cosmopolitan in place of ''westerner,'' but wish to suggest my own reading of that term and view it as a cultural successor of the West. I cannot fully speak for others' perspectives without knowing them, so I'll just consider a fictional group of people who share the following reasonable attributes.
A secular liberal cosmopolitan is thoroughly rational, or at least strives to be; thoroughly moral, not simply because religious texts prescribe morality, but because of rationality and empathy—not only toward one another but toward the whole of humanity, as well as the life forms on our planet. They may originate, by birth or prior affiliation (or both), from any of the world’s existing religions. They may also originate, by birth, from any part of the world.
However, they struggle to accommodate metaphysical views other than those derived from observation and reason, though they may enjoy other metaphysical views as entertainment or fiction. They also struggle with, or outright reject, identifying with any single demographic or ethnic group beyond the crude, sometimes practical identification it provides for their bodies—not very different from the way birthmarks function. They have highly individual tendencies, habits, and preferences, but little taste for communal rituals unless there is a rational or emotional justification at the individual level. To a secular liberal cosmopolitan, anyone who is not a secular liberal cosmopolitan will not appear as an adversary to fight with, but simply as a cohabiting entity with a different choice of inner world, with whom to negotiate for matters that concern the common good, as well as for ensuring basic decency and justice for everyone involved—not a simple problem. Perhaps this constant negotiation process itself is one source of meaning, identity and belonging.
Global climate activism, and collective efforts to defend human rights in distant parts of the world, are indeed shared meaning-making processes that can provide belonging to the secular liberal cosmopolitans, but they seem to be continually evolving and of a different character from what religion once provided. Religion, for instance, offers a fixed story and purpose for all time. In contrast, for the secular liberal cosmopolitan, the meaning-making process itself evolves, and the story evolves with it. Today, we have efforts to avert a climate catastrophe. What different purpose might a secular liberal cosmopolitan have four hundred years from now, assuming the world has survived until then? We may never know until that time arrives. But that is not a problem—only a feature. Stated this way, the problem for the west that I noted earlier dissolves.
I believe Christian theology, together with the nature of identity formation in Christianity, is the core reason. In Christianity, religious identity is largely grounded in assent to specific metaphysical beliefs, relatively less in ritual practice, and almost never in ethnic identity. Rituals certainly exist: Christianity has sacraments, liturgical calendars, and communal practices. However, these are not as constitutive of Christian identity as belief itself. One need not participate in rituals regularly to remain socially identified as Christian, provided one is initially baptized as a Christian and later affirms core metaphysical claims such as the virgin birth, the miracles of Christ, and the resurrection. Christianity also does not come attached to any particular ethnic or geographic alignment.
In Islam, Judaism, and Hinduism, by contrast, ritual and regional alignment play a more central role. Islam combines strong doctrinal commitments with clearly prescribed ritual obligations that are widely understood as normative for Muslims. Islam also has a regional--linguistic alignment: one must learn to read the Qur'an in Arabic. Hinduism contains philosophical schools that are highly metaphysical, but it also comes with a strong regional alignment to the Indian subcontinent. A similar situation applies to Judaism. For individuals in the twenty-first century who hold a modern, scientific outlook, sustaining a religious identity grounded in ritual or ethno-regional lines may be easier and more accommodating than sustaining one grounded primarily in metaphysical belief, which can feel epistemically strained under modern standards. Rituals and ethno-regional identities operate in a different category: they do not compete with science in the way metaphysical truth claims do.
This is why I find it more common to encounter ''ex-Christians'' among those who hold liberal or progressive views but were raised in Christian households. Such individuals often find themselves unable to accommodate what is arguably Christianity’s primary identity-anchoring feature—its metaphysics—in light of a modern worldview, and thus come to identify as agnostics or atheists. I include myself in this group, though I sometimes fluctuate in this regard. By contrast, a liberal Jew may say, ''I don’t know if God exists, but I am Jewish.'' A liberal Hindu may say, ''I don’t take the metaphysics literally, but I am Hindu.'' A liberal Muslim may say, ''I struggle with belief, but I am still Muslim.''
All religious metaphysics—Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism, Islam—are all challenged by the modern worldview. It's not a question of which metaphysics survive, it's a question of which religious identity formation mechanism can survive relatively well, despite the challenge to it's metaphysics.
Religions can be understood as comprising four dimensions: a moral system, a metaphysical framework, ritual practices, and demographic identity. Each contributes differently to an individual’s sense of attachment to a religious tradition. Metaphysics, demographic identity, and ritual appear to carry the greatest weight in anchoring religious identity, while morality carries the least, since moral principles often overlap across religions and secular philosophies. Rituals are most potent when they take the form of embodied involvement, such as circumcision; characteristic forms of dress; symbols placed on the body in semi-permanent ways; or prescribed ways of wearing facial hair. By contrast, purely verbal or passive observances—such as reciting a sacrament—lack the same binding force and may not fully function as rituals in this stronger sense. Embodied rituals serve at least two functions: they reinforce belief in a shared metaphysical framework, and they anchor identity to a community, creating a durable sense of belonging. Demographic identity, by contrast, is often built into one’s ancestry and physical appearance.
Historically, in many faiths, these four dimensions were tightly coupled. In Christianity, however, only three—ritual, metaphysical belief, and morality—were tightly coupled, and over time ritual gradually became less central, particularly after the Protestant Reformation. In other religions, when metaphysical claims were challenged by modernity, ritual, ethno-religious identity, and moral practice often remained bound together and continued to sustain religious identity. When Christian metaphysics came under sustained pressure from modernity—and given Christianity’s comparatively weak ritual anchoring—what largely survived was morality alone. Morality by itself, however, provides the weakest foundation for religious identity.
In other words, Christianity, as it is socially recognized, ties identity primarily to metaphysical belief; modernity undermines metaphysical belief; Christian rituals are insufficiently binding to compensate; Christianity has no ethno-regional anchoring; morality alone survives, but morality cannot anchor identity.
That is why a person is not typically identified as Christian for being generous, forgiving, or merciful; such traits merely qualify one as a ``good person.''
This emphasis on belief over ritual and ethno-regional identity is not merely a historical accident but is arguably inherent to Christianity itself. Jesus consistently prioritized internal purity over ritual observance. His disputes with the Pharisees over Sabbath laws and ritual purity illustrate this orientation. He emphasized universal virtues such as love, forgiveness, mercy, and justice over strict adherence to external practices. Christianity was therefore predisposed from its origins to prioritize interior belief and moral orientation over ritual. These were fundamentally moral and epistemic teachings, not ritual teachings.
In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus explicitly divorces faith in God from any particular nation or ethnic group when he says, ``Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.''
At the same time, Christianity was not founded by Christ alone but also by Paul and other apostles. They emphasized the metaphysical commitments and moral and epistemic teachings of Jesus, along with certain rituals, thereby giving rise to what we now call Christianity.
After the Protestant Reformation—which coincided closely with the early Enlightenment—rituals became progressively less important, while greater emphasis was placed on faith in metaphysical doctrines and adherence to the moral and epistemic teachings of Jesus Christ, as well as those of later Christian philosophers and saints such as Aquinas. These epistemic and moral principles became ingrained in institutions, laws, and civic organizations.
For this reason, one could argue that Western culture itself—especially in places such as Germany and the Nordic countries—is the unnamed surviving Christian culture, having disassociated itself from Christianity as a named religion. Western civilization’s ethics, values, and modes of reasoning, shaped by Christian natural theology together with its moral intuitions—constituting what we call modernity—are deeply Christian in origin. This influence emerged through Protestant traditions in England and Germany and Catholic traditions during the Renaissance. It includes the intelligibility of nature, the law-like regularity of the cosmos, and the moral obligation to seek truth. Figures such as Galileo, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, and René Descartes were not operating in a secular vacuum; they were formed by Christian education, metaphysics, and moral expectations.
This does not imply that modern science, technology, or morality are identical to Christianity in a dogmatic sense, nor that those who participate in modernity have unwittingly become Christian. Rather, it traces the historical development of modernity through a cultural ecosystem shaped by Christianity.
The intellectual and institutional yields of modernity that emerged from this Christian cultural ecosystem gradually separated themselves from religion as such. In the process, religious culture was clarified into two components: social, cultural, and moral practices on the one hand, and religious symbols and metaphysical claims on the other. Only the former survived and continues to coexist comfortably with a modern outlook. This was not a simple matter of extracting ethics directly from scripture. Rather, philosophers and intellectuals educated within this Christian cultural environment increasingly reasoned independently, arriving at moral frameworks that often coincided with Christian ethics. Importantly, these moral conclusions also converge with those found in Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, and secular traditions, suggesting that they emerge as much from reflection on human nature and social life as from any particular religious doctrine.
Today, many—particularly in conservative circles—fear that immigration may erode ``Christian ethics.'' From this perspective, such fears appear misplaced. Christian culture is not fragile, because Western culture itself, now global in scope, is a secularized form of Christian culture. It is Christian not by virtue of metaphysical commitment but by virtue of its historical development within an ecosystem infused with Christian ethics and embedded in Christian institutional structures, including the church--state alliances characteristic of many Enlightenment-era European societies. Even figures such as Isaac Newton lived within this framework; at Cambridge, scholars were required to take vows of celibacy in preparation for religious service, though Newton himself ultimately declined ordination, likely due to his heterodox theological views.
This cultural inheritance underlies modern science, moral frameworks, social organization, and political institutions. These worldviews demonstrably function, and much of the world benefits from them. Societies do not abandon frameworks that deliver tangible benefits.
None of this implies marginalizing other faiths. Secularized forms of many religions increasingly converge on similar modern frameworks. The ethics of reciprocity underlying many contemporary moral norms are not exclusive to Christianity, even where they were historically influenced by it.
The deeper concern expressed by many conservatives, if there is one, is not the preservation of moral systems, social organization, economics, or science, but the problem of meaning and purpose. For adherents of many faiths, meaning is sustained through ritual and ethno-religious cohesion that can coexist with modernity. For many Westerners, however—those who embrace modernity without inherited metaphysical structures—meaning is more fragile. The unspoken anxiety is that humans inevitably seek meaning and that, in the absence of their own symbolic and ritual anchors, Western societies may eventually turn elsewhere not for moral systems but for existential grounding.
The current condition of the West, and perhaps its central problem, is the presence of an existential vacuum once filled by Christian metaphysics. No clear consensus exists on how to address this vacuum. Some prefer not to confront it directly and instead displace their anxiety onto new waves of people from other regions, framing them as a threat. While adherents of other faiths often inhabit modernity alongside robust meaning-making systems rooted in ritual and communal identity, the modern Westerner frequently stands alone before an indifferent cosmos—fully equipped with modern knowledge, yet sustained by fragile and improvised sources of meaning.
At this juncture, I think a revision of the term ''westerner'' is appropriate. I believe it is historically loaded, even though some aspects of it remain applicable. Historically, a westerner meant someone from a European society with a white complexion and a post-Enlightenment progressive worldview, embedded in an ecosystem influenced and shaped by Christianity, as well as by certain Jewish philosophers and intellectuals. That definition may be too constraining today. Where, culturally and intellectually, does someone with those same views, but of non-white descent, belong? I would like to use the familiar term secular liberal cosmopolitan in place of ''westerner,'' but wish to suggest my own reading of that term and view it as a cultural successor of the West. I cannot fully speak for others' perspectives without knowing them, so I'll just consider a fictional group of people who share the following reasonable attributes.
A secular liberal cosmopolitan is thoroughly rational, or at least strives to be; thoroughly moral, not simply because religious texts prescribe morality, but because of rationality and empathy—not only toward one another but toward the whole of humanity, as well as the life forms on our planet. They may originate, by birth or prior affiliation (or both), from any of the world’s existing religions. They may also originate, by birth, from any part of the world.
However, they struggle to accommodate metaphysical views other than those derived from observation and reason, though they may enjoy other metaphysical views as entertainment or fiction. They also struggle with, or outright reject, identifying with any single demographic or ethnic group beyond the crude, sometimes practical identification it provides for their bodies—not very different from the way birthmarks function. They have highly individual tendencies, habits, and preferences, but little taste for communal rituals unless there is a rational or emotional justification at the individual level. To a secular liberal cosmopolitan, anyone who is not a secular liberal cosmopolitan will not appear as an adversary to fight with, but simply as a cohabiting entity with a different choice of inner world, with whom to negotiate for matters that concern the common good, as well as for ensuring basic decency and justice for everyone involved—not a simple problem. Perhaps this constant negotiation process itself is one source of meaning, identity and belonging.
Global climate activism, and collective efforts to defend human rights in distant parts of the world, are indeed shared meaning-making processes that can provide belonging to the secular liberal cosmopolitans, but they seem to be continually evolving and of a different character from what religion once provided. Religion, for instance, offers a fixed story and purpose for all time. In contrast, for the secular liberal cosmopolitan, the meaning-making process itself evolves, and the story evolves with it. Today, we have efforts to avert a climate catastrophe. What different purpose might a secular liberal cosmopolitan have four hundred years from now, assuming the world has survived until then? We may never know until that time arrives. But that is not a problem—only a feature. Stated this way, the problem for the west that I noted earlier dissolves.