The decline of faith
A recent poll in a local newspaper confirmed the decline in church attendance in Malta, and revealed the cafeteria-style faith of contemporary Catholics.
In Europe, religious faith among the educated has been declining for centuries. The historical roots of this decline can be traced back to the publication of The Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (1543) by Copernicus, which revealed man’s minuscule place in the cosmos. By 1611, John Donne was mourning that the earth had become a mere “suburb” in the universe, and that the “new philosophy calls all in doubt”.
The late 17th century witnessed the rise of the English Deists who questioned Christian beliefs and doctrine, and “reduced religion to a vague belief in a God hardly distinguishable from nature”.
From England, Deism spread to France through the writings of Voltaire. The historian Henri Martin described the people of France in the 1760s as “a generation which had no belief in Christianity”.
“Atheism was universal in high society,” reported Lamothe-Langon.
In the 19th century, the decline of religious belief had many sources, including the pioneering work in geology by Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.
Religious belief was further undermined by the revolutionary Hegelian version of Christ’s life, Das Leben Jesu by David F. Strauss, and by The Essence of Christianity of Ludwig Feuerbach. Both books described religion as a purely human construct and the Christian religion as an exercise in mythology.
A.N. Wilson observed in his book God’s Funeral, “By the end of the 19th century, almost all the great writers, artists and intellectuals had abandoned Christianity, and many had abandoned belief in God altogether. Echoes of the ‘death of God’ could be heard in the revolutionary politics of Garibaldi and Lenin; in the poetry of Tennyson, the plays of Shaw, and the novels of Hardy; in the philosophy of Hegel and in the work of Freud.”
The crisis that Hegel described was the crisis of a civilization that had discovered that the God on whom it depended to be also its own creation.
The late 20th century witnessed a decline in church attendance in Europe as scandals and harsh doctrine kept people away. At the dawn of the 21st century, Pope John Paul lamented the de-Christianization of Europe while the late Archbishop Joseph Mercieca deplored the “haemorrhage” of faith in Malta.
“Where did God go?” asked Time in its cover-story of 16th June, 2004. “Churches are halfempty, and God can’t get a mention in the new EU Constitution.”
John Guillaumier St Julian’s