On the passing of the Pope, National Review’s John Derbyshire laments the general decline of the Catholic church and of Christianity in general in the Western world. Derbyshire blames it all on secular hedonism,
Both [conservative and liberal critics of the RCC] surely nkow in their hearts that the real culprit is the irresistible appeal of secular hedonism to healthy, busy, well-education populations. We live, as never before in human history, in a garden of deilghts, with something new to distract us and delight us every day. None of that is enough to turn the heads of those who are truly, constitutionally devout; but not many human beings are, nor ever have been, that committed to their faith. And so the flock wanders away to the rides, the prize booths, and the freak shows.
Derbyshire is trapped because on the one hand, he believes that “conservatives . . . are supposed to be the people who celebrate humanity in all its knotty and unpredictable variety, and in the power of the individual human will to transform the world.” On the other hand, what well-educated, rich (by historical standards) individuals in the West choose to do in increasingly large numbers is embrace what Derbyshire calls secular hedonism. He seems to concede that religion for most people is something they turn to due to external forces, and once those external conditions are no longer there, only the “constitutionally devout” remain.
To Derbyshire this leads inevitably to a Brave New World where individuals choose to dehumanize themselves in order never to feel bad. I think, however, that human society will manage to cope in a post-religious age (if that ever truly arrives) without descending into that. Everyone (even us atheists), after all, struggles with how to find meaning. And while religion has certainly taken a bit hit over the last century, so has secularism. The mass murdering atheists of the 20th century certainly made that point.
I suspect that some new religious movement or other that more directly speaks to and addresses the sort of phenomenal cultural changes that have occurred in the last two thousand years will ultimately build upon and largely replace the Judeo-Christian tradition.
Source:
The Rearguard Pope. John Debyshire, National Review, April 7, 2005.