In some ways, I was delighted to read Ms. Cavendish’s
headline, along with her speculation that “the hold of aggressive atheism may
be weakening.” After all, I read her piece in the same week as philosopher Firmin
DeBrabander’s far more devastating itemization, in the Fall 2024 issue of The
Hedgehog Review, on “dechurching”— “a process involving entire populations,
not just intellectuals, radicals, or other members of the so-called secular
elite.”
What troubles me, I suppose, is that Ms. Cavendish’s
argument boils down to demography being destiny. It’s the same kind of claim
that Democratic strategists have made for a coming, decisive realignment for
their party over the last two decades, and we now see what has happened to
those hopes.
The basis for such hopes lies in the belief that
current trends will continue unabated, but so often that does not happen in
lives affected by social cataclysms.
How many demographers, for instance, would have
predicted three decades ago that the 2007-09 global financial crisis and NAFTA
would have combined to corrode Democrats’ one-time “blue wall” in the Rust Belt
states, or that the sex abuse scandal would deliver the most devastating blow
to Roman Catholicism since the Reformation?
True, Professor DeBrander cites demographic data
similar to Ms. Cavendish’s in holding that obituaries for Christianity are
premature. But I would like the data to be supplemented by counter evangelizing
for the kind of belief promoted by Pope Francis, in a Church that fosters
what he calls “theological hope” and “a change that promotes the dignity of
individuals.”
I guess I am looking for the modern equivalent of
Saints Francis, Dominic, and Ignatius Loyola—figures who rose, when the Church
seemed overwhelmed by challenges to its moral authority, to offer reminders of
the power of humility and community in teaching, by word and deed, the original
core values of the Gospels.
(The image accompanying this post, the official
portrait of Baroness Cavendish of Little Venice, was taken Apr. 23, 2024, by Roger
Harris.)
