Only American Christianity Will Survive

Christianity in America is vital, powerful, and constantly renewing itself. Christianity in Europe appears to be moribund and faltering. What's the cause of these differences? Why is America so much more religiously devout than Europe? Why is American religion so much more popular?

Spengler writes:

The remnants of Christian state religion rot and stink on the dying continent of Europe. Christianity cannot persist except as a continuing revival, a recurring conversion - as a sequence of singular events, rather than as an orderly process.

Awaiting execution in Hitler's prisons, the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote that in a world come of age, the Christian religion no longer could exist as organized practice, but only as an expression of individual conscience.

America was created for precisely this purpose, to replace state religion on the European model with a religion of individual conscience. Such a religion must be schismatic, multi-sectarian, short on doctrine but long on inspiration.

America's kaleidoscope of Protestant denominations, so bewildering to Europeans, constitutes the only type of milieu in which Christianity yet may flourish. Although Christian communities are burgeoning throughout the world, they will succeed only in emulation of the American version.

Spengler's argument appears to be the idea that when state and church are joined in an overarching institution, heresy and schism are tremendous threats; when religion is a wholly personal and private affair that is not dependent upon state or church, then it can thrive and continually renew itself.

It's an interesting argument that could have a great deal of merit. One of the fastest growing Christian denominations is Pentecostalism, a group that relies upon the ongoing inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

I think, though, that Spengler underestimates the enduring power and attraction of institutional churches like the Roman Catholic Church. Unity with the state may be a bad idea, but a strong, centralized church has a lot of advantages as well.

European Catholicism may be on something of a decline, but worldwide Catholicism is not and I've not seen any evidence that worldwide Catholicism is dominated by people who are "short on doctrine but long on inspiration."

What do you think -- does the future of Christianity, and maybe religion generally, lie entirely and solely within the American model of "religion as individual conscience," separate from any institutions?