Christian Resurgence - Preamble

A Primer for a Series on Renewing Western Christianity

I. The Need for Renewal

A faith that once crowned kings now struggles to retain boomer women.

Christianity is the right religion. This is not a slogan or a tribal boast; it is a claim about reality. The faith that once turned empires to dust and remade the world in the image of Christ has fallen into weakness. Churches still stand, but their voices tremble. A faith that once marched across centuries now drags itself through decades.

The world feels this absence. Where Christianity retreats, confusion spreads. Societies without a moral center become arenas where power devours itself. Culture becomes noise. Politics becomes theater. People search for meaning in ideologies that promise everything and deliver nothing. The collapse of the faith is not a private misfortune but a civilizational wound.

This decay did not arrive by accident. Most of it is self-inflicted. Leaders chose compromise over conviction. Believers chose comfort over duty. The result is a hollow faith, shrunken to ritual without power.

Yet decline is not the end. Christianity has survived persecution, heresy, and the slow rot of complacency before. It carries within it the power of resurrection. Its resources are deep, its history a litany of improbable victories. Every age that thought it had buried the faith ended up kneeling before it.

The task ahead is clear: the Church must live again. Renewal will not fall from heaven like rain; it must be fought for. This series begins with that conviction and proceeds with a single aim: to make Christianity dangerous to the darkness once more.

II. Diagnosing the Illness

Christianity has a competent form. We don’t get to see it very often. But it’s real.

A surgeon must first see the wound. Christianity’s wound is not hidden; it bleeds in public. Declining attendance, shallow sermons, empty seminaries, and congregations that mistake entertainment for worship all testify to the same sickness. The faith is not rejected by the world because it is too hard. It is rejected because it has become too soft.

The modern Church has traded its sharp edges for rounded corners. It is desperate to be liked, and so it has forgotten how to command respect. Where early Christians braved lions, today’s leaders fear criticism. Their sermons avoid sin, their actions avoid sacrifice. They chase relevance, and in doing so, they make themselves irrelevant.

The laity mirrors this weakness. Many believers treat faith as a hobby, something to schedule between errands. They know the slogans but not the scriptures. They pray rarely, they read even less, and they expect salvation without obedience. A faith so thin cannot endure the weight of a hostile age.

This is not the fault of the outside world. The world has always been hostile to the cross. The problem lies within. The Church is failing because it has stopped being the Church. Its leaders lack courage, and its people lack discipline.

Yet every diagnosis carries a hidden mercy: the problem is named, and what is named can be healed. Christianity is not dead, only sick. Its illness is self-inflicted, which means it can be self-corrected. To heal, it must recover its own strength.

III. Why Recovery Matters

Christianity scaffolds the greatest civilizations ever built. It will do so again.

Christianity must recover because nothing else can take its place. Philosophies rise and fall, ideologies flare and burn out, but the faith has endured because it is true. Truth is not an opinion; it is the ground beneath every civilization that lasts. When the ground cracks, everything built on it collapses.

The West stands on the ruins of its own inheritance. Its art now flatters ugliness, its politics feeds division, and its culture celebrates decay. These are not random failures. They are symptoms of a deeper loss: the abandonment of the faith that once gave the West its soul. Remove Christianity, and beauty loses its meaning. Remove it, and law loses its foundation. Remove it, and power becomes cruelty.

This matters beyond sentiment. Christianity does not merely provide comfort; it gives direction. It tells man what he is, why he suffers, and what he must become. Without it, people grasp for meaning in shallow causes, seeking transcendence in movements that only enslave them further. The results are visible: loneliness, despair, and a hunger for purpose that nothing modernity offers can fill.

For any project that seeks to rebuild—whether a guild, a community, or a nation—Christianity is the cornerstone. Without it, all efforts rest on sand. The renewal of the faith is not a side task; it is the central task.

The world may sneer at this claim. Let it sneer. The faith is right, and what is right must rise again.

IV. The Missing Leadership

Visitor: Father, I got a girl pregnant out of wedlock. Now she wants to get an abortion. What should I do?

Fr. Dumass: Well, you know, like, just go with God, man.

Every army reflects its generals. The Church today reflects leaders who have grown small. They manage instead of commanding, administer instead of inspiring. They speak in careful tones, frightened of saying something that might offend, as if Christ were crucified to protect their reputations.

True leadership requires vision, courage, and the willingness to bleed for what is right. The early bishops faced death with hymns on their lips. Reformers walked into flames rather than deny the truth. Even the ordinary parish priest of centuries past carried the weight of his flock with a sense of holy duty. Compare this to many modern leaders, who seem more like managers of decline than stewards of a kingdom.

The Church has been hollowed by careerism. Titles are pursued as trophies, not as burdens. Too many climb the ladder for status, not service. They confuse influence with power, and power with God’s favor. In this climate, bold voices are silenced or driven out, leaving only echoes where there should be thunder.

Leadership failure is not confined to clergy. The absence of courageous lay leaders—fathers who lead their homes, teachers who shape minds, artisans who craft beauty—has left the faith without strong pillars. The Church was never meant to be a stage where a few perform while the many watch.

If Christianity is to recover, it must find leaders who command by the weight of their example. Men and women who fear God more than men. Without them, renewal will remain a dream whispered to empty pews.

V. The Role of the Laity

“Who will bell the cat?”

It’s the priest’s job!

It’s the laity’s job!

It’s society’s job!

It’s the government’s job!

Gene: Screw it. Now it’s my job.

The Church cannot rise on the strength of its clergy alone. Throughout history, the laity carried the faith on their backs—through persecution, famine, and war. They built churches with their hands, taught the faith to their children, and lived it out in a world that despised them. That spirit is almost absent today.

Many modern believers approach faith like consumers. They attend services to be entertained, not challenged. They outsource their spiritual lives to pastors and priests, as if salvation were a subscription. This passivity is deadly. A Church of spectators will wither, no matter how skilled its preachers.

The laity must reclaim ownership of the faith. They must study scripture with the same seriousness they give to their careers. They must pray with the same focus they give to their pleasures. They must live as if they actually believe what they confess. Faith without action is rot disguised as piety.

Christianity thrived when ordinary believers acted as extraordinary witnesses. They cared for the sick when others fled. They welcomed the unwanted when others scorned them. They upheld truth even when it cost them their lives. This was not heroic in their eyes; it was obedience.

The recovery of the Church depends on a laity that refuses to be lukewarm. Every believer must see themselves as part of the battle, not the audience. A faith that is lived with conviction spreads like fire. A faith that is worn like jewelry dies in silence.

VI. The Path Forward

Gene: We need to do competent and proactive things.

Rabble: But we’re not saved by works!

(Somehow, this means we should refrain from doing competent and proactive things.)

The faith will not recover through sentiment. Renewal will not come from slogans or wishful thinking. It requires action—deliberate, disciplined, and rooted in truth. Without a plan, every call to revival becomes another empty shout in the wind.

The Church must return to the basics that once made it unshakable. Doctrine must be taught with clarity, not softened to win applause. Worship must be reverent, not theatrical. Communities must be built where believers carry each other’s burdens, rather than outsourcing compassion to distant programs. These changes are simple to name but hard to execute. They demand courage, not consensus.

Structures must be reshaped. The bureaucracy that smothers initiative must give way to leadership that acts with conviction. Priests and pastors must once again see themselves as guardians of souls, not managers of decline. The laity must rediscover their calling as builders of Christendom in their own neighborhoods.

The path forward will not be comfortable. It will require stripping away illusions, dismantling idols, and confronting the sins the Church has ignored. It will call for beauty where there is ugliness, strength where there is weakness, and truth where there is compromise.

Renewal is possible. The same God who raised the faith from the ashes of Rome can raise it again from the ashes of modernity. But He works through people willing to fight. If the Church dares to take this path, it will rise. If it does not, it will sink quietly into history’s graveyard.

VII. A Series for the Future

I do not blame our enemies so much as our own incompetence.

This series is born from necessity. Christianity stands at a crossroads where delay means decay. The Church cannot afford to wander in circles while the world burns around it. The time for half-hearted responses has passed. What remains is the choice to act with conviction or fade into irrelevance.

I write as one who is not a priest, yet the burden falls on more than priests. Renewal belongs to all who see the truth and refuse to let it die. The ideas to come will not flatter the complacent. They will confront failures directly, naming the idols that have stolen the Church’s strength and the practices that can restore it.

Some solutions will be hard to accept. They will break habits and minds. Others will revive ancient wisdom long forgotten, wisdom that once gave the faith its iron spine. Together they will form a tactical map—steps the Christian community can take to recover its majesty.

This is not theory for its own sake. The survival of the faith determines the survival of everything built upon it. If Christianity rises, the West has a future worth defending. If it falls, nothing else will hold.

The road ahead is narrow, but it leads upward. Each entry in this series will chart another step toward renewal. The Church can live again, and it must. Whether it will depends on whether enough people are willing to walk that road before it disappears.