B.S. Lewis

Obviously if you believe Christianity is true, you believe it will end with Christ's return. So this question is for the unbelievers: what do you think will happen to Christianity? I'm just asking for pure speculation here. It certainly seems doubtful, from an unbeliever's perspective, that Christianity will last forever--how do you predict the arc of it's popularity with humanity will look in the future?

Toto

Christianity has shown an almost infinite capacity to redefine itself to fit in with changing conditions. My guess is that in 100 years there will still be something called Christianity, but it will be as close to Christianity today as today's Christianity is to the religion that went by that name in the middle ages.

Destronicus

If you ask me, Christianity's popularity peaked centuries ago during the Dark Ages. I think nowadays alot of Christians see it only as something that looks good on a resume and it gives them something to do on Sunday mornings before going to IHOP. My prediction is Christianity will continually weaken and die out over the next several centuries, until it will eventually end up in the Encyclopedia Galactica looking something like this:

Christianity: An ancient pagan-based religion popular with Western cultures from about 50CE to 2400CE. The main tenant of Christianity was that its followers believed a demi-god named Jesus was punished and killed for their sins.

B.S. Lewis

Probably more like 300 CE if you're going to say when it was popular, and not just existent. I personally think the entry you refer to will say it was popular with Western cultures from 1600 BF (Before Ford) to 500 AF (After Ford).

Sorry, I've been reading that damn Aldous Huxley again lately.

B.S. Lewis

BTW, I think Christianity in the Middle Ages was pretty much just a source of gruesome stories that made for good dramatic stage plays you (a peasant) could go to on a Saturday night--not much different from today. Of course, if you got the plague, then you started to take it serious.

WWSD

Well, I personally believe that humans will annihilate themselves sometime within the next one to two hundred years and thus end all religions.

FarmMama

What I'd really like to be around for would be to see if when populations start coming back . . will they need a sky god as well? ? ?

WWSD

I was actualy thinking that humans would go extinct altogether. However, if it is only civilization that collapses, I think the future generations would tend towards nature-centric animistic religions.

Occams_Razor

2211: Nuclear war devastates the earth.

2450: Primitive farmer uncovers partial transcript of IIDB thread text.

2843: Brilliant student partially transcribes the IIDB scrolls.

3966: Cult of the IIDB is established.

4251: Third crusade of the flying spaghetti monster commences.

5966: Approximately two billion of the earth's population worship weekly at altars inscribed thusly:

countjulian

I just got done reading Phillip Jenkin's The Next Christendom and am currently reading Alister E. McGrath's The Future of Christianity, both of which deal with this subject. Although both of them are Christian theologians, I still manage to find them fairly unbiased.

The picture is not good, at least for us heathens.

Christianity will not be gooing away soon. It's dying in Europe and slowly but surely in the Southern Hemisphere. that may be hard to believe, with Bush & Blair et al running the show, but in my opinion this regime in the U.S. is the last dying hurah of the fundies. If you look at the stats, atheism is growing in the U.S., and non-religiosity is already up to about 14% percent. That's the good news.

The bad news is that Xtianity is growing in the Global South: Afirica, Latin America (in my opinion the new powerhouse of glabal Christianity), and to a lesser extant in Asia (especially South East Asia). What's especially disturbing (and Jenkins even admits this much) is that Southern Christianity tends to be pentacostal, fundementalist, and (especially in Africa, what with the Lord's Resistance Army et al http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord%27s_Resistance_Army) militant. On an interesting note, the book I am studying koine Greek in right now, Learn New Testamnet Greek, was written by John H. Dobson, a Christian cleric in Uganda. For more information on Christian growth, the article I wrote for Evowiki here http://www.evowiki.org/index.php/Christianity might be informative. don't forget to check out the discussion.

It seems as though Christianity won't be going away anytime soon, unless somebody does something about it.