It may be unwise to replace God with predictions of the end of Christianity

JOHN Lennon caused uproar when he dissed Jesus but the faith Christ inspired has not yet vanished.

THE 1960s was the decade of the young and their rebellion against traditions and taboos in religion, politics, sex, music, clothes and much else.

No such explosion of values had been experienced in the long Christian era, except perhaps in the opening years of the French Revolution.

The four English "rock" musicians called the Beatles helped to lead the latest revolution. Their family background in the port of Liverpool was more Christian than pagan, and indeed their leaders, Paul McCartney and John Lennon, first met at a Church of England fete and musical event in 1957. In less than a decade, the Beatles became the most celebrated young men in the world. On both sides of the Atlantic their public appearances induced hysteria and fainting, and the sales of their gramophone records were enviable. They looked so young as to appear innocent.

Miraculously, they danced their way along a thin white line that separated traditional Christian values from those displayed in discotheques and at rock concerts. On March 4, 1966, John Lennon crossed that white line. "Christianity will go," he announced in the London Evening Standard. "It will vanish and shrink," he predicted confidently.

"Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary." In praise of the Beatles, he cheerfully claimed that "We're more popular than Jesus now."

In the circles in which he moved, his observation was correct, but in Alabama - in retaliation - bundles of Beatles' records were thrown on bonfires. Preachers said that Lennon had committed blasphemy. Trying to retreat, he intimated that what he had in mind was the waning prestige of Christ in England. In Chicago he finally repented about the comparison with Christ: "I am sorry I said it."

In 1900 no celebrity in the Western world, least of all a popular entertainer, could have delivered such a slur on Christ and still retained a massive following. And yet the Beatle was partly correct. In Europe the church was in decline, and many intellectuals quietly agreed with his prediction that Christianity would vanish.

Christianity is in decline in the most prosperous, most literate and most materialist nations, though not elsewhere. Its decline in Europe may well be a portent of its long-term future. But even in Europe, a traditional Christian heartland, the decline cannot yet be viewed as permanent. In its heartland, in the course of 20 centuries, it has declined and revived again and again. In AD300 it was weaker in Europe, Asia Minor and its heartland than it is today. Even in 1000, as a result of the rise of Islam and the tenacity of paganism, it was probably less influential than it is today in that same old heartland. In 1600 it was weaker in the world as a whole than it is today. A conclusion of this book is that Christianity has repeatedly been reinvented. Every religious revival is a reflection of a previous state of decline; but no revival and perhaps no decline is permanent. In Europe, another profound change has not yet made a universal impression: the decline of its own place in the world. Today, more people and more Christians live in Africa than in Europe, and more people and more Christians live in the Americas than in Europe.

Even when Christianity was on one of its peaks, crowds of people were indifferent or lukewarm, and its influence on many parts of society was faint or patchy. As John Calvin confessed, when his Geneva was seen as the showcase of Christianity, most of its people did not necessarily believe the main religious truths. They did not necessarily believe that God was all-powerful. Calvin insisted that most men and women thought that luck, chance and fortune were the main shapers of their lives. "If one falls among robbers, or ravenous beasts; if a sudden gust of wind at sea causes shipwreck; if one is struck down by the fall of a house or a tree," argued Calvin, then most people attributed such mishaps to luck and not to the will of God. Calvin insisted that "this erroneous opinion" prevailed in all ages and is "almost universally prevailing in our own day".

That swearing and blasphemy also persisted during the centuries when Christianity was dominant is another sign that religion could be a veneer. By the late 19th century, swearing was accepted widely, even by Christians who took their religion seriously.

In Russia the devout novelist Tolstoy was addicted to swearing, while occasionally denouncing the habit. Joseph Lightfoot, Bishop of Durham, conceded in the 1880s that those Christian coalminers whom he personally knew did swear, though he assured himself that it was more with their lips than their hearts.

In essence, the Western world today should not be compared too harshly with the supposedly more Christian civilisation that preceded it. Christianity, even in its various heydays, was partly a veneer for a multitude of people.

In the Western world in the first decades of the 21st century, Christian doctrine often seems slightly irrelevant. For the first time in history, several of the maladies that made religion helpful or indispensable have been removed or weakened. No longer is there such a variety of illnesses with no known cures, and no longer such frequent deaths of the young, nor such extremes of hunger and poverty. At one time most people who died at the age of 50 were physically worn out, but machines of many kinds have largely dispensed with the incessant hard physical labour that sustained economic life. For all these reasons the incentives to turn to the Bible, when in despair or pain, have weakened, though material success seems to create fresh causes of despair.

In the more formally educated countries, Christianity has also had to face a mental mood that is less favourable. Three hundred years ago people relished supernatural explanations; now they are more often convinced by explanations that appeal - or seem to appeal - to science, logic and reason. Science and technology have a simple and persuasive message: the world's problems are soluble by ingenuity and material innovations; the world's riddles, such as the origins of the universe, can be unravelled by the scientific mind. But while science's achievements have been remarkable, they have not been revolutionary in probing human nature. In some ways the measurable problems analysed by science and technology are more easily dissected than human problems. The moon is more easily explored than the typical mind and heart.

In the hierarchy of mental virtues, knowledge rides high. The word "wisdom" is little employed in a century that values knowledge more than ever before. "Wisdom is the principal thing: therefore get wisdom," said the Book of Proverbs. Many illiterate Jews of the Old Testament, whether shepherds or water-fetchers, were probably more interested in seeking wisdom than are most of the winners of a Nobel prize 2500 years later. Wisdom is primarily concerned with human beings and their predicaments. Indeed, wisdom should constitute the arena in which atheists and Christians both compete.

It is legitimate to say that one does not believe in God. But to say no more, and to sideline that debate about human nature that surrounds the whole concept of a god, is to misunderstand why Christianity has absorbed so many minds for so long.

Edited extract from A Short History of Christianity, by Geoffrey Blainey (Viking, $45).