Anonymous Asks (329)

“What is a post-Christian society?”

I remember first using the term “post-Christian” in the early 2000s. A Roman Catholic co-worker my own age with whom I shared a fair number of views about society was trying to pin down where and when Western culture began to slide into the abyss.

“Post-Christian” popped into my head as a good description of Canada in the new millennium. I probably picked it up from somebody else along the way, but it seemed apt.

A ‘Christian’ Society?

Now, I’m not suggesting we ever had a truly Christian society with which to compare the current mess, especially in Canada, where unusual numbers of citizens with French and English backgrounds settling the country side by side meant that from the beginning of the nation’s history, Protestants had to put up with the quirks of Catholics and vice versa. Regardless of ethnic and religious distinctions, sixty years ago we shared numerous biblical values: honesty, loyalty, integrity, decency, hard work, care for one’s neighbors, generosity, love of family and so on. The school day began with a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. Not everyone was a genuine believer — far from it — but significant numbers of Canadians accepted the same definitions of good and bad, and the vast majority of these derived, however distantly, from biblical principles.

That is not to say, of course, that the majority of Canadian citizens always behaved themselves according to these generally accepted standards. History gives the lie to that. But when they didn’t, most people we knew expected and accepted being called to account for their failure to do so. Misconduct produced shame rather than brazen defiance. There was a sense that stepping outside the moral lines put you in a very lonely place.

Naturally, there were always people who didn’t play by the rules of their neighbors, but these occupied the fringes of society. A known moral failing was sufficient to disqualify men and women from positions of responsibility or service as role models. Those who sought such roles in life learned to keep their “peccadillos” to themselves.

The Inexorable Slide Downhill

That all changed throughout the 1960s, when the movement toward individual rights and free expression began to eclipse any sense of general community. I wouldn’t try to pin down the precise moment Canadian society began its inexorable slide downhill, but let’s just say Justin Trudeau’s dad was Prime Minister for most of it. His famous line? “The state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation.” Joseph Philippe Pierre Yves Elliott Trudeau presided over the decriminalization of abortion. In 1964, there were practically no legal abortions in Canada, as an abortion was only ever performed to save the life of the mother. In 1982, 66,319 legal abortions were performed in Canada and a further 4,311 Canadian women traveled to the US to get one, since access to the procedure in Canada was still insufficient to deal with the number of unwanted children.

When an individual steps outside the established moral norms of a biblically-based society by ending the life of her child, as determined women did when abortion was illegal in Canada and pregnancy outside of marriage very much frowned upon, it is not usually a reflection on the general state of a nation’s morals. It’s still a sad thing, and the woman who does so will one day give account of herself to the Lord. Still, that particular sin was both individual and exceptional. Once the practice became commonplace, permitted by governments, facilitated by medical professionals, celebrated by the media and winked at or even called “good” by polite society, we passed into the “post-Christian” era, at least in my book. Objections to the practice are now the exceptions rather than the rule.

Where is God?

I’ve chosen abortion as my “index sin” for social decline because the battle to legalize it and make it commonplace throughout the seventies marked my teen years. Significant numbers of my female schoolmates had had one, and the numbers only increased as the years went by. Was abortion the straw that broke the back of Canadian society’s “camel”? Perhaps not. Numerous other biblical standards were all being abandoned about the same period as our drive to express ourselves as individuals overwhelmed any sense of personal responsibility to the larger collective.

Where was God in all this? The decision-makers for our society didn’t ask, and its members had no interest in holding them to account for that.

And that’s what it means to be post-Christian.