The generational process of overthrowing Christianity

Three great points in a blog post at Scholars Stage. (Hat tip Arnold Kling)

1. How long does it take to enact a cultural change?  (Think overthrowing Christianity and replacing it with a new philosophy or civic religion.) From the post:

Instilling new ideas and overthrowing existing orthodoxies takes time—usually two to three generations of time. It is a 35-50 year process.

That just about fits the timescale we see for Critical Theory in higher education to go from neo-Marxist innovation in the mid 1930s to dominant by the end of the 1960s (as I discussed previously). Once education was won, it took another 40 or 45 years for Critical Theory and ideas derived from it (all with the overarching goal of overthrowing the Christian West from within) to become dominant more broadly in college-educated culture and institutions as it is today. 

2. In what cadence does culture change occur?

Scholars Stage references a quip from Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises as an analogy: “How did you go bankrupt, Bill asked?” “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually, the suddenly.” Horkheimer’s plan with Critical Theory, laid out in his 1937 essay Traditional and Critical Theory, was just that. Slowly gain adherents until achieving a critical mass, then initiate change swiftly. 

3. How do the new ideas take over? The post calls the answer “cohort change.” 

The logic of cohort change can be grasped by the graphic at the top of this essay [here, reproduced below] … America’s future is godless not because the God-fearing were convinced of the errors of their faith, but because their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren never adopted their faith to start out with. Cultures do not change when people replace old ideas with new ones; cultures change when people with new ideas replace the people with old ones.

The secret for the revolutionaries is not to focus on debates or reason to persuade established generations, but to control education so that new generations are brought up with the new ideas. Then it is just a matter of time. The plot below clearly illustrates how this process works. Christianity is not losing because long-time Christians are being convinced that there is no God in large numbers. Rather, rising generations are being educated in materialism through school and university, and never really take up Christianity. From there it is just a matter of time until the god-fearing generations move on and the materialist generations take over. 

From a broader societal perspective I am quite pessimistic about this. However, there is hope in individual families and communities. If a script can be flipped against religion in 2-3 generations, it can also be flipped the other way, even if just in individual family lines. Imagine the good that can be done over the generations in a family tree if the power of Christ can be brought in where it wasn’t before. This obviously highlights the importance of parenting in keeping the faith. 

And there is hope in the Christian community more broadly if we can band together in unity as god-fearing followers of Jesus Christ to speak up for truth.