Reappearing Church: The Hope for Renewal in the Rise of Our Post-Christian Culture

by Mark Sayers

As we will discover in the next chapter, many Christians have internalized the secular map of reality. This map continually tells us not to “expect to discover dimensions of reality beyond the empirically evident,” Ronald Rolheiser explains, revealing that this assumed secular frame presumes that “the final spiritual exorcism has already taken place. There are no longer any supernatural dimensions to reality, or, in many cases, even to religion.”1 Such a viewpoint is assumed in the West, meaning that it even shapes the assumptions of the believer. Despite our belief in Christ, we can view the decline of the church in the West as inevitable, seeing it through the interpretive lens of the disconnected and detached elites in control of the commanding heights of our media.

Douglas Hyde understood this principle well. Hyde came to faith in Christ while editor of The Daily Worker,