Postchristianity

[3] Post-Christian societies are found across the Global North/West: for example, though the 2005 Eurobarometer survey indicated that the majority of Europeans hold some form of belief in a higher power (see also "Ietsism"); fewer point explicitly to the Christian God.

[6] In his 1961 book The Death of God, the French theologian Gabriel Vahanian argued that modern secular culture in most of Western civilization had lost all sense of the sacred, lacked any sacramental meaning, and disdained any transcendental purpose or sense of providence, bringing him to the conclusion that for the modern mind, "God is dead".

Thomas J. J. Altizer and William Hamilton of Emory University drew upon a variety of sources, including the aphorisms of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers from Prison, and brought this line of thought to public attention in a short-lived intellectual movement of the mid-to-late-1960s among Protestant theologians and ministerial students.

[22] Charles Taylor, meanwhile, disputes the "God is dead" thesis by arguing that the practices and understandings of faith changed long before the late 20th century, along with secularism itself.

This perspective argues that, among previous generations in the United States, such concepts and other artifacts of Christianese would have been common cultural knowledge and that it would not have been necessary to teach this language to adult converts to Christianity.

[23] New religious movements such as Jesuism incorporate foundational elements of Christian thought in syncretic combination with various enlightenment beliefs ( Ie.