Post-Secular Countries
Both Holland and Russia seem to be turning back from their atheistic ways. Holland is a very interesting case, as they were quite far down the secular humanist road. So what happened? Well, corporate prayer for one thing. In 10 years it blossomed, amongst a society that felt prayer was an irrational and ineffective practice, to a point where now trade unions lobby to have a workers right to organise prayer recognized. But how could this be? The intellectual left has always thought their view was one which would never falter, that once secular humanism got rid of religion, it would never return. Such unrealistic fantasies have trouble when meeting the reality of human existence and spirituality. Some of the change can be attributed to immigration however

Analysts usually focus on the one million Muslim immigrants and their offspring who have made the Netherlands their home since the early 1950s. But in the past decade, Muslim immigration has been overtaken by a larger stream of immigrants, namely Christians from Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Europe. An SCP estimate puts the number of Christian immigrants in Holland at around 700,000-- and rising fast. Recent immigration reports suggest that for every new Muslim moving to Holland, there are at least two new Christian immigrants.

It should also be noted that these increases are not in the liberal churches, but in those churches who haven't changed with the secular times, but instead kept faith with the fundamental realities of orthodox Christianity.

Russia however, has seen ever more marked change towards Christianity.

Briefly, it states that at the end of 2006, 15 years after the fall of the atheistic Soviet Union, 86% of the population believes in God, and only 16% consider themselves atheists...The percentage of those who are ‘churched,’ defined as those who attend churches at least once a month and regularly partake of the mystery of Holy Communion, is also rising. In the ‘perestroika’ years,it was around 4%, and that has now risen to 10-12%.

It's enough to give your marxist professors nightmares.
- posted by Alan Grey @ Thursday, January 04, 2007