Postchristianity[1] is the decline of Christianity, particularly in Europe and Australia, in the 20th century, considered in terms of postmodernism. It may include personal world views, ideologies, religious movements or societies that are no longer rooted in the language and assumptions of Christianity, at least explicitly, though it had previously been in an environment of ubiquitous Christianity (i.e., Christendom).
Thus defined, a post-Christian world is one where Christianity is no longer the dominant civil religion, but one that has, gradually over extended periods of time, assumed values, culture, and worldviews that are not necessarily Christian (and further may not necessarily reflect any world religion's standpoint, or may represent a combination of either several religions or none). Generally, this can therefore mean the loss of Christianity's monopoly, if not its followers, in otherwise Christian societies. According to the 2005 Eurobarameter survey, the majority of Europeans (in general) hold some form of belief in a higher power, though relatively fewer point explicitly to the Christian God (as seen in the table).
In his 1961 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".
Other thinkers, namely Thomas J. J. Altizer and William Hamilton of Emory University, draw upon sources dating back to some of the aphorisms in Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers from Prison, and bring this line of thought to public attention in a short-lived intellectual fad that occurred in the mid-to-late-1960s among some younger Protestant theologians and ministerial students. Conservative reaction on the right and social advocacy efforts on the left blunted its impact, however, and it quickly became forgotten in favor of more ethically-oriented movements such as Social Gospel and feminist theologies, within the Protestant mainline at least.
Some American Christians (primarily Protestants) also use this term to discuss evangelism to unchurched individuals who may have grown up in a non-Christian culture where such traditional Biblical references may be unfamiliar concepts. The argument goes that in previous generations in the United States, such concept and other artifacts of Christianese would have been common cultural knowledge and would not have needed to be taught to adult converts to Christianity. In this sense, post-Christian is not a negative term, but is used to describe the special remediative care that would be needed to introduce new Christians to the nuances of Christian life and practice.
Some groups, mainly liberal or radical ones, even use the term "post-Christian" as a self-description, not regarding it as an epithet whatsoever. Dana McLean Greeley, the first president of the Unitarian Universalist Association, described Unitarian Universalism as postchristian insofar as Christians no longer considered it Christian, while persons of other religions would likely describe it as Christian, at least historically. [1]
Others, such as Philip Jenkins in God's Continent, argue that Europe is post-Christian insofar that Christianity is explicitly asserted and that (under a strict definition) it has been so for over a century at least. Charles Taylor, meanwhile, disputes the "God is Dead" thesis within the same context by arguing how the practice and very understanding of faith have changed long before the late 20th Century, along with secularism itself. In his A Secular Age, Taylor points out how being "free from Christendom" has allowed Christianity to endure and express itself in various ways, especially in Western society; he cites how otherwise secular ideas were, and continue to be, formed in light of some manner of faith. Perhaps in a similar manner to Jenkins, he stresses how "loss of faith" reflects simplistic notions on the nature of secularization, namely the idea of "subtraction." Thus, "post-Christian" is after a fashion, a product of Christianity itself.