Searching for the Paradise Lost

A Post-Christian Crisis or a Christian Society?

Abstract

The study assumes how pre-Christian people met Christian religion, then follows up the causes effecting the weakening of Christianity, that is to say the renaissance of “God of Nature” (deism) in philosophy and arts. The Christian freedom remained a constructive power in the era of enlightenment; however, the first secularisation attempts that had  started by that time disrupted the organic tissues of the Western culture for the last two centuries. Sciences came to a standstill since it neither could prove the origin of life nor could answer the meaning of life. Has the instinctive demand of human communities for transcendental responses disappeared? Has the Westerner got burned out and reached the point where it searches the community building beliefs and meanings again in God? Will the experiment of the secularised society fail in the next decades? Will the secular states loosing religious roots lose their viability, too? What characterises the synthesis of the 21st century arising from Christianity’s thesis and secularisation’s antithesis? What are the signs that Western communities are going to find the modern or postmodern form of Christian religion? Our conclusion is that neither the ideal form of secularised  freedom, nor political ideologies, nor science itself could have become a new community building and integrating power. Religious tradition as a community building spirit and 
a common archetype cannot be replaced for long. After a desperate two hundred 
year-long ‘period of quest’, the revitalisation of Christian religion could respond to the  disruption of Western communities. Nowadays, conservative politics, including policies for national upswing and the strengthening of the national religious life, should be seen within this historical flow. Conservatism recognises that Christian community teachings and the Christian God principle with messages in the 20th century could bring about a resurgence of the common beliefs in ‘eternal truth’ and the common search for lost Paradise of Western humans.