Stephen Reynolds

Christendom is dead – I mean, the way of things when the Western world identified itself with the Christian religion, and Christian churches claimed whole societies and peoples for their own. Christianity itself is still alive, and I am reckless enough to think that it has a future. But not as the religion privileged by statutory law and social custom, in a world where belonging to a Christian church was an ordinary part of belonging to one’s society and the sine qua non of respectability. That was the world of Christendom, and that world is extinct.