What was happening to Christianity during the rise of secular science to dominance over Western culture?
• More and more, Christianity was being forced into a Sunday sideline activity offered to the “polite” citizens of the new modern world. “Christianity” no longer defined deep or intense matters of faith, but became the label for Western “politeness.” Thus to be “Christian” was to be “civilized”; to be “civilized” was to be “Christian.” By the beginning of the year 1900 Christianity was more of a mark of cultural status than of spiritual conviction. • Not all “Christians” however reacted so lamely to the rise of secularism. • Some–who called themselves Christian “Liberals”–felt that Christianity still had a very important role to play in the unfolding of modern civilization. Being intellectual descendants of the Deists of the 1700s, the Liberals of the 1800s (and 1900s) felt that the actual or “factual” person of Jesus (the “historical Jesus”) was a glorious model of the kind of Enlightened character that modern culture was trying to bring the world to. They placed no value in Scriptu
