Special to CosmicTribune.com, March 21, 2026

Excerpted from a sermon by Bradly J Helgerson

Richard Fletcher, in his book The Barbarian Conversion, traces the way Christians evangelized pagan cultures from A.D. 500-1500.

At the beginning of that campaign major swaths of Europe remained pre-Christian pagan (i.e. they were barbarians). Conversion then (as Fletcher notes), often entailed a very long and comprehensive process—one that required a radical shift in worldview.

But eventually (over a thousand year period) nearly everyone in Europe was born into a world that was (at least) culturally Christian, meaning that people operated within in a basic Christian-thought-framework—a Christian view of God, of the universe, of the soul and body, of right and wrong, etc. And society itself was structured around this influence, from the prominence of cathedrals to adherence to the liturgical calendar.

The point at the moment is that the social imaginary of all of Europe, its set of values and intuitions, its defining stories and symbols, its celebrations and liturgies, became (over a long and elaborate process) distinctly Christian. And the success of this cultural transformation necessitated a change in the church’s approach to evangelization, one that was less about the conquering of an entire society than about the conquering of an individual soul.

Even though all hadn’t come to a profound conviction that they themselves were sinners, all Westerners believed in the reality of sin. They all believed that only Jesus of Nazareth could save them from that sin. …. So, the big obstacle for Western evangelism at this stage (from the time of the Reformation until fairly recently) was not intellectual and societal, but personal and pietistic, for while everyone now had a Christian mind and conscience, what they lacked was a Christian heart. ….

This approach to evangelism began to take center stage in the 19th and 20th centuries, during what later became known as the First and Second Great Awakenings (e.g., Jonathan Edwards’s famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”).

But as modernity marched on, another gradual shift in the cultural plates of the Western lithosphere began to occur — a theological drift that eventually gave rise not only to a thoroughgoing form of deism (the belief in a generic god, one way of domesticating the true God by removing the specificity of Christianity), but, within a few hundred years, to an anti-theism whose renunciation of the sacred was hitherto unseen in human history. …. This cultural shift displaced Christianity as our cultural touchstone and meant that true religion must once again compete with paganism in the marketplace of ideas.

Part of what makes our culture “secular,” in other words, is that Christianity is now contestable, that it is only one option among many, much the way it was in the first century, where the truth would be proclaimed in a city full of idols. …. And yet, unlike our first-century predecessors, the church in the modern era faces a greater impediment to conversion than religious competition and worldview clashes.

For one thing, it is decidedly post-Christian. Meaning that there has been a sense for almost 200 years now that when it comes to Christianity, we have been there and done that. And that even religion, itself, has — in light of scientific advancement — become old fashioned. ….

Astro-physicist Stephen Hawking [explained]:

“Science is increasingly answering questions that used to be the province of religion. Religion was an early attempt to answer the questions we all ask: why are we here, where did we come from? Long ago, the answer was almost always the same: gods made everything. The world was a scary place, so even people as tough as the Vikings believed in supernatural beings to make sense of natural phenomena like lightning, storms or eclipses. Nowadays, science provides better and more consistent answers, but people will always cling to religion, because it gives comfort, and they do not trust or understand science.”

Exuding an unflinching optimism, we see this vividly portrayed in 19th and early 20th century novels such as Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (Verne was obviously dazzled by the invention of electricity, for he gushes about its potential for nearly 500 pages), or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes short stories (written in part to dispel superstition through the power of reason; the aim of such works was to disenchant the world, to free it from primitive ways of thinking). As a result, the West was taken captive by the myth of modernity, the myth of progress. And given the great technological successes of the age, it is not hard to see why.

As a result, a kind of absolute humanism emerged — a new social order that placed man, not God, at the center of the universe. The result of which has not been good, as we are all painfully aware. The purging of Christianity from our society, indeed the denying of the sacred order altogether, has not brought about the freedom and prosperity it promised, but the opposite: tyranny and misery. For in the absence of God, man becomes, as Loren Eiseley put it, a cosmic orphan. ….

Modern man thought that when he had gotten rid of God, he had freed himself from all that repressed and stifled him. Instead, he soon discovered, the very opposite was true, that in killing God, he had also killed himself. For if there is no God, life itself becomes absurd. ….

The world it creates, frankly, “sucks” (Jonathan Pageau). It is a world that no one wants to live in. Which means we can now compare the culture Christianity produced with the one modern paganism has given us — and the results are beyond dispute. In every meaningful metric (apart from, perhaps, the rapid development of novel technology), the Christian West is far superior to the neo-pagan West.

(And, by the way, thanks to our culture’s tyrannical response to the COVID crisis, we have all seen the consequences of making the rapid development of technology one’s highest value — a myth many are still bewitched by.)

The greatness of Christian culture should give us absolute confidence in the gospel we preach, for the world it has produced is far superior to any other. It is not even close. ….

Indeed, the starting place of all repentance, according to Scripture, is remembrance. The Deuteronomic cycle of rebellion and restoration is broken each time by the nation of Israel remembering God’s goodness — the flourishing He provided under His governance. In the same way, the prodigal son “comes to himself” when he remembers the goodness of his father and the prosperity he experienced in his household. This awakening remembrance is seen again in the story of Jonah. During Jonah’s time, the nation of Israel had forsaken God and was thus on the threshold of divine desolation. ….

And notice that Jonah’s repentance comes when he reaches the bottom, literally. The context for chapter two is that Jonah is recounting the story of being thrown overboard and of lying at the bottom of the sea. It is here we are told that Jonah comes to himself, and he does so by remembering the Lord.

“When my life was fainting away, I remembered the Lord,

and my prayer came to you, into your holy temple.”

Just before he loses consciousness, Jonah remembers the goodness of the Lord and cries out to him. God answers that prayer by sending the great fish (to rescue him). Repentance begins with remembrance. We must remember (and remind others) that some of our most powerful evidence for the truth of Christianity is the civilization it produced.

  Christianity in a pagan culture: Then in a land of idols and now in the ‘post-Christian era’