There’s two words I’ve used pretty often around here: “Post-Christian” and “Post-Christendom”. They are two related words, but I think it’s helpful to spell out the difference between the two and when I try to use each.

Historical Background

Any time we talk about an era of history in broad terms like these, it is by necessity a generalization. But at times these generalizations are helpful. They help us understand both where we’ve been and where we currently are. In the context of Christianity, there are 6 broad eras that apply to how Christianity understands itself.

Primitive/Apocalyptic Christianity

The first is the Primitive or Apocalyptic era, running roughly from the time of Jesus’s resurrection and the Day of Pentecost until around 85 CE and the time following the 1^st Jewish–Roman War. In this era the Christian movement is very much a sect of Judaism, with most of the Christian church’s leadership and prominent figures being ethnically and culturally Jewish, through Greco-Roman influence on the church is certainly present.

In this era, the Christian movement was largely focused on its role as an eschatological community. The resurrection of Jesus began a new era on earth, one that will culminate in Jesus’s immanent (probably perceived to be within the early believers’ lifetimes) return. The church is the witness of the new creation in its present, and its mission is to offer an invitation to join this new community in Christ.

Hellenistic/Roman Christianity

After around 85 CE, Christianity and Judaism came to be distinct from one another from a combination of mutual hostility after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and the continued addition of Greek and other non-Jewish believers to the ecclesial community, leading to the Hellenistic or Roman era of Christianity. This is the era in which there was a shift to the idea of orthodoxy, or “right belief” and away from the immanence of Jesus’s return. As the present came to be more important, the many diverse beliefs which developed in the early church eventually coalesced into one, more institutionalized Christianity, especially after the legitimization and imperial blessing of Christianity under Constantine I and other Christian Roman emperors.

In this era, the church became less of a movement and more of an institution; growth of the church came to be the church’s mission rather than an invitation to participate in a future reality.

Barbarian/Medieval Christianity

By 500 CE, however, the Western half of the Roman empire had effectively collapsed. The church was beginning to enter Medieval Christianity, dominated by the conversion and growing influence of Germanic “barbarian” tribes to both Christianity and the Western Europe. Even as the Eastern half of the church maintained its imperial structure, the remants of the Western Roman empire only had the institution of the church to fall back on.

This is the beginning of Christendom, and the rise of the idea of a Christian nation. Cultural pressures within those same Germanic tribes led to a sense of unity among practices, which included religious practices. To be a member of the community meant having the same practices, so when enough of the community—or more influential members of the community—became Christians, the entire community was Christian,

As this era progressed, the only non-Christians one was likely to encounter were Jews living throughout Europe and Muslims, and even then Muslims were largely buffered by Spain and the Pyrenees in the west and the Byzantine Empire in the east. As such, there were seemingly contradictory trends developing. The concept of individual salvation grew, but still in the context of the strengthening institution of the church: an individual was saved through the church.

Reformation/Western Christianity

All of this changed in the late 15^th and early 16^th centuries as three major events brought a crisis to Christendom: the “discovery” by Western European explorers of millions of people who were, in the language of the time, “destined for hell” because of their unbelief in God; the Protestant Reformation which brought significant diversity of beliefs to Christendom for the first time in a millennia (though within groups, unified orthodoxy was still normalized); and the collapse of the Byzantine Empire after the Ottoman Empire’s conquest of Constantinople.

In this era, mission accompanied early colonial efforts, though the mission of the Reformation era was still mostly Roman Catholic-led. The bigger development was the concept of individual identity separate from and more important than one’s social identity. This is the era in which the idea of Christian faith (and religious faith in general) as a matter of individual decision became the predominate expression of faith in Western Christianity.

Enlightenment/Expansionist Christianity

By the early 1800s, the meaning of the word “religion” had shifted from “piety” or “holiness” to “a system of beliefs and practices.” This coincides with the Enlightenment’s focus on reason and progress, and with it the collapse of Medieval cosmology. This is the era of the Great Awakenings, which sparked incredibly missionary fervor among Protestants and with it, an era of expansion and continued colonization by Western Christian nations. (Alongside these religious developments, this was also the era in which the concepts of a “nation” and, with it, “nationalism” developed.) The Enlightenment emphasis on individual reason led to the beginning of the decline of Christianity in Europe, and the bifurcation of Christianity in North America along Fundamentalist and Modernist lines.

Meanwhile, due to colonialism and Western expansionism, the center of Christian gravity was slowly shifting to the Global South to non-European people groups. Advances in technology made the world smaller than it had ever been. It was relatively safe and easy for European missionaries to travel to previously far-off lands and share the “good news” of Christianity, and with it the brought their Western culture and practices.

Post-Christian/Ecumenucal Christianity

This brings us to today’s Ecumenical expression of Christianity, as Christianity is growing in the Global South and declining in the Global North. While this is an emerging paradigm for Christianity, it seems to also be bringing with it a largely more humble Christianity, with a focus on some of the core distinctives of Christian faith rather than complete argeement about orthodoxy. On such effort is in reclaiming the reign of God as an eschatological reality, rather than seeing the church as the present reign of God on earth. Mission is no longer seen as an act of building the church, but rather as the action of God (the concept of the missio Dei, the “mission of God”) in which the church participates and about which the church bears witness.

The Two “Post-“s

After that not-insignificant background, now I can get to why we’re here. What do I mean when I say Post-Christendom versus Post-Christian? When is one term right and when is the other?

Post-Christendom

Post-Christendom is the more general of the two terms. It’s talking about the secularization of Western cultures and the post-colonial emergence of indigenous Christianities in nonWestern cultures. This term refers to the decline of the “Christian nation” paradigm which began among the Germanic tribes, and in a way is the culmination of the values of the Enlightenment. Post-Christendom describes the rise in influence and numbers of Christians from the Global South: Asia, Africa, South America—places which are now emerging from years of Western colonialism and imperialism.

Post-Christian

Post-Christianity, on the other hand, is a term I use to more specifically refer to the experience of secularization and the optionality of religion and religious preference in Europe and Northern America. The Post-Christian social imagination largely dismisses supernatural claims as simply unbelievable. It is aware of Christian narratives and practices, and often that awareness is connected to experiences of trauma or deconstruction.

This is a somewhat unique era for the Christian church—the closest related example might be the rise of Islam in the 7^th and 8^th centuries, but there is still a key difference: there is not a competing meta-narrative with which to replace Christianity. The hyper-individualism of the post-Enlightenment has broadened the available options to connect with the transcendent as wide as any one person can conceive.

For more on this, check out the Post-Christianity and Transcendences sections of Ecclesiastical Beta Testing. Over there is a much more focused discussion of some of the unique aspects of Post-Christianity, especially this idea of the optionality of encounters with transcendence and focusing on the rise of the “apatheist” in the Post-Christian West.