>Political Atheist here. I am going to say that the reason why Christianity is collapsing today, why it has been ineffective at fighting off wokeness and progressivism, is that it has lost its pagan influences. What was it that prevented the Church from following the unworldly doctrines too closely so as to bring about the extinction of believers? I would say that the Church preserved itself and became a practical and worldly institution through its acceptance of pagan beliefs like military heroism and the pagan virtues of courage, prudence, and moderation. Of course, many Christians today criticize the Constantinian Church, the compromise made by the faith with worldly power, but without this arrangement, I believe that the West would not have been born, nor would the Christianity have been able to transform the world. It is easy for Christians living in comfortable and secure conditions to gravitate toward condemning hypocrisy like the one that made the Church powerful. But would they prefer the foolish faith of the bishop who opened the gates of his city to Attila, in response to Hunnish chieftain's declaration that he was a "scourge of God"? Too many liberal Christians today are like that bishop, whose piety led to mass slaughter and mass rape of his fellow Christians. I used to be one of those Christians. >The fact that liberal Christians are eager to condemn the sins of Christian kings and warriors of the past is a classic case of not seeing the board in one's own eye. One suspects that their zeal arises from the fact that it is a risk-free moral stance to take. Those who may criticize a Cardinal Richelieu, a Gustavus Adolphus, or a Christopher Columbus for their ambition and cruelty lack altogether the courage, sophistication, magnanimity, and initiative of these and other great men. >But here is an interesting twist - the woke and the progressives are further away from paganism than orthodox Christians are. The progressives are the termination of Christianity, a strange endpoint which we have reached precisely because the Christian tradition has lost what Nietzsche called its "dreadful" element, much of which was supplied by the pagan Greeks and Romans. Much had to do with the soil of where the seed of Christianity landed - it landed among warlike men whose passions and desires would necessarily be in tension with the message of love, humility, and self-sacrifice of Christ. Yet this combination, which strikes us as hypocritical today, entailed honest struggle and produced such marvelous fruits like the Renaissance, experimental science, and other practices and institutions that have shaped modern life. It could be said that paganism is what gave the Christian believer his or her sense of realism, a feeling for what was possible to accomplish to go alongside with his or her highest spiritual aspirations. Christianity's continued existence is thus endangered by the sincerity, or the self-deluded moral superiority, of many of today's believers.