Sorry for the click bait, but it is the underlying gist of what I am about to say. Christianity is dying. Like Rome it is besieged from all sides and from within by movements and groups which either willingly or coincidentally seek its destruction. Follow me here, it will make sense in a minute.

First and foremost we have to remove ourselves from the religious labels and look at Christians for what they are. Christians are a nation. A nation is defined as a group of people with a common characteristic that defines their collective body. Kurdish people make up the Kurdish nation. People who play sports make up the nation of Athletes. Homeowners with yellow painted houses make up the yellow house nation. This is just a fact, a nation is a term applied to a group of people who all have something in common. And the Christians of the world too form a nation. Traditionally this entity is called “Christendom”.

Why am I stating that Christians are a nation you might ask? Because, as Christians, we have to position ourselves members of a nation, in defense of this nation, not simply as individual Christians on a spiritual journey. And as a nation is a sociopolitical group, it naturally competes with other sociopolitical groups for domination of the public sphere. In laymens terms Christendom competes with other nations for dominance of various constituencies and as any other sociopolitical group does, it attempts to defend and propagate itself. The next step now that we have identified that Christians form an identifiable group by their common belief in Christ, we must now figure out who it is that Christianity is competing with.

One might say that in a perfect world all people would get along and there would be no need for competition between ideologies, but the truth is we already live in that world. The world I am referring to is the Western World, where all ideas are welcome and nobody is persecuted for them. In this perfect world of everybody getting along, at least to the point of general tolerance of each other, people do not practice a “live and let live” lifestyle when it comes to Ideology. The key to any ideology is propagation, and to propagate one ideology among people means to diminish another ideologies population base. The simple truth is that in a free society ideas spread and the ideas of which people are not willing to defend in the face of adversity lose ground and die.

Not all ideologies are mutually exclusive and as such not all Nations are mutually exclusive. A person can belong to and indeed does belong to hundreds, thousands and in actuality an uncountable number of nations which are defined by that persons Characteristics and those people who share that specific characteristic. These petty unimportant nations such as those who put their left shoe on before their right habitually, or those who prefer plaids over solid colored shirts are not what Christians need to be concerned with. Christians need concern themselves with nations that pose an existential threat to the continuation and sustainment of the faith into the future.

Christianity has three major threats to its continual existence on this Earth. These threats are not some looming superpower like the U.S.S.R. ready to wage war upon Christendom and enforce their ideology, they are simply competing ideological nations which are directly incompatible with coexistence with a Christian nation. These Sociopolitical Ideological groups purposefully fight Christianity using a variety of tactics either directly or indirectly.

The first and most apparent being Anti-theistic progressiveness, the entire purpose of which is to remove religion entirely from all aspects of public and private life. Christianity being the easiest target is obviously the main focus. The New age movement and new age religion are the second ideology which threatens Christendom. Less apparent and direct in its approach, a push for “spirituality, not religion” among many other cult like practices seems to appeal to the disenfranchised and the young. The most violent and third ideology is that of which Christianity is under siege by is Islamism in support of a Universal Caliphate. By using violence and culture clash, Islamism seeks to establish a universal Caliphate over the entire world and relegate ll non-Muslims to second class citizens.

These ideologies come into direct conflict with the existence of Christendom and seek to destroy it from the outside, but their is an even more dangerous current within Christianity itself which although not seeking to destroy Christendom, it is doing just that. This current is of course sectarian anti-ecumenism. The competition over the minds of Christians to fall in line with certain ideologies on both a large scale and a small scale is frankly disgusting.

As we are in a stateless war of nations for the minds of the west what is the defense our nation has? It would seem that the innate nature of modern Christianity coupled with the eager evangelists of anti-Christendom ideologies has created a culture of denial within worldwide Christianity as to the nature of the modern world and how it affects us as the people of Christendom. If Christianity is a ship then Christians seem to be going below deck with buckets to drain the water pouring in, instead of simply fixing the holes that the water is coming in through.­­ The cause of this denial of reality is based in a set of Ideologies about Christianity that have arisen within the 20th century.

There is a mentality among many Evangelical and missionary churches that they can save the world. Unfortunately the path they seem to take most of the time is to chip away at existing christian communities to help theirs grow in number. Instead of relying on preexisting christian infrastructure these churches seem to think that they as small or large single parish congregations can somehow develop the infrastructure to counteract the effects of modernism on worldwide Christianity.

Another common mentality is much more akin to the ostrich with its head in the sand. A small congregation with close knit membership will perpetuate the false notion that outreach and ecumenicism is unnecessary as long as they are saved. These incredibly exclusive and inward looking congregations tend to hold the belief that everyone is somehow a worse christian than the members of their congregation and their congregation are the only real ones who truly understand the Bible whilst all other congregations are simply misinformed. This mentality is often the result of congregations which split from a larger congregation over personal grievances or other non-theological issues and very often dont properly align with known denominations. These individuals often simply refer to themselves as “Christians” and follow either a very fundamentalist version of the Bible with little theological development or some sort of grab bag of various principles that their particular Pastor advocates.

The last mentality is one that I will call the feel good mentality. It is a mentality within decentralized churches that is built upon a rejection by the congregants of formalized Church practice and adoption of something usually reminiscent of a 1990’s after school program. A sort of “lets make Christianity fun” system. More often then not these individual parishes will have either split from a more formalized parish and are using their sense of hipness to attract congregants from other parishes or are formed by young people who have rejected a more traditional christian practice because it was too dull. More often then not these congregations steadily move away from a central focus on Christ over time to a focus on community involvement and outreach. These parishes tend to be more Community center than Church.

Within all Christian denominations and governing bodies there is room for corruption, but nowhere is it so easy as in these self righteous decentralized congregations with no hierarchy and governing bodies to answer to. Modern televangelists exemplify this problem. Without anyone to answer to, the rise of “profit preachers” such as Olsteen and others have become rampant in the 20th century. people who will use the emotions of the ill-informed and theologically ignorant to make profit on the slow decline and Balkanisation of Christianity.

Many problems have been presented here thus far without a solution. To find one we must once more go back to our definition of a nation and examine how a state protects itself. We have identified that a nation is a group of people with a common trait, so without a state apparatus to back to how does a nation that transcends state boundaries defend itself. First we must look at how a state defends itself in the most traditional sense. The proper comparison would be to say in a total war a states primary and immediate goal is to establish a unified front across its society. This means that when survival is on the line factionalism must be given up in favor of unity. If the total survival of a society is on the line then there cannot be competing sects within the society vying for power, a unified front must be presented to the opposing army and all resources must go toward preservation. This is no different than how a nation protects itself.

Withing certain communities one can observe a sort of nationalism, that is a pride, brotherhood, and readiness to defend the community. Within others one can see an observe a competitiveness for domination of the community or even separation from it to establish an autonomous community with no relation to the original. For nearly 500 years Christendom has fallen into the latter category. For a long time this was not an existential threat due to two things, the lack of physical and information mobility over distances. With the proliferation of information mobility and physical mobility in the 20th century it becomes necessary for Christianity to take on the first approach. Christianity must find its pride, Brotherhood and Readiness to defend itself from external forces not seen in great force in many centuries. The question of course is “how does Christianity reclaim such a defensive posture toward hostile external forces?”

The answer of course is nationalism. Usually when one refers to Nationalism they are referring to ethnic nationalism or state nationalism(otherwise known as patriotism), but nationalism is not attached to a state or ethnic entity specifically. Nationalism is simply the active defense of a nation and a perpetuated feeling of brotherhood between the members of that nation. In this context the nation is Christianity. The Christian world needs to develope its sense of religious nationalism lost so very long ago. The next atep is to figure out how to do this. The nature of a nations self defense and resilience lies not in its size, its arms or technology, but in its values. Cultures groups such as medieval steppe tribes, firearm enthusiats or Islam are insulated from subjugation even though they are traditionally decentralized due to their culture which is martially militant by nature. Christian culture is not in any way martially militant, peace and pacifism is actually written into it.

There is no cultural drive within Christianity to its own self defense due to its peaceful doctrine. In a sense Christianity shares this with most nations of the world, there is an attitude that defense belongs to the state not the people and that the state regulates what cultural attributes it wishes to defend and which it doesn’t. In this way Christianity is simply one of many attributes a person has instead of the defining attribute. The way to get around this natural disregard for cultural self defense within Christianity ie;a lack of Christian nationalism, one must establish a governing body above the nation in order to encourage a sense of greater nationalism. As is the case with states, a nation of people divided into many states is more easily overwhelmed and taken over by a larger more unified state. Thus we must unify the Christian nation instead of let it be divided. The answer to this is Ecumenism.

Ecumenism is the pursuit of unity of all the christian world in vague terms. It is necessary to Christianity and a doctrine laid out by Christ as integral to the faith. Unfortunately in the latter half of the second millennium Ecumenism died out and continual infighting began. Christianity being a religion based in collectivism not individuality does not flourish in this environment and can easily be targeted by doctrinally individualist cultures. In the absence of a State-like entity governing and corralling all of Christendom under a single tent Christians become theologically competitive, trying to outdo each other whilst also becoming complacent as to the evangelisation outside of Christianity. In the modern day there is a constant fight for who has the “real Christianity” and it helps the enemies of Christendom get their way. We have to then figure out what this All-Christendom entity will be.

The obvious choice for this governing entity of Christendom is the Catholic church or even any of the Apostolic churches. The Apostolic churches are traditionally non-competitive with each other. Though politically separate these old churches have a live and let live attitude on the whole when it comes to the existence of other Apostolic churches. Recentralization of Christianity under the communion of the Holy See is integral to its continual survival. Unlike all other denominations, with the exception of the Orthodox Christians of the East, Catholicism is the only Church that has weathered the storm and not become almost wholly crippled by the modern era. The Holy See has been a representative of Christendom to the world in the 20th century and is once again leading the way in defense of Christ. Unfortunately in recent years the Catholic church has been worked away at by the Charismatic movement of decentralized profit churches. Competitive Christianity is the greatest threat to the existence of the Apostolic churches and to the future of Christianity as a whole.

Christianity can only be strong under the banner of the Apostolic faith. therefore for a new Christian nationalism to form, Western Christianity must become centered once more under the Mother Church. Full Communion with Rome is the only option for Christianities continual survival, because it is Rome alone in communion with all Christians, not any international organisation of churches or single denomination, that can lead the counter-revolution against the enemies of Christianity and ensure that Christianity will survive into the future.