The temptation for many believers is either despair or outrage: despair that Christendom is fading, or outrage at the civilization replacing it.
Somewhere outside ancient Ephesus, according to one of the most enduring legends of late antiquity, a group of frightened young Christians fled into a cave and fell asleep. The story became famous throughout the Christian world. Greek Christians told it. Syriac Christians preached it. Medieval Latin Christians copied it into collections of saints’ lives. Eventually, it even appeared in Qur’an 18:9–26, where the sleepers became a sign of divine power and resurrection. Few stories traveled so widely across the ancient Mediterranean and Near East.
The basic outline is simple. During the persecution of Christians under the Roman emperor Decius (249–251), several Christian youths refused to worship the pagan gods. They fled outside the city and hid in a cave. The authorities discovered them and sealed the cave shut, entombing them alive. But instead of dying, the sleepers entered a miraculous slumber.
Centuries later, during the reign of the Christian emperor Theodosius II (408-450), the cave was opened. The sleepers awoke believing they had only rested a single night. One of them descended into Ephesus to purchase bread and was stunned by what he saw.
The city had changed.
Crosses stood where pagan symbols once dominated. Christianity, once hunted and despised, was now public and triumphant. The young man attempted to buy food using coins bearing the image of Decius, and the merchants stared at him as though he were a ghost.
In many tellings of the legend, the emotional force of the story rests precisely there: awakening into a world no longer recognizable. The Seven Sleepers expected persecution and found Christendom. For centuries Christians loved this story because it testified to resurrection, divine providence, and the triumph of the faith over pagan Rome. Yet today the story may strike Western Christians differently. Increasingly, it feels less like a tale of victory than one of disorientation.
Many Christians in the modern West feel as though they too have awakened into another world. Few modern figures captured that sensation more perceptively than the British theologian and missiologist Lesslie Newbigin. He spent decades as a missionary in India. There he encountered Hinduism, religious pluralism, and cultures fundamentally different from the Christian assumptions that once shaped Britain. Yet when he eventually returned home to England, he discovered something startling. The truly foreign land was no longer India. It was England itself.
This realization became central to his remarkable book Foolishness to the Greeks. Newbigin argued that the modern West had ceased to be genuinely Christian, even if remnants of Christian memory remained scattered throughout its institutions and language. Western secularism had become its own dogmatic system, its own comprehensive account of reality, complete with moral assumptions, taboos, and unquestioned orthodoxies. Britain, in other words, had become missionary territory.
The shock Newbigin experienced parallels, in a strange way, the experience of the Seven Sleepers. The sleepers expected paganism and instead found Christendom. Newbigin expected Christendom and found a post-Christian civilization.
Yet the story becomes even more complicated. For while Christianity may be weakening institutionally in the West, its moral and cultural fingerprints remain almost everywhere. This is one of the central insights of Tom Holland in his widely discussed book Dominion.
Holland, though not (yet) a Christian, argues that many of the values modern Westerners now regard as universal and self-evident are in fact deeply Christian in origin. The dignity of the weak, concern for victims, the moral equality of persons, suspicion of raw power, compassion for the marginalized, even the modern obsession with human rights. None of these emerged naturally from the ancient world, but from Christianity’s long revolution within it.
The ancient pagan world admired strength, conquest, hierarchy, and glory. Mercy was often viewed as weakness. Humility was not considered a virtue but a defect. Crucifixion itself was designed not merely to kill but to humiliate.
Christianity overturned this moral imagination. The crucified God transformed how the West understood power, suffering, and human worth. This means that even societies increasingly hostile to Christianity often continue to think with Christian moral instincts. The modern West frequently rejects Christian doctrine while simultaneously preserving Christian assumptions about equality, compassion, liberation, and justice.
In that sense, Christendom lingers like a ghost.
This helps explain one of the strangest features of modern Britain. Some of the loudest laments for the disappearance of Christianity now come not from believers but from atheists. Richard Dawkins, perhaps the most famous atheist in the English-speaking world, has in recent years described himself as a “cultural Christian.” He remains unconvinced by Christian theology but nevertheless recognizes that Christianity formed the moral and cultural framework of English civilization. More striking still, he has expressed concern over what may replace Christianity when its influence disappears.
Particularly noteworthy are his comments regarding the rise of Islam in Britain. Dawkins has acknowledged that, despite his unbelief, he feels more culturally at home in a society shaped by Christianity than in one increasingly shaped by aggressive secular emptiness or by religious traditions fundamentally different from the historic culture of England.
That admission is revealing. For decades many secular intellectuals assumed Christianity could be removed while the moral structure it created would remain intact indefinitely. But history rarely works that way. Moral worlds are not self-sustaining. Remove the roots long enough and eventually the branches weaken as well.
This does not mean every secular person becomes immoral, nor does it mean Christian societies have always embodied Christian virtues consistently. History offers ample evidence to the contrary. But it does suggest that civilizations inherit moral assumptions from deeper religious foundations, even when later generations forget where those assumptions came from.
America now seems to stand somewhere at least in the middle of this transition. Many of us instinctively recognize that the country is not what it once was religiously. Even many who rarely attend church sense the shift. Public trust has eroded. Shared moral assumptions have fragmented. Religious literacy has collapsed. Increasing numbers of Americans possess little familiarity with Christianity beyond caricature or political stereotypes.
The result is not necessarily a more neutral society. It is often a more confused one. And that confusion changes how Christians must think about themselves.
For generations many American Christians operated with the assumption that they inhabited a basically Christian culture, even if imperfectly so. Christian language still carried authority. Biblical references remained widely intelligible. Churches occupied a respected public place.
That world is fading.
This does not mean Christians in the modern West face persecution comparable to the early church under Rome. Such comparisons are often exaggerated. But it does mean Christians increasingly resemble missionaries rather than cultural custodians.
Missionaries cannot rely upon inherited prestige. They must persuade. They must explain. They must understand the culture around them while refusing to surrender the substance of the faith. They must learn patience, clarity, courage, and charity simultaneously.
This is precisely why Christians should think carefully about how they conduct themselves, how they speak, and how they defend the gospel in an age increasingly suspicious of Christianity. Anger alone will not suffice. Nostalgia will not suffice either. The temptation for many believers is either despair or outrage: despair that Christendom is fading, or outrage at the civilization replacing it. Yet neither response fully captures the posture of the early Christians themselves.
The first Christians did not inherit a Christian society. They inhabited a pagan empire whose moral assumptions frequently contradicted their own. They were often misunderstood, mocked, or dismissed as dangerous and irrational.
And still Christianity spread.
Not primarily through coercion or political dominance, but through witness, persuasion, sacrifice, intellectual engagement, and the creation of a compelling moral vision. This is exceptionally well explained in the work of the recently deceased Averil Cameron, especially in Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire. Cameron shows how Christianity transformed the Roman world not merely through imperial patronage, but through persuasion, preaching, storytelling, and the formation of communities whose lives embodied an alternative moral vision.
Christians learned how to speak convincingly within a civilization that initially regarded them as foolish.
That may be one of the central lessons Christians in the modern West need to recover. If the culture is becoming strange again, then perhaps Christians must relearn habits long neglected during the centuries of cultural dominance. Perhaps we must rediscover persuasion rather than assumption, conviction rather than panic, witness rather than mere outrage.
The Seven Sleepers awoke to discover that the world had changed while they slept. Many Christians today feel something similar. We look around and sense that we no longer inhabit the moral and religious landscape our grandparents knew. The symbols remain in places, but the assumptions beneath them have shifted.
The deeper lesson of Christian history, however, is that the faith has survived such moments before. Indeed, Christianity first flourished not in a confident Christendom, but in a world where believers were strangers.
We would do well to remember that the ultimate mission of the Church is not merely the preservation of a civilization.
Paul did not describe the gospel primarily as the power of God unto civilizational stability or cultural restoration, important though such questions may be. The gospel is first and foremost God’s saving message for sinners.
Christendom rose, flourished, fractured, and now appears to be fading across much of the West. Cultures change. Nations rise and decline. Moral consensus shifts. Yet the mission entrusted to the Church remains unchanged because it is God’s mission.
The Apostle Paul, writing to Christians in the heart of the pagan Roman Empire, declared that he was “not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God unto salvation to everyone who believes” (Romans 1:16). Significantly, Paul did not describe the gospel primarily as the power of God unto civilizational stability or cultural restoration, important though such questions may be. The gospel is first and foremost God’s saving message for sinners.
The central mission of the Church, therefore, is not simply to reclaim a culture, but to proclaim Christ crucified and risen and thereby participate in God’s work of seeking and saving the lost.
That perspective changes how Christians approach this cultural moment. If believers see themselves primarily as guardians of a collapsing civilization, despair and anger will almost inevitably follow. But if Christians remember themselves as witnesses to the risen Christ within a mission field, then even a post-Christian society becomes not merely a tragedy, but an opportunity for faithful proclamation.
Indeed, this was the environment in which Christianity first spread most powerfully. The early Christians possessed no cultural dominance, institutional prestige, or social standing. Yet they believed the gospel itself carried divine power.
Perhaps that is the deepest lesson hidden within the story of the Seven Sleepers.
Christians may awaken to discover that the world around them has changed. But the gospel has not changed. The mission has not changed. And the God who raised his Church in one pagan age is not exhausted in another.
