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Christian History Corner: European Christianity's 'Failure to Thrive'
Why Christendom, born with an imperial bang, is now fading away in an irrelevant whimper.

...While no single factor can exhaustively explain the stark differences between these Western strongholds, the contrast between Europe's long legacy of government-sponsored religion and America's historically recent and unique separation of church and state provides one wide window on European Christianity's decline....

...Yet from its inception, Christendom suffered the ill effects of the church's intimate relationship with the state. While in an environment of open religious competition American Protestant denominations have thrived both in numbers and—often—in spiritual health, European Christianity's disputes have historically proven bloody and spiritually costly....

...Rome's fall, Constantinople's forsaking, and Christendom's eventual collapse during the Reformation era's wars of religion reveal the perils of uniting the church so closely with temporal earthly regimes. Bluntly put, the church that lives by state power, dies by state power—its fortunes are too closely tied to political vicissitudes....