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fubarobfusco comments on Stupid Questions January 2015 - Less Wrong
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Did the Enlightenment manage to break the Christian faith experience after all, so that today's Christians have more in common with today's pagan revivalists than they realize? The fact that people in traditionally Christian countries seem to have lost interest in maintaining the forms of the religion suggests that Christianity in its former strongholds has begun to decline.
Of course, Christians themselves apparently come up with the idea that religions have expiration dates - their contrived BC/AD division in history. Has Christianity therefore entered its own late, BC-like era?
What is "the Christian faith experience"?
Specifically, what is "the" doing there?
The idea of a unitary Christendom in Europe prior to the Reformation was not produced by a "faith experience", but by the violent destruction of alternative Christian faiths such as the Gnostics, Cathars, Waldensians, and other dissident Christian groups; by the perpetual hounding of the Jews; the various wars and Crusades against the Islamic caliphates; and so on. This started long before the Enlightenment or even the Renaissance.
One of the things common to many of the dissident Christian groups of Europe is that they did not see a need for a centralized hierarchy in religion. They either held to equality among all believers, or a relatively flat system of initiation or priesthood. For this they were persecuted, in some cases to utter extermination, by the Roman Church and its kingdoms.
What changed in the Reformation was that the Lutherans, Calvinists, and later Anglicans had sufficient political power to create their own zone of violent destruction of alternatives — including Roman Catholics and Jews. Unlike the Cathars, the Protestants were too strong to be exterminated. The Wars of Religion were bloody, but they could not become a one-sided massacre like the Albigensian Crusade.
Ultimately this led to Westphalia and the replacement of the ideal of a unitary Christendom in Europe with the idea of nation-states.