The decline and persistence of faith

Sociologist Steve Bruce of the University of Aberdeen asks of his own Scotland, "Is Christianity facing a slow, inevitable death?" Here he charts the decline of adherence to the national Church of Scotland, and even to the Catholic Church and the smaller free churches, over the course of 150 years. Concludes Bruce:

People do not accidentally become religious. Being a Christian is not "natural"; it is an acquired characteristic. Like a language, it must be learned and, if it is not used in the home, in everyday conversation and in public life, it dies out. As the population that speaks a minority tongue shrinks, decline does not slow; it becomes faster. There is no natural obstacle to the death of a language. I do not see why the fate of a religion should be different.

The analogy to language can be taken further than Bruce himself recognizes. Individual languages may indeed die out, as he correctly notes. Think of the fate of Cornish or old Prussian. But the human capacity for language itself does not. Even if, say, Occitan dies out, the descendants of its speakers simply take on French as their primary means of communication. Similarly the decline of Christianity does not mean the decline of faith; rather it means the taking on of another faith -- perhaps a secular one based on a closed view of the cosmos and bereft of a personal deity. But it is a faith all the same.