Secularism is today’s Renaissance. The first Renaissance, which brought the European Middle Ages to a close, moved man into the center in place of God. The challenge of the Renaissance led to the Reformation of the 1500’s in the Christian church. Those of us who remain in that church, formerly identified as “Christendom,” struggle toward a new Reformation in response to the challenge of secularism.

I remember a course in my college days, Renaissance and Reformation. We studied the two movements together. The Renaissance began, so we learned, in Italy in the 1300’s. The Reformation began later. The watershed year was 1517, when Martin Luther nailed the famous Ninety-Five Theses to the church door in Wittenberg, Germany.

Why was the Renaissance first? Did most Christians accept the excesses of their church in the late Middle Ages as okay? Accept them because they were afraid if they messed with the church they were going against God? Worshiped the church as God?

Reformers worked before the Reformation, men such as John Wycliffe in England and John Hus in Bohemia. Monastic movements like the one led by Francis of Assisi called Christians to a simpler religious practice. Spiritual and secular leaders were aware of wrongs within the church during the 1200’s and before, but it took the challenge of the Renaissance and new inventions like the printing press (a revolution akin to today’s Internet) to create the Reformation.

Who knows? Today’s New Atheism might challenge Christians toward a rediscovery of their faith. Emergent churches, contemporary churches, and those movements in Africa, Asia, and South America indicate that Christianity is thriving, seething, roiling.

Perhaps we do not recognize the new wineskins into which it has been poured.