The Catholic mission against Western secularisation has sputtered in part because the West, religious and non-religious, has laboured for many years now under what is at best an imperfect understanding of what "secularisation" really is. Until now, the Church has passively let secular thinkers tell the tale of how and why people stop believing in God — all of which would be fine if secular thinkers had succeeded in connecting those dots correctly. But the trouble is that they haven't, as is evident from several insurmountable logical problems that could not have been foreseen when Friedrich Nietzsche's madman first prophesied the death of God.

For one, consider the historical timeline. Secularisation has been understood by most great modern thinkers — and by plenty of mediocre ones — as a linear process in which religion slowly but surely vanishes from the earth — or at least from its more sophisticated precincts. As people become more educated and more prosperous, the collective story goes, those same people come to find themselves both more sceptical of religion's premises and less needful of its ostensible consolations. Hence, somewhere in the long run — Nietzsche himself predicted it would take "hundreds and hundreds" of years for the news to reach everyone — religion, or more specifically the Christianity once dominant on the European continent, will die out. 

Exactly which feature of modernity would put the final nail in the coffin has been unclear, but a representative list would include technology, education, material progress, urbanisation, science, feminism and rationalism, among the usual suspects. Once again, this process has been supposed by many to be inexorable. Like candles on a birthday cake the religious faithful, too, will sooner or later flicker out, one by one. 

The trouble with this widely accepted storyline is that it does not describe the historical reality of Christianity's persistence. The American sociologist of religion Rodney Stark, who is a contrarian in these matters, opened a classic 1999 essay called "Secularisation RIP" with an entertaining review of predictions of the demise of Christian faith dating back to 1660 and continuing to the present day — including such secular soothsayers as Frederick the Great, Thomas Jefferson, Auguste Comte, Friedrich Engels, Sigmund Freud, the anthropologist Anthony F.C. Wallace, the sociologist Bryan Wilson and other notables. As Stark wryly implies, none seems to have grasped the ironic fact that their own obituaries would be written long before the rest of the world stopped believing in God. As John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge suggest in their 2009 book God is Back, the Almighty has not expired on the timeline predicted by his would-be obituarists.