At this time, looking around, we can see a rapid and catastrophic failure of even the most devout Christians.
The mainstream churches are essentially dead - because watching stuff online is just more TV; online groups are just social media. Social-distancing destroys society. Any church that states health is their priority, is no longer a church.
What is worse, extremely few (ex?) Christians acknowledge this catastrophic failure.
In reality, what has been revealed about Christianity in the past half-year, by the response to the birdemic, is a really Big Thing in the history of the world: and especially the past 2000 years.
We are living through a transition of comparable significance with any in world history: comparable to the invention of agriculture or the industrial revolution - and happening must faster than either.
Sudden and very complete collapse has affected the traditionalist and conservative and patriarchal churches, as well as the liberals and sexual-revolutionary radicals. Therefore, it really is no use to be harking back, and to pointing at the old ways.
External sources of tradition are broken; the old ways have failed.
Christians are now mostly isolated or in small groups. 'Fighting' rhetoric is nonsense in this context, because we are massively outnumbered and out-powered, and even the law is against us.
The strength must thus be inner - or it will be absent; the fight is spiritual - or else the outcome will be surrender.
Even merely to stay a Christian is very difficult (and clearly too difficult for most 'devout' churchgoers) - but mere stasis is not an option, growth is needed for survival.
Therefore, each Christian requires new (previous untapped - or hardly used) sources of strength, motivation, conviction. Christians must Think and to Be in unprecedented ways - and ways that are qualitatively different from the mainstream of impulse gratification and totalitarian bureaucracy.
We can't get this secondhand, so every serious Christian needs to be actively working on this - every day. The problem is of absolute urgency - it brooks no delay. Once active and faithful Christians are falling-away daily, hourly.
You may be next; and by that time you won't even care; because if the Holy Ghost has been known and then rejected, the route back is notoriously uncertain.
Unlikely as it sounds, Christians can have absolutely solid faith that it can be done.
We are never left bereft; since God is both our loving father and the creator; so there are innumerable ways we can be (and are being) helped; if only we recognise them, and meet them halfway. Thanks to Jesus Christ: the Holy Ghost is ever present, and bottomless well of guidance and encouragement.
Properly considered, the Christian situation is really not too difficult for anybody, and anybody who wants to be Christian can have it and hold it.
But we will not find help and strength if we keep looking in a place where Christianity has departed, if we keep depending on authorities that have abandoned the faith, and who address the body instead of the soul.
We must look in the proper place: the true and indestructible House of God.
