Over the past century many influential people have predicted the collapse of mass religious belief, especially among educated people. But it didn’t happen. Somehow, God survived and even flourished. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the former Soviet Union and its satellite states. For most of the century the Soviet state was controlled by a totalitarian regime based on an atheistic philosophy and dedicated to the eradication of all forms of religious belief. But then, in the late nineteen eighties, international Communism imploded, while the faith it sought to destroy mushroomed in Russia and continues to do so. A similar thing has happened in China where, despite the almost unbelievable totalitarian oppression of the Maoist era and persecution on a grand scale, the number of practising Christian is now in the order of 100 million.
However there’s nothing new about this. People have always been predicting God’s demise. But eventually they all die and are forgotten, while the faith they dismissed lives on.