One of the metaphors that Jesus used to describe the influence of Christianity was salt.

Christians are to be the salt of the world and through that be a positive influence on society. In the analogy, the Lord was asking what happens if believers lose their saltiness. Essentially, they would become useless and thrown out (Matthew 5:13).

But aside from Christians losing their saltiness, other forces are at work to remove the Christian influence from the world.

Perhaps one of the key leaders of this movement has been former Oxford University professor Richard Dawkins, 83. An evolutionary biologist and atheist, he has been at the forefront, publicly criticizing religion and Christianity in particular. He wrote a popular bestseller, The God Delusion, as part of his battle to discredit faith.

But in a recent interview with Rachel Johnson on Britain’s LBC at the end of March, we have seen a slight change in Dawkins’s tune.

In no way has he become a man of faith, but Dawkins is lamenting the loss of the Christian influence in society. He even went one step further and called himself a ‘cultural Christian.’

“I do think we are culturally a Christian country. I call myself a cultural Christian,” Dawkins said. “I’m not a believer, but there is a distinction between being a believing Christian and a cultural Christian…. I love hymns and Christmas carols and I sort of feel at home in the Christian ethos, and I feel that we are a Christian country in that sense…. [I] would not be happy if, for example, we lost all our cathedrals and our beautiful parish churches.”

In his article for the Catholic News Agency, Walter Silva pointed out, that as recently as four years ago, Dawkins was already lamenting Christianity’s declining influence in society.

“In 2018 he notably said that we should not celebrate that Europe is less Christian, as we should hold onto it ‘for fear of finding something worse,‘” Silva explained.

And Dawkins is not alone.

In his Church and Culture blog, James White points to a comment made by Derek Thompson, a self-proclaimed agnostic, in an article for The Atlantic, who was similarly regretting the decline of Christianity’s influence in American society.

“As an agnostic, I have spent most of my life thinking about the decline of faith in America in mostly positive terms.” Thompson wrote. “Organized religion seemed, to me, beset by scandal and entangled in noxious politics. So, I thought, what is there really to mourn? Only in the past few years have I come around to a different view. Maybe religion, for all of its faults, works a bit like a retaining wall to hold back the destabilizing pressure of American hyper-individualism, which threatens to swell and spill over in its absence.“

There is no doubt a major cultural shift is taking place in society. Attendance at mainstream Christian churches in America, such as Methodists and Episcopalian, is in absolute free fall.

Having abandoned the Bible and the basic tenets of the Christian faith, they have lost their saltiness and as Jesus said “no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.”

Yet amid this darkening world, a flicker remains, as Biblical Christianity continues to thrive.

In their article for The Conversation, Biola University professor Brad Christerson and USC Dornsife professor Richard Flory state that across America, groups that they refer to as the Independent Network Charismatic (INC) are growing at a rapid pace.

“INC Christianity is the fastest-growing Christian group in America and possibly around the world,” Christerson and Flory explain, “Over the 40 years from 1970 to 2010, the number of regular attenders of Protestant churches as a whole shrunk by an average of .05 percent per year, while independent neo-charismatic congregations (a category in which INC groups reside) grew by an average of 3.24 percent per year.”