My only qualification for expounding on the future of religion is that I survived a very religious childhood. This gives me a felt-in-the-bones connection to the subject, although in point of fact I haven't thought seriously about it for several years. As we know, though, the opinions of ordinary individuals on any question are just as valuable as the views of people who spend their whole lives studying the subject. More valuable, in fact. On the matter of religion we'd rather listen to a woman on the street than to God himself, who we would suspect of promoting his own interests, and resent for authoritarianism. That's just the thing, isn't it, that's the collapse of religion in a nutshell.

With the authority of an ordinary person, then, I assert that Christianity has been contaminated beyond any foreseeable hope of redemption. (I'm confining my comments to Christianity and to North America, the limits of my temerity.) Many of us have admired the exquisitely appropriate terms of its disgrace-Protestantism brought down by its greasy-haired television salesmen after centuries of promoting material prosperity as a sign of God's favour, and Catholicism, which made its distaste for women into a cornerstone of the faith, shamed by the misdirected lust of its priests.

In more general terms, I'd say that the Christian church is collapsing largely because as a moral institution it has been outstripped by society, which, for example, recognizes the equality of women and homosexuals, and is slowly moving to reorganize itself in response. This doesn't account for the fact that people are staying away in droves from liberal churches, which have attempted to evolve morally and to provide people with a place for asking the big questions. We can only assume that people have never gone to church in great numbers to ask questions. It may be that Christianity is one of those splendid ideas, like socialism, that have never been never properly tried.

In any case, with Christianity's terms hopelessly devalued, most people are taking their quest for meaning elsewhere. In this century, psychoanalysis has done a better job of explaining the way we act, the terms and limits of our existence, the meaning of our connection to others. Nature has been a better cathedral, offering us solitude and evidence of what is real, beautiful, vital, separate from ourselves, and non-negotiable. Most of our experiences of worship and transcendence have been in nature. So personal spirituality finds its own forms and exists as it has always existed. I'm not sure that organized religion ever facilitated it that much.

Most of the other things that religion came to be about are alive and well, secularized but not essentially changed. The public confession of sins and the veneration of saints have found electronic expressions. As Christianity retreats, there's a groundswell of interest in phenomena from religions we used to call pagan: body fetishism, astrology, Halloween, witchcraft, vampires, ghosts, and extraterrestrials. This may look like a devolution but I'm not sure it is. Throughout centuries of Christian worship, it's been hard to disengage superstition from faith, and there have always been crowds flocking to see statues of the Virgin oozing tears of blood. The difference is that now we have electronic media dedicated to tracking the most sentimental, sensational, and tawdry aspects of who we are. I think we should brace ourselves for more sights like the spectacle we witnessed in September of thousands laying flowers and bits of sad doggerel on the ground outside Kensington Palace.

Will our needs for worship, absolution, and the illusion of control over our fate express themselves in a widespread religious movement that will shape our society for centuries, as Christianity did? I don't think so. There's not enough cohesion is society, we're changing too fast, our attention span is too short. All in all, this is probably a good thing. When it's institutionalized, the religious impulse, even in its finer expressions, so easily turns into its antithesis. We might be drawn to church because it's a place to connect with other people who also want to contemplate realities greater than themselves. The first thing you know, though, we're going to war on the basis of this affiliation, claiming the authority of that higher reality.

This is not to deny that as a society we are suffering certain real and painful losses in having outgrown organized religion. Community. Rituals that mean something. A way of thinking that makes sense of the horrors of the world, or, failing that, allows us to consign them to some inscrutable Will, and sleep at night. The social civility that grew out of a lot of people holding the same principles of proper behaviour (although when push came to shove it never seemed to run that deep).

Martin Buber contends that our age presents the ultimate opportunity for faith, that the way the name of God has been trampled on and soiled and disgraced is a vivid modern manifestation of Christ taking on the sins of humanity. This is the sort of celebration of paradox that is at the heart of Christianity, and it used to seem very meaningful to me. Hope in despair, joy through suffering, life in death. Now it doesn't resonate very much. To see anything other than death in death seems to me to be delusion. There is something in the modern mind-set that exacts a full look at the worst. Not because seeing things for what they are is redeeming, but because it is maturity, sanity.

"Every age is equidistant from God." I don't know who said this, but I've held it in my mind since I heard it, liking the way it puts the drama of twentieth century dread into the perspective of millennia of human confusion, struggle, and truth. I wish I could conclude on that note, but what gives me pause is the crisis we presently face in the physical environment. The degradation of nature is our age's special catastrophe, far more ominous and significant than the degradation of the church-or perhaps, a more concrete way of talking about the same thing. In "The world is charged with the grandeur of God", Gerard Manley Hopkins writes about how hard it is to sense the divine force in nature when you walk on paving stones all day and breathe in the stink of industry. It's 1918, though, and he is able to assert his faith in a renewing, immutable pulse of life that infuses the world:

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs-

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

In the eighty years since Hopkins wrote these lines, we have discovered what the death of God means; we have lost our certainty in the vitality of the earth.

Joan Thomas is a Winnipeg writer and contributing book reviewer for the Globe and Mail.