The Sea of Faith was once too at the full, and round earth's shore lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

But now I only hear its melancholy,

lull, withdrawing, roar.

When the Victorian poet Matthew Arnold published his famous poem Dover Beach in 1867,

it served as a eulogy for the certainties of a bygone era, especially religion.

100 years earlier, the Enlightenment had swept through Europe,

and its philosophers and scientists had announced the death of the age of superstition

and the birth of the age of reason.

The Industrial Revolution was creating social upheaval

as engineering geniuses like George Stevenson and Isambard Kingdom Brunel constructed

a technological future. Natural history museums in the style of Gothic churches were being constructed

as new cathedrals to the modern sciences. Charles Darwin had recently published his theory

of naturalistic evolution in

On the Origin of Species, and Karl Marx was about to publish his materialist manifesto

Das Capital. The advance of science, secularism and technology was the backdrop to Arnold's

haunting poem and its famous line about the

melancholy long withdrawing roar of the sea of faith. The receding tide of religious belief

that Arnold witnessed in his day has only continued at an ever-increasing pace in the Western world.

In the 1800s, the church and its Christian

teachings still dominated society. 150 years later, we are undeniably living in a post-Christian

world where the picture looks very different. My name is Justin Briley, and I've been hosting

conversations on faith between Christians, atheists, agnostics and other worldviews for over a decade and a half.

...