We don’t need to recover a ‘golden age’ of Christianity. ‘The Great Return’ falls short

Jamie Franklin’s The Great Return urges the Church to reclaim its past dominance but confuses the decline of Christendom with that of Christianity, argues Dr Joshua Bloor. True renewal, he argues, must centre on Christ, not nostalgia

In The Great Return (Hodder Faith), Jamie Franklin presents a stark and dystopian vision of Christianity’s current condition, warning that unless the Church returns to its former glory, society is destined to spiral into moral chaos. It is a provocative call for the Church, particularly in the West, to come back from the edge of spiritual exile and reclaim its theological, liturgical, and moral convictions. Written in the shadow of the pandemic and its ecclesial aftermath, the book is part lament, part warning, and part rallying cry. Franklin believes Covid-19 exposed a deeper rot within the modern Church: not merely temporary confusion, but a longstanding abandonment of Christian orthodoxy, reverent worship, and prophetic clarity.

Yet at the core of Franklin’s argument lies a fundamental flaw: he appears to conflate the decline of Christendom (a political and cultural expression of Christianity) with the decline of Christianity itself. The reality is quite the opposite. There are more Christians alive today than at any other point in history. In 1910, often viewed as the height of Christianity’s institutional power, there were approximately 600 million Christians. Today, that number is around 2.38 billion.

Take global Pentecostalism, for instance. Anthropologists and scholars of religion have been astonished by its explosive growth throughout the twentieth century, particularly in light of its rise during an