My kind interpretation of the previous poster’s comment is that he or she may have confused the latter with the former: looked at highly religious places, saw them moving forward in social terms and thought it was the religion moving forward when in fact it was the people dropping the religion and thus moving forward.
It sounds like Christianity didn’t go through self-reflection, it sounds like Christians did and many of them stopped being Christians.
Exactly.
My kind interpretation of the previous poster’s comment is that he or she may have confused the latter with the former: looked at highly religious places, saw them moving forward in social terms and thought it was the religion moving forward when in fact it was the people dropping the religion and thus moving forward.