Authored by Stephen Soukup via American Greatness,

One of the great tragedies of the Enlightenment and its aftermath was that Christianity in general and the Catholic Church in particular lost faith in their legitimacy and in the legitimacy of their mission. As a result, they surrendered that mission's otherworldliness and agreed to fight only on temporal grounds. In other words, when the Church responded to its attackers, it did so not on its own terms but on the terms—and in the terms—of those attackers. Rather than focus on its mission and the eternal truths for which it had become the earthly vessel, the Church became distracted. The problem wasn't that the Church failed to defend itself, but that it did so on the foreign turf of the rationalist philosophers, economists, sociologists, and politicians. And it continues to do so.

When Immanuel Kant insisted that God's existence cannot be proved by philosophy, science, or reason, Christianity should have conceded and moved on. Christianity is not about proving those things to nonbelievers. It is about fostering the faith necessary to believe them without proof.