How then do you explain the culture of the Byzantines, which was entirely Christian? The truth is the decadence and decay of the west in Europe had begun long before the establishment of Christianity as the state religion. Furthermore, what we know of pagans and the prechristian era is available to us only because the early church kept learning and law alive in the face of repeated incursions by barbarian (ie pagan) hordes whose only use for books was as kindling.
Those in Europe, and here on this board, whose single creative faculty is to denegrate and misrepresent our priceless Christian hertiage resemble, more than anything else, those 4th & 5th century (pagan) Romans who had so lost faith in their own history and culture that they allowed it to whither and die.
Christ Jesus is alive today in the life and souls of BILLIONS. Today! Christ is the watershed event of human history. Modern Europe misreads its own history and in doing so jeopardizes its own future.
That's not going to happen in America.