Historian William H. McNeill seems a prophet of our times when he wrote in Past and Future, 1964:
Without religious revival on a grand scale, I should think it likely that moral lassitude and a spirit of indifference, a sense of futility, and, perhaps a supine fatalism would increasingly gain hold of men's minds; and, having nothing much worthwhile to live for or strive for, they might even cease to propagate their kind in sufficient number to prevent a decrease in the population of the earth. Something like this frame of mind did come to possess the Greeks and Romans, and the curious demographic decay of those nations in the days of the Roman Empire may have been connected with the political and religious disintegration of their ancestral way of life." pp. 174-75. Quoted in John Warwick Montgomery, Where is History Going?" p. 97.