Father, my own stab at some reasons secularism has made great in roads in the Church:  1.) the sapping of the strength and vitality of the Church in her traditional homelands by centuries of subjugation to Islam in a state of dhiminutude;   2). The oppression of the Russian Church by the demonic rule of the communists;  3) The consequent refusal of the old country Patriarchs to help the Church in the U.S and other western countries to become a vital, free and potent evangelical force as we should be. 

The concentration on the ‘ethnic’ which includes the American ethnic of many converts (largely shaped by secularized Protestantism and ‘Enlightenment rationalism’)  has created a situtation in which the reality of God being “everywhere present and filling all things”  is often forgotten. All that matters is the created thing.  The Natural Law approach of the RCC is of little help with this IMO, simply because it tends in the direction of a deitistic separtion between God and us–His creation (the main problem I have with RCC ecclesiology and soteriology BTW).  What develops is an impotent gnosticism in which aceticism becomes self-torture and the torture is then attributed to God so asceticism is not pursued (even more marked in the Calvinist derived Protestants)  Certainly we Orthodox are not immune from such self-destruction either.  The mystical delusion is a frequent story even in the lives of saints.     

BTW: The nilhism that pentrates and lies just under the surface of so much of American letters (from Emerson forward) is marked, but largely invisible because it is the assumed manner of thought. What is presented is the gradual dissolution and destruction of the human soul.  Oh the heroic man or woman may for awhile by superhuman effort attempt to escape from the darkness, but they, at best, remain in an extential grayness.  At worst, they are sucked back into the darkness from which they were attempting to escape.  So, why not eat, drink and be merry?  Is that much different from pray (indvidualistically), pay and obey? 

If we were ever to actually enter into the two great evangelistic statements and live them, all of that would be shattered.  “Repent for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand” and “Christ is Risen!”  The way to do that, it seems to me, is to worship God in community rather than the created thing.  True asceticism is an effort at doing that.  It is not an heroic denial of this world, it is a constant recognition of from where and from whom our life actually comes and how close He is (“nearer than hands and feet”). 

Joy is a God given gift.  It too is ‘at hand’ 

“This is the day the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it” 

The academic environment for the study of early Islam is rather different than that for the study of early Christianity. By and large, most scholars of Islam are either Muslims themselves (often converts) or are highly sympathetic to that religion, and very sensitive to the historical injustices perpetrated against it by Europeans and Americans. For this reason, it’s really impossible at the moment for practicing specialists in the field to undertake a study of the Qur’an and Muhammad using the methodology used in Biblical Studies and Early Christian studies. So, the gap is often filled by people who aren’t particularly well-positioned to undertake the task. For example, Cook and Crone wrote “Hagarism” when they were graduate students as a deliberately provocative thought-experiment. Tom Holland is a Classicist writing without expertise in the primary texts (let alone the necessary languages). Then there are the overtly polemical writers, like Robert Spencer or Christoph Luxenberg, who work with questionable credentials and motives, making flashy-but-dubious assertions.

There are a few exceptions to this, most notably Gabriel Reynolds at Notre Dame, but their research tends to be carefully considered and much, much less headline-grabbing….

So, in my opinion as someone in the field, one should be more impressed with Islam’s ability to insulate itself from modern scientific inquiry than anything else…