Project: A book on the de-Christianization of European culture. Christianity has lost much of its following, at least in relative numbers, since the eighteenth century. At the same time its residual adherents have ceased believing what their predecessors believed. The lapsed Christian tenets have not, however, simply vanished without a trace. Rather, they recur periodically in modified form, their Christian derivation unacknowledged. Three such recurrences are examined in detail. The Christian afterlife as a total repository of this-worldly existence reappeared in the substitute concept of the perpetual presence of the past, which built up in the course of the nineteenth century. The doctrine of original sin revived in secular guise from 1914 to the mid-1950s. And the notion of an absolute truth contrasting with our blurred mortal perspective on things has been replicated in reverse since 1900 in the form of a growing denial of objective reality in natural science, philosophy and the arts. A concluding analysis compares these Christian recurrences with others not studied in such detail and infers from the overall pattern that the breakdown of the faith around 1750 was traumatic and that the tendency for individual or collective trauma to be relived informs religion, human life generally and indeed physical and biological processes as a whole.