Membership and Cultural Christianity

There is no doubt that membership in the Christian Church has decreased recently to a minority of the population in Europe and is approaching that in the United States, yet in both areas a majority of the population still claims to be Christian. That being the case, what does being a Christian mean to those who don't belong to a church? If it doesn't mean following Jesus, it is a misnomer.

At the beginning of the current era, Europe was controlled by the Roman Empire. This evolved into religious control by the Roman Catholic Church for several centuries, then into strife between the Roman Catholic Church and the churches of the Protestant Reformation.

As a result of these events, a culture developed that is commonly referred to as conventional wisdom, a philosophy that is roughly taken from that of the Christian Church, but doesn't follow any doctrine of the church completely. This way of life is sometimes referred to as Cultural Christianity.