Meacham on post-Christian America

In the new issue of Newsweek, Jon Meacham explores the decline of Christianity as the animating spirit of American life. Excerpts:

Let's be clear: while the percentage of Christians may be shrinking, rumors of the death of Christianity are greatly exaggerated. Being less Christian does not necessarily mean that America is post-Christian. A third of Americans say they are born again; this figure, along with the decline of politically moderate-to liberal mainline Protestants, led the ARIS authors to note that "these trends ... suggest a movement towards more conservative beliefs and particularly to a more 'evangelical' outlook among Christians." With rising numbers of Hispanic immigrants bolstering the Roman Catholic Church in America, and given the popularity of Pentecostalism, a rapidly growing Christian milieu in the United States and globally, there is no doubt that the nation remains vibrantly religious--far more so, for instance, than Europe.

Still, in the new NEWSWEEK Poll, fewer people now think of the United States as a "Christian nation" than did so when George W. Bush was president (62 percent in 2009 versus 69 percent in 2008). Two thirds of the public (68 percent) now say religion is "losing influence" in American society, while just 19 percent say religion's influence is on the rise. The proportion of Americans who think religion "can answer all or most of today's problems" is now at a historic low of 48 percent. During the Bush 43 and Clinton years, that figure never dropped below 58 percent.

Many conservative Christians believe they have lost the battles over issues such as abortion, school prayer and even same-sex marriage, and that the country has now entered a post-Christian phase. Christopher Hitchens --a friend and possibly the most charming provocateur you will ever meet--wrote a hugely popular atheist tract a few years ago, "God Is Not Great." As an observant (if deeply flawed) Episcopalian, I disagree with many of Hitchens's arguments--I do not think it is productive to dismiss religious belief as superstitious and wrong--but he is a man of rigorous intellectual honesty who, on a recent journey to Texas, reported hearing evangelical mutterings about the advent of a "post-Christian" America.

More:

Which is precisely what most troubles [Southern Baptist theologian Al] Mohler. "The post-Christian narrative is radically different; it offers spirituality, however defined, without binding authority," he told me. "It is based on an understanding of history that presumes a less tolerant past and a more tolerant future, with the present as an important transitional step." The present, in this sense, is less about the death of God and more about the birth of many gods. The rising numbers of religiously unaffiliated Americans are people more apt to call themselves "spiritual" rather than "religious." (In the new NEWSWEEK Poll, 30 percent describe themselves this way, up from 24 percent in 2005.)

Roughly put, the Christian narrative is the story of humankind as chronicled in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament--the drama of creation, fall and redemption. The orthodox tend to try to live their lives in accordance with the general behavioral principles of the Bible (or at least the principles they find there of which they approve) and anticipate the ultimate judgment of God--a judgment that could well determine whether they spend eternity in heaven or in hell.

... "The moral teachings of Christianity have exerted an incalculable influence on Western civilization," Mohler says. "As those moral teachings fade into cultural memory, a secularized morality takes their place. Once Christianity is abandoned by a significant portion of the population, the moral landscape necessarily changes. For the better part of the 20th century, the nations of Western Europe led the way in the abandonment of Christian commitments. Christian moral reflexes and moral principles gave way to the loosening grip of a Christian memory. Now even that Christian memory is absent from the lives of millions."

Read the whole piece. There's a lot of talk about the error conservative Christians made in thinking that politics was the best, or at least a sufficient, way of halting and reversing the advance of post-Christian America. I think this is entirely correct. It ends with Al Mohler making a sobering -- and again, an entirely correct -- observation that we don't know what's going to come next, as the post-Christian identity of the US begins to gel, but we can know for sure that it's going to be very different from what came before.

The other day, a Christian friend suggested to me that perhaps I am so gloomy about the future for traditional Christians because I work in the media, and am surrounded by so many signs of decline. He suggested that maybe my view is distorted. And he had a point. But it's also possible that his view is distorted by the fact that he lives in a fairly strongly Christian milieu. Generally speaking, life in Dallas is far more congenial toward public Christianity than anywhere else I've lived. This is, relatively speaking, a socially conservative city. Dallas is, in my experience, significantly out of step with the rest of the country in those terms. This is one reason (probably the main one) why I like living here, but it is what it is, and anyway, Dallas is not an island (it surprises people to learn that politically, Dallas County went Democratic a couple of election cycles ago; as a purely political matter, George W. Bush now lives in Blue America).

I strongly believe that traditional Christians need to read the signs of the times, and soberly to assess where we stand today, and figure out how we and our children are to live in a political and cultural order ever more alien and hostile to what we know to be true. This is not the end of the world, but it's the end of a world, and we should get that straight in our minds, and prepare for how to live as Christians in it. You can read some of the comments on various threads in this blog -- well, you could have read them if you got to them before I deleted them -- and seen flashing rage at traditional Christians, and in that a presentiment of what I believe is going to become more common, though probably in a milder form (at least at first), as the years and decades pass. I see no prospect of this being turned around in the near long term, which is another way of saying it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better. Better to get that learnt right now, and soberly make spiritual preparation. Which could include this: