It
was a small detail, a
point of comparison
buried in the fifth
paragraph on the 17th
page of a 24-page
summary of the 2009
American Religious
Identification Survey.
But as
R.
Albert Mohler Jr.—president
of the Southern Baptist
Theological Seminary,
one of the largest on
earth—read over the
document after its
release in March, he was
struck by a single
sentence. For a believer
like Mohler—a starched,
unflinchingly
conservative Christian,
steeped in the theology
of his particular
province of the faith,
devoted to producing
ministers who will
preach the inerrancy of
the Bible and the Gospel
of
Jesus Christ
as the only means to
eternal life—the central
news of the survey was
troubling enough: the
number of Americans who
claim no religious
affiliation has nearly
doubled since 1990,
rising from 8 to 15
percent. Then came the
point he could not get
out of his mind: while
the unaffiliated have
historically been
concentrated in the
Pacific Northwest, the
report said, "this
pattern has now changed,
and the Northeast
emerged in 2008 as the
new stronghold of the
religiously
unidentified." As Mohler
saw it, the historic
foundation of America's
religious culture was
cracking.
"That really hit me
hard," he told me last
week. "The Northwest was
never as religious,
never as
congregationalized, as
the Northeast, which was
the foundation, the home
base, of American
religion.
To lose New England
struck me as momentous."
Turning the report over
in his mind, Mohler
posted a despairing
online column on the eve
of Holy Week lamenting
the decline—and, by
implication, the
imminent fall—of an
America shaped and
suffused by
Christianity.
"A remarkable
culture-shift has taken
place around us," Mohler
wrote. "The most basic
contours of American
culture have been
radically altered. The
so-called
Judeo-Christian
consensus of the last
millennium has given way
to a post-modern,
post-Christian,
post-Western cultural
crisis which threatens
the very heart of our
culture." When Mohler
and I spoke in the days
after he wrote this, he
had grown even gloomier.
"Clearly, there is a new
narrative, a
post-Christian
narrative, that is
animating large portions
of this society," he
said from his office on
campus in Louisville,
Ky.
There it was, an old
term with new urgency:
post-Christian.
This is not to say that
the Christian God is
dead, but that he is
less of a force in
American politics and
culture than at any
other time in recent
memory. To the surprise
of liberals who fear the
advent of an evangelical
theocracy and to the
dismay of religious
conservatives who long
to see their faith more
fully expressed in
public life, Christians
are now making up a
declining percentage of
the American population.
According to the
American Religious
Identification Survey
that got Mohler's
attention, the
percentage of
self-identified
Christians has fallen 10
percentage points since
1990, from 86 to 76
percent. The Jewish
population is 1.2
percent; the Muslim, 0.6
percent. A separate Pew
Forum poll echoed the
ARIS finding, reporting
that the percentage of
people who say they are
unaffiliated with any
particular faith has
doubled in recent years,
to 16 percent; in terms
of voting, this group
grew from 5 percent in
1988 to 12 percent in
2008—roughly the same
percentage of the
electorate as
African-Americans.
(Seventy-five percent of
unaffiliated voters
chose Barack Obama, a
Christian.) Meanwhile,
the number of people
willing to describe
themselves as atheist or
agnostic has increased
about fourfold from 1990
to 2009, from 1 million
to about 3.6 million.
(That is about double
the number of, say,
Episcopalians in the
United States.)
While we remain a nation
decisively shaped by
religious faith, our
politics and our culture
are, in the main, less
influenced by movements
and arguments of an
explicitly Christian
character than they were
even five years ago. I
think this is a good
thing—good for our
political culture,
which, as the American
Founders saw, is complex
and charged enough
without attempting to
compel or coerce
religious belief or
observance. It is good
for Christianity, too,
in that many Christians
are rediscovering the
virtues of a separation
of church and state that
protects what Roger
Williams, who founded
Rhode Island as a haven
for religious
dissenters, called "the
garden of the church"
from "the wilderness of
the world." As crucial
as religion has been and
is to the life of the
nation, America's
unifying force has never
been a specific faith,
but a commitment to
freedom—not least
freedom of conscience.
At our best, we single
religion out for neither
particular help nor
particular harm; we have
historically treated
faith-based arguments as
one element among many
in the republican sphere
of debate and decision.
The decline and fall of
the modern religious
right's notion of a
Christian America
creates a calmer
political environment
and, for many believers,
may help open the way
for a more theologically
serious religious life.
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.
