The Obama inauguration symbolized the dilution and decline of a once-muscular Christianity that had guided American public life for two centuries.
INDICES OF CHRISTIAN DECLINE
Since President Harry Truman’s time, a day each year has been set aside as a National Day of Prayer and presidents have traditionally hosted an annual ecumenical service marking the day in the East Room. Obama abolished the service. White House press secretary Robert Gibbs explained: “Prayer is something the president does every day.”11
Atheists had long objected to the National Day of Prayer and Obama, according to a Los Angeles Times commentary, “has shown an unusual sensitivity toward atheists, the first president to mention nonbelievers in an inaugural.”12
Obama’s White House thus enlisted in the long and successful campaign to expel Christianity from the public square, diminish its presence in our public life, and reduce its role to that of just another religion. Cultural power in America long ago passed to an anti-Christian elite that rules the academy, Hollywood, and the arts. Secularism is now America’s state religion and the people sense it. That same May, the Gallup organization found that 76 percent of Americans polled believed that religion was losing its influence on American life.13
Consider the statistics of Christian decline. According to an American Religious Identification Survey of 54,500 Americans conducted over six months in 2008 by the Program on Public Values at Hartford’s Trinity College:
• Sixteen percent of all adults and 20 percent of all men have no religious affiliation. Among Americans under thirty, 25 percent have none.14 Thirty percent of all married couples did not have a religious wedding; 27 percent of Americans do not want a religious funeral.15
• The nonreligious were the only group that added to its numbers in every state since the 2001 survey.16 Robert Putnam and David Campbell, authors of American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, found higher figures two years later, in 2010:
Today, 17 percent of Americans say they have no religion, and these new “nones” are very heavily concentrated among Americans who have come of age since 1990. Between 25 and 30 percent of twentysomethings today say they have no religious affiliation—roughly four times higher than in any previous generation.17
“[I]f more than one quarter of young people are setting off in adult life with no religious identification,” Putnam and Campbell added, “the prospects for religious observance in coming decades are substantially diminished.”18
• Northern New England has passed the Pacific Northwest as the region with the highest percentage of those unaffiliated with a church. The Vermont of socialist senator Bernie Sanders leads the nation, with 34 percent professing no religion.19 Unsurprisingly, it is in New England that same-sex marriage has been most warmly received. As the ranks of the unaffiliated grow in New England, the ranks of those attached to traditional churches decline. “Thanks to immigration and the natural increase among Latinos, California now has a higher proportion of Catholics than New England,” says Barry Kosmin, of the American Religious Identification Survey. “The decline of Catholicism in the Northeast is nothing short of stunning.”20
“That really hit me hard,” President R. Albert Mohler, of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, told Jon Meacham. America’s Northeast, Mohler said, “was the foundation, the home base of American religion. To lose New England struck me as momentous.”21
This decline in religious faith helps to explain the defection to the Democratic Party of these once rock-ribbed, Republican states. For it has become a truism of American politics: the less religious an electorate, the more Democratic. The more frequently one attends church, the more conservative one tends to be. Half of those who attend church weekly describe themselves as conservatives, only 12 percent identify as liberals. Putnam traces the political “God gap” to the Reagan decade when “the public face of religion turned sharply right.”22
Yet, there is a glaring exception to this rule.
Three-fourths of all members of historically black churches are Democrats. And black Christians are more likely than any other church group to say the Bible is the “literal word of God,” more likely than any church group save Jehovah’s Witnesses to say “religion is very important to their lives,” and more likely than any except Mormons to believe in heaven and hell.23
Thirty-six percent of black Americans attend church weekly and 44 percent pray daily. Because of their faith, they would seem to be natural conservatives. African Americans also voted overwhelmingly to outlaw gay marriage in California. But in politics, race trumps religion, and African Americans are the most reliable ethnic bloc of Democratic voters.
• As a share of the U.S. adult population, Christians declined from 86 percent in 1990 to 76 percent in 2008.24 The denominations suffering the greatest losses are Episcopalians, Methodists, Lutherans, and Presbyterians.
These mainline churches which profess moderate theologies and stress social justice and personal salvation made up the vast majority of Protestants in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth century. With the explosion of evangelical Christianity, however, the mainline churches saw their membership fall from 50 percent of U.S. adults in 1958 to 13 percent today.25
Nondenominational “megachurches” like Rick Warren’s, in Lake Forest, California, have grown at the expense of traditional mainline churches, surging from 200,000 adherents in 1990 to 2.5 million in 2000, to 8 million today.26 Says Mark Silk, of the Public Values Program, “A generic form of evangelicalism is emerging as the normative form of non-Catholic Christianity in the United States.”27
Mainline Protestants are now mostly Democrats. By more than two-to-one (64–27 percent) they oppose any further restrictions on women’s access to abortions.28 When one considers that it was not until 1930 that the Anglican Church at its Lambeth Conference began to lead the Christian community to accept birth control, the dilution of traditional Christian doctrine has been dramatic.
• This decline in religious affiliation is not restricted to Christians. Jews who describe themselves as practicing fell from 3.1 million in 1990 to 2.7 million in 2008—from 1.8 percent of the adult population to 1.2 percent.29 Religiously observant Jews are no more numerous now than are adherents of the new religions such as Scientology, Wicca, and Santería. Writes Michael Felsen in the Forward:
The JCC study notes that Jews score lower than Evangelicals, mainline Protestants and Roman Catholics on all available measures of religious belief. Compared to Christians, Jews are much less likely to say they believe in God, in the Bible as God’s word, in life after death, in heaven or hell.30
Yet Jews made up 8.4 percent of Congress in 2010 and 13 percent of senators. Episcopalians were 7 percent of Congress.31
• Mormons have maintained their 1.4 percent share of the population.32 The Pew Forum puts Mormons at 1.7 percent of a U.S. adult population that has grown to 228 million.33 As of 2010, five senators and nine members of the House were Mormons. Writes Eric Kaufmann in “Breeding for God” in Prospect, “In the 1980s, the Mormon fertility rate was around three times that of American Jews. Today the Mormons, once a fringe sect, outnumber Jews among Americans under the age of 45.”34
• Muslims have doubled their share of a growing U.S. population from 0.3 percent to 0.6 percent since 1990.35 This growth rate would translate into fewer than 1.5 million Muslim adults, which seems too low. Speaking in Cairo, Obama referred to “nearly 7 million American Muslims in our country today.”36 This is the highest figure this writer has seen. In an August 2009 story about the Washington, D.C., area Islamic population exploding to where Muslims were renting a synagogue for Friday prayers in the suburb of Reston, Virginia, the Washington Post conceded that estimates of Muslims in the United States are guesswork: “Nobody really knows how many Muslims are in America—estimates range from 2.35 million to 7 million—but researchers say the population is growing rapidly, driven by conversions, immigration and the tendency for Muslims to have lar
ger families.”37 In August 2010, the Wall Street Journal’s Carl Bialik had similar difficulty in fixing the number of Muslims in the United States.38
The Pew Forum found that most Christians no longer believe their own faith is essential for salvation. Seven in ten of the religiously affiliated believe other religions can lead to eternal life and that there is more than one way to interpret the teachings of their faith. While 92 percent of Americans still believe in a God, only 60 percent believe in a personal God. Three in ten believe God to be an impersonal being.
THE EMERGING PROTESTANT MINORITY
The Trinity College survey closely tracks the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. After interviewing 35,000 Americans between May and August 2007, the Pew Forum found that:
• Forty-four percent of all adult Americans have lost their faith or changed religions.39
• While 99 percent percent of Americans were Protestants at the time of the Revolution, this figure had fallen to 51 percent by 2007.40 For the first time in our history, Protestants will soon be a minority in the United States.
• While 62 percent of those seventy and older are Protestants, the figure is 43 percent for those ages eighteen to twenty-nine.41
• While only 8 percent of Americans over seventy are unaffiliated with a church or religion, one-fourth of those under thirty have no religious affiliation.
“We are on the verge—within ten years—of a major collapse of evangelical Christianity,” writes Michael Spencer,42 who describes its progression:
The breakdown will follow the deterioration of the mainline Protestant world and it will fundamentally alter the religious and cultural environment in the West.
Within two generations, evangelicalism will be a house deserted of its occupants.… This collapse will herald the arrival of an anti-Christian chapter of the post-Christian West.43
Spencer lives and works in a Christian community in Kentucky and believes Evangelicals made a strategic blunder in tying their faith to political conservatism and the culture war.
The evangelical investment in moral, social, and political issues has depleted our resources and exposed our weaknesses. Being against gay marriage and being rhetorically pro-life will not make up for the fact that massive majorities of Evangelicals can’t articulate the Gospel with any coherence. We fell for the trap of believing in a cause more than a faith.44
Spencer echoes Christ’s admonition: “My kingdom is not of this world,” and believes “consumer-driven megachurches” like Warren’s Saddleback Church will be the beneficiaries of evangelical Christianity’s collapse.45
In an essay, “God Still Isn’t Dead,” John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, authors of God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World, agree with Spencer as to who will inherit the evangelical estate: it is the “pastorpreneurs”:
men like Bill Hybels of Willow Creek and Rick Warren of Saddleback. These are far more sober, thoughtful characters than the schlock-and-scandal televangelists of the 1970s, but they are not afraid to use modern business methods to get God’s message across.
Mr. Hybels’s immaculately organized church employs several hundred staff, and the church has both its own mission statement and its own consulting arm.46
“The real strength of religious America is in its diversity,” write Micklethwait and Wooldridge:
There are more than 200 religious traditions in America, with 20 different sorts of Baptists alone.… There are services for bikers, gays, and dropouts (the Scum of the Earth Church in Denver); Bibles for cowboys, brides, soldiers and rap artists. (“Even though I walk through / The hood of death / I don’t back down / Because you have my back”) and even theme parks for every faith. This Holy Week you can visit the Golgotha Fun Park in Cave City, Ky.47
Is this a manifestation of the “real strength” of Christianity, or does it, instead, sound like disintegration, the loss of unity of the People of God?
“Are we witnessing the death of America’s Christian denominations?” asks Russell D. Moore, dean of the School of Theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and he answers his own question:
Studies by secular and Christian organizations indicate that we are. Fewer and fewer American Christians, especially Protestants, strongly identify with a particular religious community—Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, Pentecostal.…
More and more Christians choose a church not on the basis of its denomination, but on the basis of more practical matters. Is the nursery easy to find? Do I like the music? Are there support groups for those grappling with addiction?48
Spencer believes it imperative that Evangelicals “shake loose the prosperity Gospel from its parasitical place on the evangelical body of Christ.”49
Indeed, it sometimes seems that to counter liberation theology’s First Church of Christ, Socialist, Christians preach a gospel of the First Church of Christ, Capitalist. Yet, in reading of the life and death of Christ and his apostles, it does not appear any were successful by the standards of the world, and surely not in the deaths they endured.
Atheism may be surging, but its hold on the heart appears weaker. Half of those raised in an atheist, agnostic, or nonreligious home have affiliated with a church.50 Even in this secular age, the search for God and salvation captivates the heart. Many who lose their faith seek to rediscover God as they grow older, even if not in the church in which they were raised.
EPISCOPAL CRACK-UP
The decline and fall of mainstream Christianity is starkly reflected in the recent history of the Episcopal Church.
In the halcyon days of the Eastern Establishment, the Episcopal Church was known as “the Republican Party at prayer.” Today, the Episcopal Church is divided and disintegrating, having lost a million members since 2000. It has been torn asunder over morality, the ordination of female and gay priests and bishops, and the legitimacy of same-sex unions. The church’s share of the adult population has fallen to less than 1 percent.51
In Fairfax County, Virginia, nine parishes broke with the national Episcopal Church over the installation at Washington National Cathedral of Katharine Jefferts Schori as 26th Presiding Bishop. Schori had blessed same-sex unions and supported the consecration of Gene Robinson as bishop of New Hampshire, who had left his wife and daughters and entered a homosexual union.
Seven of 111 Episcopal dioceses refused to accept Schori’s elevation. Their defection, and that of the Fairfax parishes, however, produced mockery and mirth from Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson.
“Whether it was the thought of a woman presiding over God’s own country club or gays snuggling under its eaves, it was all too much” for the “Fairfax Phobics,” wrote Meyerson.52 This is, he continued, “just the latest chapter in the global revolt against modernism and equality and, more specifically, in the formation of the Orthodox International.”53
And what is the Orthodox International?
The OI unites frequently fundamentalist believers of often opposed faiths in common fear and loathing of challenges to ancient tribal norms.… The OI’s founding father was Pope John Paul II, who … sought to build his church in nations of the developing world where traditional morality and bigotry, most especially on matters sexual, were … more in sync with the Catholic Church’s inimitable backwardness. Now America’s schismatic Episcopalians are following in [John Paul’s] footsteps—traditionalists of the two great Western hierarchical Christian churches searching the globe for sufficiently benighted bishops.54
“Fundamentalists,” “phobics,” “tribal,” “bigotry,” “backwardness,” “benighted.” Meyerson’s vocabulary is that of the Christian-baiter who has come out of the closet and runs rampant on the op-ed pages of the mainstream media. Yet Meyerson is not wrong about which way the wind is blowing. Modernism does indeed appear triumphant, and traditionalism in retreat.
Still, in rejecting the authority of Bishop Schori and refusing to bless same-sex unions, the di
ssenters may yet prevail, for three reasons.
First, they have Scripture on their side. Did not Christ say to the Pharisees: “Have ye not read that He who made man at the beginning ‘made them male and female’? And He said, ‘For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and they two shall be in one flesh.’” Second, it is the accommodationist faiths that are the dying faiths.
Third, dissenters have the country on their side. Thirty-one states have voted “No” to homosexual marriage. Not one has voted to approve. When the Washington, D.C., city council voted to recognize same-sex marriages from other states, the Board of Elections and Ethics refused to submit the issue to a referendum.55 Voters have no right to authorize discrimination, said the board. The real fear is that, as in California, black churches would turn out their flocks and reverse the city council’s decision.
All the efforts by mainstream churches to accommodate modernity have gone hand in hand with what Newsweek sees as the decline and fall of Christianity in the United States.56 Now ranked fifteenth in congregants, the Episcopal Church is losing members more rapidly than are the Presbyterians, Lutherans, or Methodists.57 The rising churches are the rigorous churches. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is now ranked fourth, with close to six million faithful, three times as many Mormons as Episcopalians.58 Other rising churches are the Assemblies of God and Jehovah’s Witnesses.59
Globally, writes sociologist Rodney Stark, it is “high-tension” religions “with the clearest boundaries and the highest demands of members that flourish.”60 Low-tension religions like Unitarians tend to be “dissolved into the cauldron of secularism.”61
Columnist William Murchison explains the phenomenon:
[T]he Mainline churches—not fully understanding their job description, which is basically to connect members with the God who created them—fare less and less well in the 21st century. Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Lutherans—all have declined sharply in membership over these past few wonderful decades of liberalism. The Episcopal Church, my own shop, has fewer adherents than the Mormons—not least because whatever it is Mormons believe, they really believe it.62
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