Newsweek wonders this week whether it's The End of Christian America. The piece, by Jon Meacham, revolves around two explosive findings in the 2009 American Religious Identification Survey. First, the number of Americans claiming no religious affiliation -- the "secular," in short -- has risen from 8 percent in 1990 to 15 percent this year. Second, the Pacific Northwest is no longer the only demographic stronghold for secularism. Now New England, the erstwhile home of witch-hunting Puritans, is one too.
When you add these new statistics to others, the future is starting to look a bit bleak for American Christianity. Self-identified Christians have fallen from 86 to 76 percent of Americans since 1990. The number of people who expressly profess to be atheist or agnostic has quadrupled in the last 20 years. At 3.6 million, they now outnumber Episcopalians two to one.
For some comparison between developed nations, here are findings from a 2006 Harris poll:
|
Great Britain |
France |
Italy |
Spain |
Germany |
United States |
|
|
% |
% |
% |
% |
% |
% |
|
|
Believer in any form of God or any type of supreme being |
35 |
27 |
62 |
48 |
41 |
73 |
|
Agnostic (one who is sceptical about the existence of God but not an atheist) |
35 |
32 |
20 |
30 |
25 |
14 |
|
Atheist (one who denies the existence of God) |
17 |
32 |
7 |
11 |
20 |
4 |
|
Would prefer not to say |
6 |
6 |
8 |
8 |
10 |
6 |
|
Not sure |
7 |
4 |
3 |
3 |
4 |
3 |
As you can see, atheists and agnostics outnumber believers by significant margins in Britain, France, and Germany.
Meacham argues that while while America may become less Christian, it will never become "post-Christian." Why not? Because, says Meacham, religion is just too inextricably bound up with human nature. "America, then, is not a post-religious society -- and cannot be as long as there are people in it, for faith is an intrinsic human impulse. The belief in an order or reality beyond time and space is ancient and enduring."
This is a non-sequitur. Belief in a reality beyond time and space might endure, but this doesn't mean that Christianity will endure or remain unchanged. Christianity is just one possible form of such belief. What's more, Christianity itself comes in different forms: most critically, liberal and conservative, modernizing and fundamentalist. This is what is really at stake here: not belief versus non-belief, but fundamentalist belief versus modernized forms of belief; forms of belief that decry and resist modernity versus forms of belief (as well as non-belief) that are adapted to the modern, cosmopolitan, and scientifically-informed world. It's not just Christopher Hitchens versus Dinesh D'Souza. It's also Bishop John Shelby Spong (author of the recent Why Christianity Must Change or Die) versus James Dobson.
Meacham's soft-focus analysis invites too much complacency. The future of religious belief in America is not predetermined. It will depend on what the ideological generals and foot-soldiers on each side of the emerging culture war between modernism and fundamentalism do. It will depend on the effectiveness of the arguments and evidence they marshal and on their astuteness, discipline, and perseverance.
Finally, Meacham fails to appreciate the great opportunity that is opening up for American intellectual life. Now that American nonbelievers are emerging from political insignificance and social marginalization, the stage is being set for a great public argument. This will be a debate about first principles, covering huge swaths of polemical territory. It will be like the massive argument that was waged three centuries ago between the forces of the European Enlightenment and the forces of political paternalism and tradition. We might in fact be witnessing the beginning of its sequel. Except this time, the combatants won't be scribbling their manuscripts with quills and lugging books back and forth in horse-drawn carriages. They'll be using faster, nimbler, longer-range weapons: blogs and wikis, discussion forums and comment threads, PDFs and e-books.
Let the great battle begin, and may we live in interesting times.