I wrote a
commentary on The End of Christian America for the Acton
Institute. As you can tell from the title of this blog
post, I'm a little skeptical.
Here's a clip:
Christian America is busy dying again.
If you believe some partisan historians, it was dead
before the American Revolution, or at least, nobody important
was a Christian by then. The Founders had all moved on to
deism. Then again, maybe Christian America died at the Scopes
Trial during the 1920s when Clarence Darrow pinned down the
non-theologian, non-scientist politician William Jennings Bryan
with the power of hostile cross-examination. If it wasn’t dead
by then, it was really dead by the late 1960s when every other
religion book seemed to be about either the death of God
movement or “secular” Christianity. The most memorable volume
of the period was Harvey Cox’s The Secular City,
which put a happy face of the death of public Christianity and
heralded a new, more mature age of secular community.
Meanwhile, a host of prominent sociologists of religion
sagely assured the public (and each other) that public faith
simply could not co-exist with a world full of technological
wonders like conveyor belts, cathode ray tubes, and time and
motion studies. The great sociologist Peter Berger imagined
tiny groups of believers huddled together against the coming of
the 21st century.
topics:
Religion
