Tues, Sep. 13, 2011 Posted:
09:57 AM EDT
The United States is often referred to as a
“post-Christian” nation. In one sense, that is
true: The moral and cultural assumptions
shaped by Christianity that used to hold sway
in American society, can no longer be taken
for granted. They must be defended and
contended for in the public square.
But that’s not the same as saying that
Americans are becoming more like Europeans
when it comes to matters like church
attendance or belief in a personal God. In
many ways the shift in cultural assumptions I
just noted is taking place in spite of what
Americans believe and do, not because of them.
You would be hard-pressed to know this
judging from media reports. These reports
seize on any bit of evidence, however suspect,
to promote the thesis that Americans are
becoming more “secular.” Every few months we
are told about some new study that purports to
show how secularism and even atheism is on the
march.
We are supposed to conclude that instead of
going to church our children will spend Sunday
mornings reading the holographic edition of
the New York Times on their iPad 15 while
sipping a latte made from coffee beans grown
hydroponically in zero gravity.
It’s a tidy, convenient story. But
unfortunately for its tellers, it just doesn't
square with the facts.
That’s what two of my favorite researchers,
Rodney Stark and Byron Johnson of Baylor,
recently told the Wall Street Journal. The
flip side to the media’s pouncing on any
finding of our alleged drift away from
religion is its “yawning” over findings to the
contrary.
One such finding is a Baylor survey showing
that the percentage of Americans who are
atheist – 4 percent – is the same as it was in
1944. And that same survey showed that “church
membership has reached an all-time high.”
Again, if all you had to go on is what you
read or heard in the mainstream media, both of
these facts would come as a surprise to you.
The media, you see, uncritically trumpets
reports that “young people under 30 are
deserting the church in droves,” but they
don’t go on to tell you that, “once they marry
. . . and especially once they have children,
their attendance rates recover.”
Likewise, reports about the politics of
younger evangelicals are, to put it
charitably, selective in their reading of the
evidence.
Neither Stark, Johnson, nor I are suggesting
that some kind of conspiracy is at work. What
we see here is the human tendency to view
evidence in ways that comport with our
worldview.
Secularists, both outside and inside the
media, see decreasing religiosity as the wave
of the future, an inevitable byproduct of
cultural refinement and evolution. So they
naturally gravitate towards stories that
confirm that hypothesis.
It doesn't help that the press “doesn't get
religion.” Newsrooms are filled with people
who don’t know believers and, thus, don’t have
real-world experience with the phenomenon they
assume is on the decline. They are strikingly
uninformed. So much so that they’re calling
orthodox Christians “theocrats,” as I've
discussed in another commentary.
But, as Stark and Johnson remind us, you
can’t always believe what you read in the
newspapers. The reports from the real America
are very encouraging. Millions of us are
practicing the faith and passing it on to our
children.
That’s a fact that even bad reporting won’t
be able to change.
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From
BreakPoint,
September 8, 2011, Copyright 2011, Prison
Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with the
permission of Prison Fellowship Ministries.
All rights reserved. May not be reproduced or
distributed without the express written
permission of Prison Fellowship Ministries. “
BreakPoint®”
and “Prison Fellowship Ministries®” are
registered trademarks of Prison Fellowship
