That is because the Christians do not act like the Christ. :) ----- Original Message ----- From: subana
This is a long article and since I'm not sure if MSNTV has a problem with
Newsweek's website, I'll send the rest of the article in another message. If
you're not interested, just delete the other message........
The End of Christian America
Charles Gullung / Photonica-Getty Images
RELIGION
The percentage of self-identified Christians has fallen 10 points in the past
two decades. How that statistic explains who we are now-and what, as a nation,
we are about to become.
By Jon Meacham | NEWSWEEK
Published Apr 4, 2009
>From the magazine issue dated Apr 13, 2009
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.
To be post-Christian has meant different things at different times. In 1886,
The Atlantic Monthly described George Eliot as "post-Christian," using the term
as a synonym for atheist or agnostic. The broader-and, for our purposes, most
relevant-definition is that "post-Christian" characterizes a period of time
that follows the decline of the importance of Christianity in a region or
society. This use of the phrase first appeared in the 1929 book "America Set
Free" by the German philosopher Hermann Keyserling.
The term was popularized during what scholars call the "death of God" movement
of the mid-1960s-a movement that is, in its way, still in motion. Drawing from
Nietzsche's 19th-century declaration that "God is dead," a group of Protestant
theologians held that, essentially, Christianity would have to survive without
an orthodox understanding of God. Tom Altizer, a religion professor at Emory
University, was a key member of the Godless Christianity movement, and he
traces its intellectual roots first to Kierkegaard and then to Nietzsche. For
Altizer, a post-Christian era is one in which "both Christianity and religion
itself are unshackled from their previous historical grounds." In 1992 the
critic Harold Bloom published a book titled "The American Religion: The
Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation." In it he cites William James's
definition of religion in "The Varieties of Religious Experience": "Religion .
shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in
their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to
whatever they consider the divine."
Which is precisely what most troubles Mohler. "The post-Christian narrative is
radically different; it offers spirituality, however defined, without binding
authority," he told me. "It is based on an understanding of history that
presumes a less tolerant past and a more tolerant future, with the present as
an important transitional step." The present, in this sense, is less about the
death of God and more about the birth of many gods. The rising numbers of
religiously unaffiliated Americans are people more apt to call themselves
"spiritual" rather than "religious." (In the new NEWSWEEK Poll, 30 percent
describe themselves this way, up from 24 percent in 2005.)
Roughly put, the Christian narrative is the story of humankind as chronicled in
the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament-the drama of creation, fall and
redemption. The orthodox tend to try to live their lives in accordance with the
general behavioral principles of the Bible (or at least the principles they
find there of which they approve) and anticipate the ultimate judgment of God-a
judgment that could well determine whether they spend eternity in heaven or in
hell.
What, then, does it mean to talk of "Christian America"? Evangelical Christians
have long believed that the United States should be a nation whose political
life is based upon and governed by their interpretation of biblical and
theological principles. If the church believes drinking to be a sin, for
instance, then the laws of the state should ban the consumption of alcohol. If
the church believes the theory of evolution conflicts with a literal reading of
the Book of Genesis, then the public schools should tailor their lessons
accordingly. If the church believes abortion should be outlawed, then the
legislatures and courts of the land should follow suit. The intensity of
feeling about how Christian the nation should be has ebbed and flowed since
Jamestown; there is, as the Bible says, no thing new under the sun. For more
than 40 years, the debate that began with the Supreme Court's decision to end
mandatory school prayer in 1962 (and accelerated with the Roe v. Wade ruling 11
years later) may not have been novel, but it has been ferocious. Fearing the
coming of a Europe-like secular state, the right longed to engineer a return to
what it believed was a Christian America of yore.
But that project has failed, at least for now. In Texas, authorities have
decided to side with science, not theology, in a dispute over the teaching of
evolution. The terrible economic times have not led to an increase in church
attendance. In Iowa last Friday, the state Supreme Court ruled against a ban on
same-sex marriage, a defeat for religious conservatives. Such evidence is what
has believers fretting about the possibility of an age dominated by a newly
muscular secularism. "The moral teachings of Christianity have exerted an
incalculable influence on Western civilization," Mohler says. "As those moral
teachings fade into cultural memory, a secularized morality takes their place.
Once Christianity is abandoned by a significant portion of the population, the
moral landscape necessarily changes. For the better part of the 20th century,
the nations of Western Europe led the way in the abandonment of Christian
commitments. Christian moral reflexes and moral principles gave way to the
loosening grip of a Christian memory. Now even that Christian memory is absent
from the lives of millions."
Religious doubt and diversity have, however, always been quintessentially
American. Alexis de Tocqueville said that "the religious atmosphere of the
country was the first thing that struck me on arrival in the United States,"
but he also discovered a "great depth of doubt and indifference" to faith.
Jefferson had earlier captured the essence of the American spirit about
religion when he observed that his statute for religious freedom in Virginia
was "meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the
Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindoo and infidel of every
denomination"-and those of no faith whatever. The American culture of religious
liberty helped create a busy free market of faith: by disestablishing churches,
the nation made religion more popular, not less.
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 a reality beyond time and space is ancient and enduring. "All men,"
said Homer, "need the gods." The essential political and cultural question is
to what extent those gods-or, more accurately, a particular generation's
understanding of those gods-should determine the nature of life in a given time
and place.
If we apply an Augustinian test of nationhood to ourselves, we find that
liberty, not religion, is what holds us together. In "The City of God,"
Augustine -converted sinner and bishop of Hippo-said that a nation should be
defined as "a multitude of rational beings in common agreement as to the
objects of their love." What we value most highly-what we collectively love
most-is thus the central test of the social contract.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/192583
--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"WebTV Dawgs/Dittos" group.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected]
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
[email protected]
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/WebTV-Pals
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
<<inline: post-christian-america-NA01-vl-vertical.jpg>>
