Ezra Klein affirms what I’ve been saying for years — a lot of the turmoil in the world is reaction against the steady, inevitable decline of the Abrahamic faiths. Basically, what is afoot is a reaction against modernity itself.
These are big, dramatic changes, and they’re leading Christians — particularly older, white, conservative Christians — to experience America’s changing demographics as a form of siege. In some cases, that experience is almost literal.
The political commentator Rod Dreher blogs for the American Conservative, where he offers a running catalog of moral affronts and liberal provocations. He doesn’t simply see a society that has become secular and sexualized, but a progressive regime that insists Christians accept and even participate in the degeneracy or fall afoul of nondiscrimination laws and anti-bigotry norms.
Count me unsympathetic. For starters, it simply isn’t true that Southern Baptists, for instance, can no longer be Southern Baptists; they can, and that right is rigorously protected. Second, the secularization of our public life is movement toward the ideal that undergirds both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. If these people knew anything about their own country, they’d know that — and I’m not going to be a good sport about their ignorance being made my problem.