A Newsweek cover story taking-up the decline of Christianity in America has provoked an eruption of commentary, some of it pretty sharp and some of it dopey. The shrewdest observation, though, came from the Newsweek piece’s author, Jon Meacham.
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.”
Christopher Hitchens, meantime, seems to have the idea that the Creationists are defeated.
As a proportion of the population they are shrinking, and in ethical terms they find themselves more and more in the wilderness of what some of them morosely called, in conversation with me, a “post-Christian society.” Perhaps more than any one thing, the resounding courtroom defeat that they suffered in December 2005 in the conservative district of Dover, Pa., where the “intelligent design” plaintiffs were all but accused of fraud by a Republican judge, has placed them on the defensive.
Cheery thought — but wrong. They are simply going underground, into home schools and sullen Calvinist analogs to the old klaverns.
The political defeats, the deserved social stigmatization … that’s what the resurgence of Calvinism is all about, a retreat from modernity to the crude and degrading, but reassuring, simplicity of fundamentalism. It’s about as complicated a world as they are capable of understanding.
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