Doubt

Don't kid yourself; you've contended with it

Are you surprised about this?

While the number of Americans who celebrate Christmas as a cultural holiday is going strong, there has been a shocking rise in the number of people ditching Christianity — what sociologists call “nonverts.”

Pew Research Center estimates that Christians will be a minority of Americans by 2070 if current trends continue.

One observer of the phenomenon is struck by what he sees as the abruptness of the reversal:

It’s a kind of “cultural whiplash” from religion to secularism that’s hit the United States much faster than it has other parts of the world, said theology and sociology professor Stephen Bullivant.

Bullivant, a practicing Catholic who teaches at St. Mary’s University in London and the University of Notre Dame in Sydney, spoke to Grid about why Americans are leaving Christianity in droves and the demographics that are seeing the (ahem) ungodliest declines. His new book, “Nonverts: The Making of Ex-Christian America,” came out in the U.S. on Dec. 1.

Under-30s may be leading the way numbers-wise, but all age groups are getting on the nonvert train.

Bullivant, of course, is a trained sociologist, so he must have solid data to back up his claim that this was a suddenly emerging trend:

While the trend toward atheism and agnosticism in Europe has been a slow but steady decline, Bullivant said, the increase in Christians dropping the faith didn’t really take off in the U.S. until the early 2000s, and the decline since then has been steep and quick.

For people who study such trends, there was kind of this feeling in the ’90s that if a rise in secularism hadn’t happened yet in America, there was no reason to think it would. “Even the most dramatic historical examples of religious growth or decline tend to occur over many generations,” said Bullivant. “But then it was as if in the early 2000s, something was released.”

He goes on to ascribe three overarching causes going back several decades: “the Cold War, 9/11 and the internet.” He juxtaposes the revulsion a lot of Americans felt toward Communism and puts much emphasis on that ideology’s godlessness. Bullivant contrasts the respectability conferred on decidedly atheistic philosopher Bertrand Russell in the UK with the villainization of atheist activist Madalyn Murray O’Hair in the US to illustrate how strongly America continued to hold to its pervasive collective faith in comparison to Europeans.

With all due respect, I think the brush being used to paint this scenario is too broad.

Precipice readers know that few subjects consume me more than the basic question of what has happened to the West over the course of my lifetime. It’s been hard for me to untangle, because I was still in my formative years as what I call the tectonic shift yielded irreversible results.

Last spring, at Ordinary Times, I wrote about what my personal experience as a church-going adolescent as the culture at large was so rapidly transforming:

I’ve only been what I’d consider an actual Christian for a decade at most. I had to feel my way through a process of sorting out a lifetime of head trips to get there.I was raised in the Presbyterian Church where my father had been a member since 1945. Our family was regular about attendance. I sang in the primary and junior choirs, went to Sunday school after the service, and was confirmed at age 14. My parents, particularly my dad, were comfortable with the approach the congregation took toward a life of faith. The minister was a mix of sociocultural preoccupations – this was the 1960s – and a genuine theological foundation rooted in southern Presbyterian thought. This fit well with our family’s lifestyle. We and our neighbors were typically middle class. There was cocktail hour before dinner, a Republican political affiliation, civic involvement (my father insisted I join the Boy Scouts when I turned 11), and an emphasis on manners and comportment. There was, however, room for the occasional dirty joke told in the company of close friends. My parents slowly and with visible discomfort relented on issues such as hair length, and, by the time I got to college, my drug use.

Let me back up, though.

Shortly after I’d been confirmed, my father took the minister to lunch and announced he was leaving the church. The final straw, he told him, was the PCUSA’s donation to Angela Davis’s defense fund. Fast forward to my college years and early adulthood. I dove with abandon into the full panoply of secular-yet-sporting-the-facade-of-spiritual-earnestness offerings available to a boomer coming of age: beat literature, eastern thought, rock music, and the aforementioned drugs.

Years later, after I’d done some reading, just because I was curious to dig deeper than I had, that disabused me of the Noam Chomsky-Howard Zinn notion that my own country was a principal villain on the world stage, I did indeed share in the aforementioned revulsion at the antiwar activism that resurfaced around Reagan-era policy in Central America. I couldn’t unsee what I’d seen. “Concerned citizens,” sometimes under circumstances supported by mainline Protestant churches, sometimes under the auspices of groups I now knew to be Communist front groups, such as the Committee in Solidarity With the People of El Salvador, went on “fact-finding tours” of the region and came back to spread the propaganda with which their heads had been filled.

When I went to grad school to pursue a master’s degree in history, I wrote my thesis on the role of mainline Protestantism’s preoccupation with a leftist view of foreign policy in its denominations’ bleeding of membership from the 1960s to the 1990s, when I was writing it.

Meanwhile, college in America came to serve two dual, and not mutually exclusive, purposes: partying and preparing for a career.

So these are elements that must be part of the discussion. An ever-more outlandishly razzle-dazzle popular culture that offered the possibility of sexual liberation and chemically induced mystical experience, mainline Protestantism abnegating its role as the most influential force in institutional Christianity in order to peddle a nihilistic view of America’s role in the world, rapid changes in communication technology, and higher education’s abandonment of its notion of its own mission as helping young minds grapple with life’s largest questions.

While the rise of the nonverts has characterized the overall picture, even the most ostensibly doctrine-embracing force within institutional Christianity, evangelicalism, has felt the effects of what’s been going on:

Almost one-in-five (18 percent) believes the “Holy Spirit can tell me to do something which is forbidden in the Bible.” A significant majority (65 percent) believe that “Jesus is the first and greatest being created by God” while only 29 percent disagree. (Because this is a true/false question, they may have mistakenly assumed “created” was synonymous with “begotten.”)

On the issue of salvation, slightly more than half (57 percent) agree that the “Holy Spirit gives a spiritual new birth or new life before a person has faith in Jesus Christ.” Slightly more than half (51 percent) believe, “Even the smallest sin deserves eternal damnation,” and 84 percent agree that “God counts a person as righteous not because of one’s works but only because of one’s faith in Jesus Christ.” More than one-third (38 percent) agree with the statement, “God chose the people he would save before he created the world,” while nearly half (44 percent) disagree.

Almost half (46 percent) believe, “Everyone sins a little, but most people are good by nature and that “God accepts the worship of all religions, including Christianity, Judaism, and Islam” (42 percent).

One hundred percent agree that “God created male and female,” yet more than one in five evangelicals (22 percent) also believe that “gender identity is a matter of choice.” Almost all agree that “abortion” (88 percent) and “sex outside of traditional marriage” (90 percent) are sins, and only about one-in-ten (11 percent) believe the “Bible’s condemnation of homosexual behavior doesn’t apply today.”

Almost one-in-four (23 percent) think that “religious belief is a matter of personal opinion; it is not about objective truth.” More than one-in-three (39 percent) believe “worshiping alone or with one’s family is a valid replacement for regularly attending church,” while more than one-in-four (26 percent) believe “churches must provide entertaining worship services if they want to be effective.” More than one-in-three (39 percent) believe the prosperity gospel claim that “God will always reward true faith with material blessings in this life.”

We’re kind of back to the scene in the garden in Genesis 1 in which the serpent tempts Eve, aren’t we?

His spiel to her was predicated on the argument that the special tree - the one that imparted the knowledge of good and evil - didn’t look one bit different from any other tree in the grove. Neither did the fruit. Also, that it had been a while since God had directly dealt with the two humans.

Isn’t that where we are right now?

We see Russia’s naked aggression against Ukraine and the attendant rise in risk of a nuclear conflagration. We see on a daily basis political figures and celebrities engage in behavior that until recently we would have called “embarrassing oneself.” We’ve taken two of the most basic elements of what it means to be human - sexuality and language - and completely obliterated them.

And what is the answer to the smart-ass postmodern agnostic who pelts us with taunts of “Where is your God?”

This doesn’t lend itself to easy answers, folks. There are still lots of great churches out there - I attend one - that preach sound doctrine, make a concerted effort to guide and shepherd their young people, and engage in outreach ministry to jails, homeless shelters and pregnancy care centers.

But if it’s not moving the needle, what else is required?

What this means is that millions of Americans are dealing with life’s vicissitudes - serious illness, death of those close to them, financial setbacks, and the like - without consulting any source of strength outside themselves. True, a lot of them rely on affirmations they come across on social media, or various kinds of support groups, but those activities wind up being self-referential, affirming the way the people in question had already sized up the world.

Put bluntly, most people are not attracted to the question, “Where is God in all this?”

Their answer is “I don’t care. It’s not relevant.”

It wears on a guy.

What’s my own answer? Is it enough to maneuver through my daily life prayerfully and in a manner that is going to keep controversy rubbing off on me to a minimum?

I have faith, but I’d be doing you a disservice if I didn’t admit that I sometimes wonder if I’m jiving myself.

But then I think of the millions I refer to a couple of paragraphs above. The sum total of their efforts to respond to life’s tough aspects on their own erodes our collective notion of meaning itself, it seems to me. Seriously, why the hell does it matter if one’s child dies, or one’s life savings is wiped out? Why should anyone care, even the person to whom it is happening?

We’re at a uniquely challenging juncture. It doesn’t look like that to everybody, because we’re still more materially comfortable than any human beings in history have been.

But anyone who still professes faith is going to have to dig deeper than he or she ever anticipated.

Dig deeper for what?

May I offer this answer?

To see this, let it in, and let it have its full effect:

He says, “Be still, and know that I am God;
    I will be exalted among the nations,
    I will be exalted in the earth.”

He will be so exalted, at a time of his own choosing, and everything will look different from there ever after.

Buckle up.