A loyal reader pointed out an interesting new essay by author and Newsweek editor Jon Meacham concerning the end of “Christian” America. Using the recently released ARIS data as a starting point, Meacham talks with conservative Christian luminaries like R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and talk-show pundit Joe Scarborough who both seem to be far more convinced of a post-Christian future than I am.

“Turning the [ARIS] 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.”

Meacham reinforces the ARIS data (and Mohler’s “gloomy” outlook) by supplementing it with some recent Newsweek polling that says 68% of Americans think religion is losing influence in American society, and that less than half (48%) now believe that religion “can answer all or most of today’s problems”. But as I’ve pointed out before, we should be clear that “post-Christianity” doesn’t mean Christianity is going away, or that America will soon be overrun by secularist stormtroopers, but that (as Mohler points out) there is a new narrative concerning religion that displaces Christianity as the lone voice of moral authority. What is this new narrative?

“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.“

In other words, a society welcoming to religious minorities and Pagans. The “others” that saw a growth spike in the ARIS numbers that Mohler finds so troubling. While Meacham turns introspective towards the end concerning Christianity’s place in out modern society, he does little to anticipate how much better a post-Christian society might be for those who don’t necessarily agree with the privileged place the dominant monotheisms have held for so long. That the “birth of many gods” will not lead to moral anarchy as Mohler and other conservative Christians fear, but a more (religiously) tolerant age.  Pagans will most likely be a very small minority for some time into the future, but there is a chance that we’ll see in our lifetimes the emergence of geographic regions where minority faiths like ours hold enough sway to influence elections and social policy. A time when what an elected official swears in on, or who leads an opening prayer, will no longer be seen as a possible front in a manufactured culture war. I, for one, look forward to this growing “post-Christianity” and hope the “gloomy” forecasts of conservative Christians aren’t simply a bout of self-obsessed pessimism.

Tags: Albert Mohler, ARIS, Christianity, Jon Meacham, Newsweek, post-Christian, secularism