The First English Translation of Hamann’s “London Writings”

Last updated on: April 22, 2022 at 5:06 pm By Gene Veith

To show the relevance of Johann Georg Hamann (1730-1788) today, he may have been the first, in 1784, to add to an unrelated word the prefix “meta.”

In his day, he had an impact on thinkers ranging from Goethe to Kierkegaard to C. F. W. Walther. Today he has been rediscovered and is credited with anticipating–and critiquing–both modernism and postmodernism. Notre Dame professor John Betz sees in Hamann’s thought the only way forward from postmodern nihilism, opening the door to a “post-secular” vision.

Hamann also was a devoted Christian, whose cutting-edge philosophy was largely a sophisticated application of his confessional Lutheran theology.

Unfortunately, not all of Hamann’s writings–which are notoriously challenging to read, due to his playful multi-leveled style–are available in English. But now Hamann’s most foundational work, the London Writings–in which he tells of his conversion to Christianity, meditates on Scripture, and formulates the ideas he would develop throughout his life, doing so in a clear, engaging style–has been translated in its entirely into English.

And the translator is John W. Kleinig, the Australian theologian known to many of us Lutherans in the U.S. as the author of books like Grace upon Grace and Wonderfully Made and for his work with the Doxology ministry. I was privileged to work on this project with him.

Hamann was part of a circle of young Enlightenment rationalists, including Kant. The father of one of them in Riga hired the 28-year-old Hamann to go to London to arrange some business negotiations. But his mission was a failure, Hamann fell in with dissolute company, and he was soon destitute. At this low point in his life, he picked up an English Bible and started to read it. The Law and the Gospel had their full effect on this bright but troubled young man, and he was transformed into a fervent follower of Christ and a rapturous lover of Scripture.

The “London Writings” were written during this period in the midst of his spiritual awakening, which also proved to be a catalyst for ideas about the physical world, language, reason, and faith that he would develop for the rest of his life. They consist of nine works:

(1) “On the Interpretation of Sacred Scriptures.” A brief summary, with statements like this: “The inspiration of this book is as great an act of self-effacement and condescension as the creation of the world by the Father and the incarnation of the Son.”

(2) “Biblical Meditations of a Christian.” Hamann’s notes as he read the Bible from beginning to end, amounting to a Christo-centric Bible commentary that is electric with unexpected insights.

(3) “Thoughts on the Course of My Life.” The account of his life and his dramatic conversion.

(4) “Thoughts on Church Hymns.” Hamann would later say that his spiritual life centers in the Bible, Luther’s Small Catechism, and his church’s hymnal. Here he meditates on the lyrics of classic hymns, some of which we still sing today, culminating in his own ecstatic joy in the Ascension of Christ and in our union with Him.

(5) “Deuteronomy 30:11-14 together with Romans 10:4-10.” Tying together two texts that say, “the word is very near you. It is in your mouth and in your heart.” Thoughts on connection between the Word and Faith.

(6) “Fragments.” Our thoughts, Hamann says, are fragments, which we must gather together into baskets, as the Disciples did after the feeding of the 5,000. A collection of brief thoughts on a variety of topics, some of which Hamann would continue to develop.

(7) “Meditations on Newton’s Essay on Prophecies.” Not Isaac Newton the scientist, nor John Newton the hymn writer, but Thomas Newton the Anglican theologian. Here Hamann writes about the Holy Spirit.

(8) “Further Thoughts on the Course of My Life.” Hamann picks up his life story after he leaves London and goes back home. We see how his rationally Enlightened friends now reject him and trace the course of his ill-fated courtship of Katherina Berens.

(9) “Prayer.” A wide-ranging prayer that Hamann would continue to use in his morning and evening devotions.

This translation with commissioned in 2017 by George Strieter of Ballast Press, a micropublisher that reprinted Gustaf Wingren’s Luther on Vocation and Adolf Koeberle’s Quest for Holiness, both of which were taken over by Wipf & Stock. George had read about Hamann in Oswald Bayer’s book about him, which did much to facilitate his rediscovery. He told me about Hamann, and then Dr. Kleinig put me onto Betz’s book, probably the best introduction to his thought. George had the idea to translate the London Writings, and together we persuaded Dr. Kleinig, who is fluent in German, to take on this enormous project. Not only did he do the translation, he also provided extensive introductions to each section, footnotes, and references to Hamann’s Biblical allusions.

I edited the translation. That means, at first, I worked with Dr. Kleinig as his reader, going over his renditions, discussing with him how to express certain passages, and making the occasional suggestion. Once the manuscript was finally finished, a process that took two years, my editorial duties shifted to the publishing side, setting the book into type, requiring me to learn InDesign publishing software–which, believe me, was not easy–and then preparing the exhaustive topical index and Scriptural index. This was my big project during the pandemic lockdowns! Then George and I had to see the project through the printing process, which proved to be a difficult and time-consuming task in itself.

Now, four years later, London Writings: The Spiritual & Theological Journal of Johann Georg Hamann, is finally completed and available to all!

You can buy it at the website, which includes other information you might want to look at, or via Amazon. I urge you to buy it, urge any libraries you are connected with to buy it, and otherwise spread the word.

This book can be a game-changer for contemporary theology, putting it back on a Biblical, Christ-centered track, and for those attempting to find a way past the dead ends of postmodernism. But reading this book is also profoundly devotional. It rekindled for me the joy of reading and studying God’s Word.

I’ll have other posts over the next few days that will focus on some of the content of the London Writings to show you what I mean.

“Extremism Experts Don’t Get America’s Hinterland”

Last updated on: January 27, 2022 at 8:18 am By Gene Veith

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A raft of books, articles, speeches, and internet exchanges is putting out the narrative that the Republicans are trying to overthrow American democracy and that right wingers are organizing to commit acts of terrorism and to provoke another civil war.

James Pogue is himself an expert on extremist groups, but he complains that the overwrought scare tactics that many progressives are using to scare each other are wildly off the mark. Since alarming readers is what sells books, he says, even writers with scholarly credentials are trying to incite panic, as opposed to actually learning about the people they are purporting to write about.

He has written a piece for UnHerd entitled This is not how civil wars start, with the deck “Extremism experts don’t get America’s hinterland.” He tells about moving to rural Northern California, allegedly a hotbed of extremist activity, including a militia trying to take over the county government:

Just before I sat down to write this, I was at a bar where a liberal guy invited a not-so-liberal guy out to the parking lot. The liberal showed off a fly rod he’d built, and the redneck showed off a not-at-all-legal belt-loaded gun that he’d built. They came back smiling. Everyone mostly gets along fine. The incidents that seem to show overt cracks in the social order are very rare — occasional spats at restaurants or threatening visits to trailers, county board meetings moved online for safety.

They’re usually non-violent, and so wrapped up in the baroque Facebook-driven personal drama that colours life [in] the rural American West these days that any honest observer has to wrestle with questions about whether or not they portend a real breakdown. The numbers of people involved are tiny. The divides aren’t really about Trump, race, class. They aren’t really about anything that fits into mainstream America’s understanding of why civil violence feels so possible in this country, unless you count the fact that basically everybody around here has guns.

The same is true where I live, in rural small-town Oklahoma. It’s definitely Trump country, including members of the numerous Native American tribes around here, but we have liberals here too. Yes, both the conservatives and the liberals tend to be armed to the teeth. But most people, whatever their faction, get along pretty well, despite what they might say online. This is true even when there are provocations. Someone on one of our main thoroughfares has put up a big banner on his house that says, “F**k Trump and f**k you for voting for him!” It’s still up, long after the election. No one of our many Trump supporters has torn it down, much less torched the house. I wish the police would enforce the local public obscenity ordinance and make the guy take it down, but even the police seem to go with the live and let live philosophy.

Pogue goes on to discuss the “extremism-watching” industry.

Luckily, America has an influential class of professionals who make a living explaining situations like this. These are our extremism-watchers, and I should say here that I’m one of them. . . .The best way for them to get attention on Twitter and spots on NPR and cable news is by offering evidence that alarms the political and media class. And that class is naturally most alarmed by evidence that confirms its already-existing fears about what is going wrong in America.

The result is that there’s a very real professional incentive not to get to know your subjects too closely, lest you discover something that muddies up the story. And so the people who make the best living by describing America’s descent towards civil violence tend to be those with almost no personal knowledge of the armed rednecks they think are leading us there.

He goes on to review in detail the bestseller by Barbara F. Walter, How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them, a title that is getting much attention from the prestige media. She argues that America has become an “anocracy,” something between autocracy and democracy, which is the type of government most susceptible to civil wars. Furthermore, she says that most civil wars are ethnic conflicts–such as Croatians vs. Serbs in Yugoslavia, and Hutus vs. Tutsis in Rwanda–therefore, our polarization is actually one too, a matter of white supremacists unwilling to accept racial diversity. The solution, she says, is to treat right wingers as we treat Taliban terrorists. (Probably a pre-Afghanistan-withdrawal comparison.)

Pogue critiques her argument and her research. He says that where he lives the issue isn’t race at all. “Here there is a very totalising war of worldviews, touched off by the pandemic and resistance to expert advice and state action, led by a militia-aligned faction that thinks the local government betrayed the county’s free-living values by participating in California’s Covid protocols.”

Pogue, who has himself written for the New Yorker and the New Republic, is the author of the acclaimed account of the Oregon militia group that occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, Chosen Country: A Rebellion in the West. He says that the writers who stereotype and demonize their subjects are not only failing to understand the real issues, they risk creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of national disunity, driving a wedge between people and further polarizing the population.

Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay

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“The Great Resignation” Continues

Last updated on: January 22, 2022 at 5:20 pm By Gene Veith

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Last year we blogged about what was being called “The Great Resignation,” the phenomenon of people quitting their jobs and not returning to the workplace. Much of that was a response to the COVID epidemic, with the lockdowns giving people a taste for not going to work and the government relief payments (including unemployment benefit supplements that paid many workers more for doing nothing than they were earning on their jobs) making that, at least for awhile, financially possible.

But now, most of those who voluntarily left the workplace back then still have not come back. The workplace participation numbers are essentially the same as they were back in August of 2020. This, even though pay has shot up, as companies are growing desperate for workers. The labor shortage is throwing off the economy, but it also bodes ill for those who are cultivating idleness and for the culture as a whole.

So says an article by By Mene Ukueberuwa in the Wall Street Journal (behind a paywall) entitled The Underside of the ‘Great Resignation’.

In 2000, the labor force participation rate–which includes everyone in the population, including the retired and unable to work– reached a high mark of 67%. Today, it is 61.9%, a drop of 5%, the same that it was last August. Among men in their prime working age, from 25 to 54, only 88.2% work. In 1961, the percentage was 96.9%. Put another way, among men between 25 and 54, the proportion of those who do not work for a living is 1 out of 8.

For women of the prime working age, the high point in 2000 was 77.3%, dropping to 75% today. The overall percentages are lower, since women often opt out of the workplace to have children and to take care of them, but the decline is also lower compared to men.

The work rate today is lower than it was during the Great Depression. Thirty years ago, according to the article, Americans had a 10% higher work rate than the European Union, but today Americans have fallen “a couple of points” behind the supposedly easy-going Europeans.

The reporter interviewed the economist Nicholas Eberstadt, who wrote a book on the subject in 2016 entitled Men without Work. It turns out, this phenomenon pre-dated the pandemic, with the work participation rate declining ever since the turn of the 21st century.

This is not the same as unemployment. This is people not looking for jobs. What are they doing instead? Watching TV! Taking advantage of all of the streaming services!

“By and large, nonworking men don’t ‘do’ civil society,” Mr. Eberstadt says. “Their time spent helping in the home, their time spent in worship—a whole range of activities, they just aren’t doing.” His source is the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ American Time Use Survey, which compiles respondents’ self-reported habits.

What is filling idle men’s time? “There’s a lot of staying at home, it seems. And what they report doing is ‘watching.’ They report being in front of screens 2,000 hours a year, like that’s their job.” Women again trail the men, but not by much. In 2019 childless women without jobs said they spent seven hours a day in “leisure,” a category dominated by entertainment.

How can they afford to do this? The answer would vary from person to person, probably including cashing in IRAs; government assistance; living off of a spouse, girl friend, or parent. The number of people getting disability payments has almost doubled from 2.2% of the working-age population in 1977 to 4.3% in 2021. Most of those disability claims are surely well-deserved, but today’s workplace would seem to be less hazardous over all than back then, though perhaps our health has declined due to our bad diets and inactivity.

Surely, many of these folks will eventually run out of money or support and have to re-enter the workforce, especially as the number of jobs keeps growing and the labor demand is sending paychecks higher and higher. But there are other factors at work.

[Eberhardt] notes that widespread contempt for many ordinary jobs may be making the problem worse. Journalists and economists who cheer on the Great Resignation often stigmatize work in the same breath, writing off low-paid jobs as not worth taking.

“It’s astonishingly condescending to say that some work is meaningless,” Mr. Eberstadt says. “And it shows an astonishing ignorance of how other people live.” It’s wonderful that millions of people are finding better work. But there are millions more who could fill the jobs they’re vacating, and disdain for low-skill work helps keep those people away.

Instead of stigmatizing low-skill jobs, we would do better to stigmatize idleness, especially among men. Not long ago, Mr. Eberstadt says, “the idea that 1 in 8 men should be neither working nor looking for work would have been an absolutely horrifying prospect.” Re-embracing that perspective could do a lot of good for the economy, as well as for idle Americans.

It seems that many Americans have lost the work ethic that we used to be famous for. Americans have also lost the doctrine of vocation, which gives work of all kinds meaning, value, and spiritual significance.

Photo by AllaSerebrina via DepositPhotos, attributed free license

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Nudge vs. Mandate

Last updated on: January 15, 2022 at 1:35 pm By Gene Veith

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President Biden’s recent speech in Georgia accused opponents of the Democrats’ voting rights bill of racism and totalitarianism, building up to this big finish:

At consequential moments in history, they present a choice: Do you want to be on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace? Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor? Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?

He thus branded every Republican in Congress, all of whom oppose the bill to nationalize election practices–and by extension nearly half of the American population that voted for them–as segregationists, brutal racist cops, and enemies to the nation. (See this and this for explanations of why his charges are not true.)

My question is, did he think this kind of demonizing of his opponents would persuade any of them to support the bill? Human beings respond to attacks by defending themselves. When people hear themselves reviled like this, they become defensive. That means they become even more resistant to the opposing point of view than they already were.

Yes, I am aware that President Trump also used this tactic of vilifying those who disagree with him, but he too had problems getting bills passed and stoking emotional opposition. But it is odd that President Biden, who campaigned on the promise that he would bring Americans back together, is himself using the tactics of polarization.

Though such rhetoric can inflame one’s base, or scapegoat a minority, you cannot govern this way in a democratic system. Normally, the legislative process in dealing with a contenti0us issue such as election laws would unfold something like this: Democrats are concerned about ballot access, thinking that voting should be made easier. Republicans are concerned about ballot security, worried that lax voter identification and security procedures make it possible to hold fraudulent elections. Lawmakers on both sides would debate the issues, make various proposals to win votes, and eventually come up with a bill that would protect both ballot access and ballot security.

But that’s not how our political process is working right now. To take other examples, President Biden’s response to Democratic senator’s Joe Manchin’s blocking his infrastructure bill has been to harshly attack him. Is that a way to win him over? He has been demonizing Americans who choose not to get vaccinated, to the point, in the words of a sympathetic journalist, that “President Joe Biden is trying to concentrate the anger of the nation’s inoculated majority against the refusal of 25% of eligible Americans to get vaccinated against COVID-19.” He also sought to coerce their compliance and punish their refusal by making them lose their jobs, though his vaccine mandate was tossed out by the Supreme Court.

The non-partisan contrarian site Unherd has posted an article on this subject by Geoff Shullenberger entitled How vaccine mandates became a political weapon, with the deck “Biden is using them to punish his enemies.” The author goes on to contrast President Biden’s approach with that of President Barack Obama.

Now, Obama is certainly a progressive, probably even more so than Biden, then his vice-president. But he was a follower, according to Shullenberger, of one of his former colleagues at the University of Chicago, economist Cass Sunstein, whom Obama appointed to be his “regulatory tsar.”

Sunstein pioneered the approach known as the “nudge”, which gave the title to the 2008 book he co-authored with Richard Thaler. Instead of mandating or proscribing behaviours, Sunstein suggested, governments might alter “choice architecture” to tacitly incentivise desired behaviours and discourage undesired ones. An oft-cited instance is making opt-in the default on certain decisions, like signing up for retirement contributions or the organ donor registry. These apparently small changes, “nudgers” believed, could re-engineer mass behaviour in a prosocial direction. Sunstein and Thaler, David V. Johnson notes, claimed to have “found the Golden Mean between Reagan free-market conservatism and FDR state-guided liberalism”. Their ideas had a natural appeal to a president who had promised to overcome the divisions between red and blue America. . . .

In his writings, Sunstein directly contrasts nudge-type efforts with mandates, and argues the former are preferable because they are “choice-preserving”. For example, making green energy preferences on utilities the default option predisposes consumers towards environmentally favourable choices, but still gives them an escape.

Shullenberger goes on to how this approach played out in the Obama administration, critiques the ineffectiveness of Biden’s COVID policy, and suggests how the “nudge” approach might work better.

Clearly, “nudge” tactics–which can be used in the service of any cause–can be manipulating and objectionable for many reasons, but they tend to be pragmatically more effective than mandates, which serve mainly to stir up opposition.

This is a lesson for politicians of both parties. Also for C.E.O.s, managers, college presidents, pastors, parents, and others whose vocations involve leadership. Though imposing your authority is sometimes called for, the trick is to get your charges to follow you of their own free wills. To do that, you must persuade, not alienate. And, like a cowboy herding cattle, you can nudge them in the direction you want them to go.

Photo by Andrew Postell, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

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Defining Being “Spiritual”

Last updated on: January 11, 2022 at 9:02 am By Gene Veith

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We often hear, “I’m not religious, but I’m spiritual.” We also hear about the “spirituality” of various religions. But what’s the difference? And what do people mean by “spirituality”?

Psychology Today takes up this question in an article by Saul Levine, former psychiatry professor (UC-San Diego), entitledAre You Religious or Spiritual? Both or Neither?

He says that religious “refers to a belief in the existence of a Supreme Being, an omniscient and omnipotent God who somehow introduced humans to this planet.” Being spiritual, though, refers to a psychological or experiential state:

Spirituality is different from religion. While it can involve the worship of God, it has more to do with sensory states involving mysticism and awe, beyond the physical self, society, or the world. Spirituality is said to encompass the ineffable (words can’t describe), the noetic (psychic enlightenment), and the metaphysical.

For many people, he says, this kind of feeling is connected to religion, to their devotion to God. Other people, though, can find this kind of transcendent experience by other means.

Spiritual enlightenment and feeling “at one with the universe,” can be achieved through contemplation and serenity on the one hand and via intense experiences on the other. These can involve evocative group activities, challenging physical accomplishments, profound music, romantic experiences, awe-inspiring art, magical scenic vistas, intense prayer, psychedelic drugs, and other sources which can induce transformative mind-altering states.

Dr. Levine does not minimize the importance of religion. He affirms both religion and spirituality, saying that human beings have a profound need for meaning and for what he calls the Four B’s: being, belonging, believing, and benevolence.

I would take issue with Dr. Levine on his definition of “religious.” Not all religions have a personal, omniscient and omnipotent God who created the world. Buddhism doesn’t hinge on there being a God. Hinduism has lots of gods, which are testimonies to a single non-personal divinity that is inherent in all things, with the physical world of division is not a creation at all but an illusion spun by a demon.

I think the real distinction is that “religions” are communal, something shared with others who have the same beliefs, experiences, and “spirituality.” Whereas being “spiritual,” in Dr. Levine’s sense, is a solitary experience, something an individual might feel in isolation.

In terms of what he writes about those Four B’s in another article, those four things we need for our well-being, his understanding of “spirituality” would fall in the category of “being.” But solitary inward experiences do little for belonging (for that you need a church), for believing (for that you need theology), and benevolence (for that you need the love of neighbor). And those four can only come from an actual religion.

Christianity indeed has its “spirituality.” Indeed, the different strains of Christianity have their spiritualities. I wrote a book about how and why I became a Lutheran entitled The Spirituality of the Cross. My faith is not just based on my subjective experiences, but I do feel awe, a sense of transcendence, and an experience of the ineffable when I contemplate Christ and His Cross. Also when I worship Him through the church’s liturgy and when I receive the Holy Communion of His body and blood. And when I read the Bible and pray. And when I am attentive in carrying out my vocations. And going from the despair at my failure to keep God’s Law to exulting in the promises of the Gospel is certainly experiential.

The sense of the sacred is often downplayed in contemporary Christianity. My sense is that some people especially yearn for that, and, not finding it in their churches, search for it elsewhere. We would do well to recover Christian spirituality. (Towards that end, read John Kleinig’s Grace Upon Grace: Spirituality for Today.) If we do, we might attract some of those who are “spiritual but not religious” by showing them how those two categories, when pursued in truth, actually go together.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

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How Parents Make Their Children Religious (or Not)

Last updated on: January 6, 2022 at 4:57 pm By Gene Veith

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The most important factor in whether or not children hold on to their faith and go to church when they are older is their parents. That does not always hold true, of course, but in general, if the parents are religious, their children eventually will be also. And vice, versa. Again, with exceptions, if the parents are not religious and do not go to church much, neither will their children.

Oxford University Press has published a book on the subject by sociologists Christian Smith and Amy Adamczyk entitled Handing Down the Faith: How Parents Pass Their Religion on to the Next Generation

The researchers have written about their findings in Christianity Today in an article entitled Parents Set the Pace for Their Adult Children’s Religious Life with the deck “‘Handing Down the Faith’ shows a vast majority of Americans don’t choose their religious beliefs. They inherit them.” Here is an excerpt:

Parents define for their children the role that religious faith and practice ought to play in life, whether important or not, which most children roughly adopt. Parents set a “glass ceiling” of religious commitment above which their children rarely rise. Parental religious investment and involvement is in almost all cases the necessary and even sometimes sufficient condition for children’s religious investment and involvement.

This parental primacy in religious transmission is significant because, even though most parents do realize it when they think about it, their crucial role often runs in the background of their busy lives; it is not a conscious, daily, strategic matter. Furthermore, many children do not recognize the power that their parents have in shaping their religious lives but instead view themselves as autonomous information processors making independent, self-directing decisions. Widespread cultural scripts also consistently say that the influence of parents over their children recedes starting with the onset of puberty, while the influence of peers, music, and social media takes over.

According to Smith and Adamczyk, the so-called “Generation Gap,” much heralded in the 1960s, does not really exist for today’s young people. They do listen to their parents and they are influenced by them, whether they admit to it or are even aware of it or not. The religious influence of parents comes not just in what they say to their children but in the day-to-day practices of the family–going to church or not; praying or not.

Evangelicals tend to stress conversion experiences. I have had evangelical students who were troubled that they were “raised in a Christian home,” as opposed to living a life of sin and unbelief until the Holy Spirit broke in upon them. People with that mindset are often vulnerable to attacks on their faith that say, “you just believe that because you were raised that way.”

But surely, God gives parents the prime responsibility for the spiritual lives of their children, as underscored throughout the Bible (e.g., Deuteronomy 4:9-10; Proverbs 22:6; 1 Corinthians 7:14; 2 Timothy 1:5; etc.). In the great passages on vocation in Ephesians, this is made explicit: “Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4).

As we show in Family Vocation, the vocation of parents, even more so than that of pastors, is the evangelism and Christian formation of their children. This starts by bringing them to Baptism, where Christ makes them His own. And then feeding their children with the Word of God at church and at home. And ensuring that they have the “instruction of the Lord”–that they are taught about Christ, that they know the Law that brings them to the Gospel–and the “discipline” of the Lord, the life of the Church and the Christian life.

This doesn’t mean that religious beliefs are “inherited,” despite the Christianity Today headline. Children must make their parents’ faith their own. But it does mean that religious beliefs “run in the family,” just as the Old Testament saints invoked the “God of our fathers.” And that “letting the kids decide about religion for themselves when they are older” generally means the kids will share their parents’ indifference.

And if transmitting the faith is part of the vocation of parents, this also means that God Himself is at work in and through what the parents do. It may not seem like the children are receptive and they may well rebel against what their parents have taught them, but, in the long run, what God does by means of parents will have its effect.

But if parents pass down their faith to their children, why is church membership declining so much? Well, according to another study, “Younger Americans have had less robust religious experiences during their childhood than previous generations have.” And, perhaps even more to the point, Christians have been having significantly fewer children. (See Philip Jenkins’ book Fertility and Faith.)

Image by Geralt, via Pixabay

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