The Decline and Fall of Christian America - Newsweek Cover

This past week's issue of Newsweek featured a cover-story entitled, "The Decline and Fall of Christian America," which was written by Newsweek editor, Jon Meacham. This particular piece focuses on religious identity in America, evincing that the percentage of people who identify as Christian has dropped 10 points in the past couple of decades, and addresses what this might mean for American Christianity.

Meacham has written a few other articles for Newsweek on the subject of religion and politics, published a book on American religion (American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation [Random House, 2006]), and made several appearances on talk and news shows over the past few years. So, he has some experience with religious matters in the public sphere, but is certainly not a scholar of religion or religious studies. His pieces are more in the vein of journalistic coverage of social phenomena; he tends to pull out certain polls or surveys and freely comment on the possible implications of these numbers with very little substantial recourse to academic religious studies scholarship. Granted, he invokes a few philosophers (Hermann Keyserling, Friedrich Nietzsche, William James, and Tom Altizer) and theologians (mainly Augustine and a pastor he interviewed, Albert Mohler, Jr.) to make his points, but they seem to me to be exercised in a rather cursory and superficial manner, not at the center of his article but rather at the periphery.

It's certainly true that writing a magazine article is a totally different animal than, say, a peer-reviewed academic journal (the difference in audience, editing process, etc.), but I feel that if Newsweek is going to publish a column specifically concerned with religion and religious issues these pieces should be tackled by specialists in religious studies who have a more in-depth and wide-ranging knowledge base with which to work. This would bring a greater amount of accuracy and nuance to the articles and more credulity to the column in general. This being said, I nonetheless think that, considering these conditions, Meacham's article wasn't bad; it made some interesting points.

The crux of Meacham's piece is that for the past decade or so less people in the U.S. identify as explicitly Christian, while more identify as "unaffiliated" with any religious organization. According to the American Religious Identification Survey, since 1990 the number of self-identified Christians in the U.S. has fallen from 86 to 76 percent. A recent Pew Forum poll reported that the percentage of people who claim to be "atheist" or "agnostic" has increased four-fold since 1990 (from 1 to 3.6 million). From these stats Meacham argues that, although the U.S. is still shaped by religious sentiments, its politics and culture are generally less influenced by Christian movements and arguments than before. It seems that he's speaking to the failure of the Christian conservative right's hopes of creating a Christian state of some kind, which, especially in light of the stats he reports, seems like a veritable pipedream. Since the Christian right has been the most politically vocal and forceful, Meacham's talk about a "less Christian America" really only applies to the desires and aims of this group of Christians. Many of us more mainstream, moderate, or progressive Christians recognize that the U.S. has never been a Christian nation in the strict sense because of the constitutional provisions set out to protect the freedom of practice for people of all religions and to prevent the establishment of an official state/imperial religion. Although Christianity has always been a majority, and thus a great influence in public life, America was never intended to be and never has been a "Christian nation." And a great number of us moderate and progressive Christian acknowledge this reality.

I would contest that American culture is still greatly affected in a plethora of ways by Christian beliefs, practices, language, etc. (I won't rehearse these here). Just because the number of Christians is shrinking and that of the unaffilated is growing doesn't necessitate a conclusion that we're living in a "post-Christian" America. Rather, coupled with the research done by the Pluralism Project at Harvard, this suggests to me that we're not living in a post-Christian America, but a pluralist America, where public life and culture are increasingly influenced by a great variety of diverse belief-systems and practices that constitute the great religio-cultural "fruit salad" (to borrow a term from Ven. Thich Nhat Hanh) that is the United States. So, I think of these changes that Meacham speaks of as not so much pointing to a post-Christian situation but an ever-increasing pluralist situation where Christianity is still greatly influential in terms of numbers and history, but is gradually giving way to a rich tapestry of diversity of collective religious identity. And this increasing religious plurality is an exciting thing to become more aware of and experience.