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It was
a small detail, a point of comparison buried in the
fifth paragraph on the 17th page of a 24-page summary of
the 2009 American Religious Identification Survey. But
as R. Albert Mohler Jr.president of the Southern Baptist
Theological Seminary, one of the largest on earthread
over the document after its release in March, he was
struck by a single sentence. For a believer like Mohlera
starched, unflinchingly conservative Christian, steeped
in the theology of his particular province of the faith,
devoted to producing ministers who will preach the
inerrancy of the Bible and the Gospel of Jesus Christ as
the only means to eternal lifethe central news of the
survey was troubling enough: the number of Americans who
claim no religious affiliation has nearly doubled since
1990, rising from 8 to 15 percent. Then came the point
he could not get out of his mind: while the unaffiliated
have historically been concentrated in the Pacific
Northwest, the report said, "this pattern has now
changed, and the Northeast emer
ged in 2008 as the new stronghold of the religiously
uni-dentified." As Mohler saw it, the historic
foundation of America's religious culture was cracking.
"That really hit me hard," he told me last week. "The
Northwest was never as religious, never as
congrega-tionalized, as the Northeast, which was the
foundation, the home base, of American religion. To lose
New England struck me as momento-us." Turning the report
over in his mind, Mohler posted a despairing online
column on the eve of Holy Week lamenting the declineand,
by implication, the imminent fallof 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 i
n Louisville, Ky.
There it was, an old term with new urgency:
post-Christian. This is not to say that the Christian
God is dead, but that he is less of a force in American
politics and culture than at any other time in recent
memory. To the surprise of liberals who fear the advent
of an evangelical theocracy and to the dismay of
religious conservatives who long to see their faith more
fully expressed in public life, Christians are now
making up a declining perce-ntage of the American
population.
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