Newsweek has an interesting cover story, The End of Christian America, that points out that:

. . . the number of Americans who claim no religious affiliation has nearly doubled since 1990, rising from 8 to 15 percent.

15% may not seem like a big deal but it means that is 45 million Americans have no religious affiliation; only the Catholic Church has more official members in the US (the Catholic church is the single largest denomination in the US, the Southern Baptists are the largest Protestant denomination). Accurately measuring religious affiliation is a complicated matter. Millions of Americans will self-identify as members of one denomination or another, but will in fact not have set foot in church for years. Other Americans are strictly C&E – or Christmas and Easter – attendees. Other Americans will clearly claim a religious affiliation but do not go to church except to get married or buried (or to see a family member do the same). A better measure is attendance versus membership. I don’t remember the exact numbers (I’m sure someone here will know them) but even in Utah there exists a vast chasm between active attendees and official members. Some denominations (i.e. the Episcopal Church) actually report more attendees than members in many local congregations.

Demonstrating an incredible level of completely not understanding, Tim Graham at Newsbusters (a site claiming to “provide immediate exposure of liberal media bias, insightful analysis, constructive criticism and timely corrections to news media reporting”), wrote:

Newsweek clearly see traditional Christianity as a pestilent obstacle to the kind of libertine America they want to create. How nice to pick the week of Easter to tell Americans that Jesus is on the wane.

These sentences represent a common conservative Christian view – that either you are a devout, fundagelical Christian or you are a completely immoral heathen. The notion that one can be eminently moral and yet declare no faith is anathema to this kind of thinking; it says faith is not necessary for morality and in fact one can lead a moral life without resorting to God, which profoundly undermines much of the rationale offered for conservative Christian faith. The idea that one does not need God to serve as a higher authority strikes at the core of much religious faith. Call it the human declaration of independence from stone age obedience to the invisible sky bully. And that scares the hell out of a whole host of religious people. (Not for nothing, the idea that people won’t be moral unless the threat of eternal damnation hangs over their heads says more about the person saying that than it does about morality or for that matter god.)

Fundamentalism is a profoundly modern phenomenon – a response to the expanding fields of science and the higher criticism of the Bible that revealed among other things that the Bible was historically inaccurate, that the Bible was the product of multiple authors and hands over the centuries. Fundamentalism responded to the academic and scientific movements by articulating and adopting a theology that explicitly rejected such things – hence we have creationism and its bastard stepchild intelligent design, we have arguments about Biblical morality and Biblical marriage and so on. The fundamentalist (no matter the actual faith) answer to modernity is a howling, agonized “No.” It’s not accidental that opposition to feminism and gay rights have been driven by conservative religious believers who see in them a rejection of Biblical systems authority (men over women, straight over gay). By contrast, the mainline churches (the so-called Seven Sisters of American protestantism including the Congregationalists/UCC, the UUs and the Episcopalians) with their historic advocacy of higher education attempted to integrate the disciplines into their theologies. Thus one finds many mainline pastors preaching in favor of evolution and science on Darwin Day or teaching that the Biblical story cannot be taken as a literal account of what happened and instead we have to search it for metaphorical and spiritual, not literal, truths.

The Newsweek article includes this paragraph:

While we remain a nation decisively shaped by religious faith, our politics and our culture are, in the main, less influenced by movements and arguments of an explicitly Christian character than they were even five years ago. I think this is a good thing—good for our political culture, which, as the American Founders saw, is complex and charged enough without attempting to compel or coerce religious belief or observance. It is good for Christianity, too, in that many Christians are rediscovering the virtues of a separation of church and state that protects what Roger Williams, who founded Rhode Island as a haven for religious dissenters, called “the garden of the church” from “the wilderness of the world.” As crucial as religion has been and is to the life of the nation, America’s unifying force has never been a specific faith, but a commitment to freedom—not least freedom of conscience. At our best, we single religion out for neither particular help nor particular harm; we have historically treated faith-based arguments as one element among many in the republican sphere of debate and decision. The decline and fall of the modern religious right’s notion of a Christian America creates a calmer political environment and, for many believers, may help open the way for a more theologically serious religious life.

It is exactly the historical treatment of faith-based arguments as one element among many that concerns today’s fundamentalist Christians. In our local context, many LDS persons privilege the statements of church leaders over other statements and opinions and are somewhat taken aback and often offended (and cry bigotry) when the rest of us don’t. The battle fundamentalism – in all its forms – is waging is a battle against the Enlightenment and the sciences in an attempt to restore to its central place the authority of revealed “truth” (in the form of the Bible, the Book of Mormon or the Koran) and its human representatives – be they Popes, Pastors, Prophets, Imams or Seers and Revelators.

As Newsweek’s editor puts it:

For more than 40 years, the debate that began with the Supreme Court’s decision to end mandatory school prayer in 1962 (and accelerated with the Roe v. Wade ruling 11 years later) may not have been novel, but it has been ferocious. Fearing the coming of a Europe-like secular state, the right longed to engineer a return to what it believed was a Christian America of yore.

But that project has failed, at least for now. In Texas, authorities have decided to side with science, not theology, in a dispute over the teaching of evolution. The terrible economic times have not led to an increase in church attendance. In Iowa last Friday, the state Supreme Court ruled against a ban on same-sex marriage, a defeat for religious conservatives. Such evidence is what has believers fretting about the possibility of an age dominated by a newly muscular secularism.

At his place, Hugo recently wrote an interesting post “Despair on the right” in which he mused:

Despite temporary victories for social conservatives like the passage of Proposition 8 in California, the polling indicates a gradually growing consensus in favor of the freedom to marry, particularly among the youngest Americans. Legislative efforts to advance an anti-abortion cause continue to make tiny bits of progress, but much of their work has been undone both by the strongly pro-choice Obama Administration and by a series of disheartening defeats at the ballot box. Younger conservatives may still be anti-abortion, but despite the shrill cries of their elders, they are increasingly likely to see the “life” issue one among many; many young evangelicals are increasingly liberal in their views on fighting poverty and global warming, with many more inclined (rightly so, from a Scriptural perspective) to see the morality of the pocketbook as of more concern to Christ than the morality of the pelvis. And heck, as the headlines have told us just this past month, Americans are less religious than ever before, more likely to have babies out of wedlock than ever before.

Politics works in cycles; the GOP will come back eventually, and conservatives will come to power again. But culture doesn’t work in the same cyclical way. The genie of women’s liberation and cultural emancipation has been hard for the right to put back in the bottle, despite their most furious efforts for forty years. The Pill isn’t going away. Americans as a whole are not showing any signs of a renewed willingness to marry young and stay married to one spouse of the opposite sex for the rest of their lives. Oh, there are a few microtrends here and there that might gladden a reactionary heart — but for the most part, the narrative of American history holds true: rights once granted are hard to take away; freedoms once tasted are hard to give up. And that will be true if Obama is re-elected and it will be just as true if, heavens forfend, a Palin-Jindal ticket sweeps into office in a 2012 landslide.

I think social cons know that even when they win an occasional battle, they’re losing the larger war.

Hugo shrewdly put his finger on the issue. The issue for social and religious conservatives is larger than a growing number of Americans who profess no religious affiliation – it is that even most of those who do are indistinguishable from those who don’t. The power of conservative religion lies in its absolute certainty – you get saved, you’re going to heaven, the Bible is TRUE and LITERAL, the voice of God speaks clearly. But in a world in which certainties are increasingly shown to be unreliable, in a religiously pluralistic society, contact with other faiths (and with non-belief) undermine the proclamations of any faith that it holds “absolute Truth”. Absolute devotion to a faith and its particular tenets and sources of authority becomes increasingly untenable. Even the most ardently and fervently devout, regularly come into contact with ideas and people whose very existence undermines their own faith’s claims of certainty. America’s growing secularism is expressed in the growing number who proclaim no religious affiliation but also among those who claim affiliation but who are sporadically and rarely in church as well as many who attend the proudly heterodox mainline churches. Though these persons are believers, their belief is as far from fundamentalism orthodoxy as are the beliefs of the secularist or atheist.

Fundamentalism is revealing a diversity of thought and belief that undermines the quest for orthodoxy; younger conservatives, as Hugo points out, are less wedded to single issues and like second or third generation New England Puritans are introducing a broader, more expansive understanding of the gospel than that of their elders. Forty years into the full-blown emergence of America’s religious and conservative right, the younger generation is adapting in ways their elders would have found unthinkable – especially demonstrating a willingness to compromise on culture war issues.

At the end of the day, I think a more secular public square is a good thing. Public policy informed by the best research – not by faith – will yield better results for everyone and the constant effort by conservatives to put the genie back in the bottle have not in fact yielded a more perfect union or a more dynamic America. It was an experiment that hasn’t worked out and it’s okay to try something else.