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The Editor’s Desk
By Jon Meacham
From the magazine issue dated Apr 13, 2009
Reports of the death of the religious right or about the high hopes of the religious left are familiar, but something deeper and more fundamental (so to speak) than a tactical repositioning is going on at the moment. Christianity is not depleted or dying; it remains a vibrant force in the lives of billions. Only a fool or an ideologue would say otherwise. There is, however, a sense among believers and nonbelievers that America is less Christian than it has been, and may even be moving into a post-Christian phase.
This argument, which I explore in our cover this week, would not have been as compelling five years ago as it is today. In 2004 came the release of Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ,” which religious conservatives helped turn into a box-office success (unlikely for a movie whose dialogue was in Aramaic); this was also the era of Terri Schiavo.
What has happened in the intervening years? John McCain, for one. Though he tried to get right with Jerry Falwell and others (and he gave America Sarah Palin), McCain’s heart never seemed to be in it. During a particularly bleak period in his campaign for the nomination, McCain and I spoke about religion and politics. He talked movingly of his sense of providence and of gratitude for having been spared in war and captivity, but also said that he did not believe the Lord God of Hosts was paying attention to who won the Iowa caucuses or the New Hampshire primary. That view—a sound one, in my opinion—was not widely shared among many religious conservatives within the Republican Party. There was the discussion prompted by books on atheism by Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and others. And there was Barack Obama, who campaigned on a vision of faith and politics that underscored religious liberty rather than the imposition of explicitly religious values in the public sphere.
George Weigel, the Roman Catholic theologian and papal biographer, disagrees with talk of a post-Christian America—to an extent. “We have a post-Christian high culture, though even there are echoes of the biblical culture out of which much of the American founding came,” he told me. “But lots of things change with elections—not just occupants of certain houses on Pennsylvania Avenue, but cultural attitudes shift a bit. I think what you are seeing is a government that is less concerned with first principles and more interested in managing what is, rather than engaging with ideas. They see rationality as the opposite of theology; theology is seen as rigid, frozen, out of step.”
What about America versus Europe? Weigel, the author of a book on the secularization of Europe, “The Cube and the Cathedral,” said: “It’s inconceivable that in Europe today there would be the kind of discussion that is going on about Obama and Notre Dame; Sarkozy does not have a panel of ministers he talks to. Gordon Brown may still have something to do with the choice of bishops in England, but that fact of entanglement between church and state has nothing to do with the course of public policy.” And finally: “As long as presidents of the United States feel it appropriate to end speeches with ‘God bless America,’ we can be reasonably sure that the United States hasn’t become secular Europe, and that that distinctive American religiosity that Tocqueville observed still has something important going for it.”
But “something going on” in terms of the viability of a religious culture is not the same thing as the viability of an explicitly Christian one, and therein lies the issue confronting millions of American evangelicals. What they do about it, and how the rest of America responds, is a critical next chapter.
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/192460
© 2009
