| Religion is an anachronism that is evaporating and will exist only in museum exhibits in the near future. |
| Perhaps for the first time since the United States was established, a majority of young adults here do not identify as Christian.
Only 49 percent of millennials consider themselves Christian, compared with 84 percent of Americans in their mid-70s or older, according to a new report from the Pew Research Center. The share of American adults who regard themselves as Christian has fallen by 12 percentage points in just the last decade. “The U.S. is steadily becoming less Christian and less religiously observant,” the Pew study concluded. “Pompous right-wing political chest-thumping, and an unwillingness to listen on matters like climate change or racism, has contributed to a perception by millions that Christianity is irrelevant, or worse yet, a threat to progress,” the Rev. Richard Cizik, the leader of a group of self-described “new evangelicals” with moderate views, told me. “That’s a real burden to carry going into the 21st century.” Pew’s latest report found that nonbelievers are gaining ground fast. “Nones” — those with no particular religion — now account for more than one-quarter of the American population. There are substantially more nones than Catholics. The decline in religion is particularly evident among young people. Those born between 1928 and 1945 are only two percentage points less likely to identify as Christian than they were a decade ago, while millennials are 16 percentage points less likely to call themselves Christians. “Adults coming of age today are far less religious than their parents and grandparents before them,” said Gregory Smith of the Pew Research Center. The central issue is that faith is supposed to provide moral guidance — and many moralizing figures on the evangelical right don’t impress young people as moral at all. Senator Jesse Helms said in 1995 that AIDS funding should be cut because gay men get the disease. The Rev. Jerry Falwell and the Rev. Pat Robertson initially suggested that God organized the 9/11 terror attacks to punish feminists, gays and lesbians. God should have sued Falwell and Robertson for defamation. But, in some sign of karma, a survey found that gays and lesbians have higher public approval than evangelicals do. Source: "We’re Less and Less a Christian Nation, and I Blame Some Blowhards" By Nicholas Kristof - NY Times - 10/26/2019 The radical makeovers of Quebec {Canada} churches reflect the drastic decline of the Catholic Church in a majority-Catholic Canadian province, where 95 percent of the population went to Mass in the 1950s but only 5 percent do so today. For generations, parishioners whispered their sins in the dark wooden confessional booths of Notre-Dame-du-Perpétuel-Secours, an imposing Roman Catholic church in Montreal. The once-hallowed space, now illuminated with a giant pink chandelier, has been reinvented as the Théâtre Paradoxe at a cost of nearly $3 million in renovations. It is now host to, among other events, Led Zeppelin cover bands, Zumba lessons and fetish parties, as well as the talk show that Sammy appeared on. And it is one of dozens of churches across Quebec that have been transformed — into university reading rooms, luxury condominiums, cheese emporiums and upmarket fitness centers. Source: "Where Churches Have Become Temples of Cheese, Fitness and Eroticism" By Dan Bilefsky - NY Times - July 30, 2018 In Britain, the results of the 2011 national census have just been published. They show that a quarter of the population claims to have no religion, almost double the figure 10 years ago. And though the United States remains the most religious country in the West, 20 percent declare themselves without religious affiliation — double the number a generation ago. Source: "The Moral Animal" By JONATHAN SACKS - NY Times - December 23, 2012 |
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