A post Christian America?

This is really good news, hopefully the trend will continue.

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 percentage of the American population.

The positive nature of this is somewhat tempered by the fact that the remaining christians are becoming more radicalized.

A third of Americans say they are born again; this figure, along with the decline of politically moderate-to liberal mainline Protestants, led the ARIS authors to note that “these trends … suggest a movement towards more conservative beliefs and particularly to a more ‘evangelical’ outlook among Christians.” With rising numbers of Hispanic immigrants bolstering the Roman Catholic Church in America, and given the popularity of Pentecostalism, a rapidly growing Christian milieu in the United States and globally, there is no doubt that the nation remains vibrantly religious—far more so, for instance, than Europe.

If that trend continues we will probably wind up with a vast underclass of people who insist on believing in creation myths and having large families, all because they know the “rapture” is just around the corner. These people will be left behind, but not in the way they think, chances are they will get bitter over generations of not seeing any of their mythology come true, while the heathens continue to live better and better lives by abandoning the mythology of the past. Leading to a small hard-core group of extremists, who sit around in caves and plot attacks on non-believers. This seems like a familiar story, I just can’t remember from where.