Gentle readers are likely to hear a lot about at least one of the articles to which we are about to refer, so we figure they might as well hear about them here.
Newsweek's celebrated editor and congenital complainer about the religious right Jon Meacham offers a longish discussion of the decline of Christianity. Per Meacham, recent polls show fewer confessing Christians in our Republic, which is an indicator of the failure of the religious right to carry out its vision of an avowedly Christian America.
Meanwhile, Economist writers Michelthwait and Adrian Wooldridge write in WSJ that it's far too early to count Christianity out, either in sheer numbers or in influence. Our Republic's history is too full of examples of the faith's resurgence.
SWNID, ever the cynical optimist, finds more in the second article to affirm than in the first, though the first is far less dour than one might think. More particularly, however, we note what Meacham narrates at the beginning and end of his essay: the gloom that present demographics bring to Al Mohlers of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. We note in that the repeated tendency of certain Christian leaders to declare the advent of a crisis that will make the future far different from the present.
Most often we think such judgments have to do with the rhetorical need to stir up the faithful with the imminent falling of the sky. And maybe to raise some dough for one's seminary too.
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