Thought for the day: Religion is not decreasing in our society. It’s merely moving from the public sphere to the private sphere. There has been a shift in the Western world from viewing religion as knowledge (reality) to viewing religion as faith (personal fiction). Our job as Christians, then, is to cut this public-private divide, recovering Christianity from its cultural captivity to the private sphere of “values,” and recovering Christianity’s rich intellectual heritage.
May 21, 2009
Thinking to Believe 
May 28, 2009 at 1:48 pm
I rarely disagree with you Jason but on this one I have to say that it is not that simple. First, Religion is alive and well today but the ideas and expressions are constantly going through changes while the titles remain. There does not seem to be any reliable data on what is actually going on because the information collectors often are not motivated by honesty or the interviewees are not clear on what they are or believe and why, some are no doubt even dishonest. These polls that are taken from which the data is drawn that seems to indicate that Christianity is decreasing for instance are not relaible since many are not clear on what Christianity is. There is so much confusion in the minds of so many people as to what is what that I am amazed that there is even an attempt to determine what is “in” or “out”.
More importantly, what happends to “religion” does not change Christianity as it is presented in the Bible. I think that we as Christians have our work cut out for us to make clear what we believe and why and to help others who want to understnad the defference to understand.
I hope you get where I am coming from because it’s the end of the work day and I’m on my way out of the office. I just had to get in a quick word before leaving.
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May 28, 2009 at 3:11 pm
I’m not so sure we actually disagree. You and I both agree that what is changing are people’s individual religious ideas: not an abandonment of religion for atheism/secularism.
As for polls, many are flawed, but some (such as the Pew research group) seem to be highly accurate.
My point (which is by no means original to me) is that the secularism we are seeing in our culture is not the result of people giving up on religion, but the result of people privatizing religion; i.e. religion is not viewed as objectively true and valid for both private and public life, but a subjective truth one subscribes to that only has relevance to their personal life. Think about it. The number of professing Christians is about the same today as it was 50 years ago, and yet our society is radically different. Why? Because people no longer consider religious knowledge to be genuine knowledge, and no longer think religion has a place in public life.
Jason
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