EU-DIGEST: US Politics: Christians cannot strategize and argue their way into renewed prominence

10/6/14

US Politics: Christians cannot strategize and argue their way into renewed prominence - by Michael Brendan Dougherty

Christian conservatives are preparing for a big and long overdo rethink of their position in our culture, and in America's political life.

Although Pew regularly tells us that about 40 percent of Americans are regular attendees of church services, more accurate surveys show that the actual number is about half that. And it's not just conservatives who fear the wane. Religious liberals also worry about passing on their faith to the next generation.

Court cases like Hobby Lobby, or the clash between bishops and legislators in California over whether Catholic insurance plans must cover abortion, have the faithful worrying that compromises of pluralism will be denied to the religious in the near future, and that a new social orthodoxy is being imposed on them and their institutions. And they're trying to figure out what to do about it.

The magazine First Things recently held an informal conversation among religious thinkers on these themes, according to Rod Dreher of The American Conservative. (Full disclosure: I once worked at The American Conservative.) These thinkers hashed out ideas about their ever-more-tenuous relationship with political conservatism. And they talked about just how they might reach a culture of the unchurched.

Now, First Things and religious conservatives generally have a habit of letting their imaginations go dark under Democratic administrations. During the immediate years after Casey v. Planned Parenthood and the Clinton administration's RICO suits against abortion opponents, First Things wondered aloud about "The End of Democracy." But the differences between the '90s rethink and today's are illustrative. In the 1990s, writers from First Things could believe the problem was a judicial usurpation of democratic politics. They had some faith that the people were with them, and adopted a more insurgent populist tone. Now, the writers and editors know that a growing majority is against them. And they seem ready to settle for being a creative minority, hoping some measure of liberality will apply to them.

Dreher's recounting of the event sounds pretty bleak. And anyone with declinist temptations is ready to believe the worst. It can seem in some cultural battles that today's form of American secularism has grown more confidently anticlerical. And that its bleeding edge is more convinced of the righteousness of its cause.

The history of the Church is filled with times where the state or some other movement put pressure on the flock. And these episodes are often confusing and painful for people of faith. Ambitious people apostatize. Families break. Church leaders make bad compromises with worldly authority. It's all disheartening stuff.