Thanks to our friend Roy Edroso, we have long enjoyed the columns of conservative writer Rod Dreher, but perhaps not in the way Dreher intended. (That’s just our way of plugging our friend Roy — you should really read him if you don’t already — and to hint that we are not generally fans of Dreher’s body of work.)
Anyway, we very much were fascinated by a recent column Dreher penned for its abject sense of dread. “Christianity Collapsing in America,” he titled it, and if you thought that headline was really a hedge and Dreher was actually calling into question a new study from the Pew Center or looking for some silver lining, he really wasn’t.
This is a columnist in a flat-out, full-on panic.
“Notice how religion falls off a cliff when it comes to Millennials. If you think somehow there’s going to be a recovery with Generation Z, you’re dreaming,” he writes, citing the study, which suggests that the Millennials may become the first majority no-religion generation in American history.
Just as interesting were Dreher’s commenters, who tried to find some recent explanation for the trend — whether or not the president’s antics were turning young people away from religion, for example.
But it struck us that this was a case when Americans seem so completely walled off from what has been going on in the rest of the world for decades, particularly in Europe. It sure looks to us like the rapid secularization of the United States is simply this country catching up with the rest of the developed world.
This recent poll, for example, shows that 91 percent of young people in the Czech Republic have no religion, while the number is 70 percent in the UK. And have you been over there lately? Churchgoing is generally not a thing — at least in the liturgical sense. But European churches these days are some of the best venues for great plays and concerts. And so what? Some people there are still religious, just like they are here. And no one there or here wants to stop them from practicing what they want to.
When we see people like Dreher panicking, it’s really mostly about political power, isn’t it?
