19AR24-47

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AR 24:47 - Questioning "the coming end of Christian America"

In this issue:

AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY - "half empty" vs "half full"

FREEDOM OF SPEECH - loss of control to dictate loss of freedom?

Apologia Report 24:47 (1,455)

November 27, 2019

AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY

In an October 20 piece for The Week magazine, Bonnie Kristian reports on a recent Pew survey <www.pewrsr.ch/2XH63gh> under the triumphant headline "The coming end of Christian America." Sound familiar? Many media outlets commented on it. <www.bit.ly/2KNEjS2>

Responding with the question "Is American Christianity Really in Free Fall?," the eminent Philip Jenkins (professor of history, Baylor University) begins: "The Pew Foundation has just released a significant report concerning the state of American religion. As with anything done by Pew, both the research and the analysis are exemplary, and the findings are convincing. I will challenge one small but important thing in the report, namely its title - but I will be arguing a great deal with the way in which it has been represented in the media. We are seeing substantial changes in religious attitudes and beliefs, but they are just not what is being headlined. ...

"The report in question is titled 'In U.S., Decline of Christianity Continues at Rapid Pace: An update on America's changing religious landscape.' That 'decline in Christianity' point is obviously eye-catching, and in different ways it provides the core of media reports. The British Guardian headlined 'Americans becoming less Christian as over a quarter follow no religion.' The Wall Street Journal declares, more broadly, 'Religion Is on the Decline as More Adults Check "None",' and you will undoubtedly see your own variants. ...

"The Pew report findings can be summarized thus: Both Protestantism and Catholicism are experiencing losses of population share. Currently, 43% of U.S. adults identify with Protestantism, down from 51% in 2009. And one-in-five adults (20%) are Catholic, down from 23% in 2009. Meanwhile, all subsets of the religiously unaffiliated population - a group also known as religious 'nones' - have seen their numbers swell. Self-described atheists now account for 4% of U.S. adults, up modestly but significantly from 2% in 2009; agnostics make up 5% of U.S. adults, up from 3% a decade ago; and 17% of Americans now describe their religion as 'nothing in particular,' up from 12% in 2009. ...

"Just like rates of religious affiliation, rates of religious attendance also are declining. Over the last decade, the share of Americans who say they attend religious services at least once or twice a month dropped by 7 percentage points, while the share who say they attend religious services less often (if at all) has risen by the same degree. ...

"Although the 'None' terminology dates back to the 1960s, another Pew study published in 2012 drew intense media attention to what appeared to be a rising social trend. Not only were the Nones abundant, but their numbers had grown sharply, from 8 percent in 1990 to 15 percent in 2007 and to 20 percent by 2012. Another Pew report in 2013 found that 'Religious "nones" - a shorthand we use to refer to people who self-identify as atheists or agnostics, as well as those who say their religion is 'nothing in particular' - now make up roughly 23% of the U.S. adult population.' Today, the figure is 26 percent. If in fact we understand these people to be of 'no religion' - defined as atheists or agnostics - then the United States is evidently moving to European patterns at a headlong rate. To put it crudely, the religious content of America's future appears to be, well, None.

"But as the most recent study carefully points out, None does not equal no religion, or no religious belief, and you should dismiss any media report that suggests otherwise. By any reasonable standard, in fact, American Nones are a surprisingly religious community. In 2012, a third of the unaffiliated said that religion was very important, or somewhat important, in their life.

"Two-thirds of them say they believe in God (68%). More than half say they often feel a deep connection with nature and the earth (58%), while more than a third classify themselves as 'spiritual' but not 'religious' (37%), and one-in-five (21%) say they pray every day. ...

"What has changed in recent years is that the Nones are not formally identifying even as Christian, and that fact - that denial of belonging, if not believing - requires explanation. To understand the American situation, we can usefully compare studies undertaken in the 1980s or 1990s, which likewise indicated a reluctance to commit to specific denominations or doctrinal assertions. ...

"As the new century began, social and political changes were altering people's willingness to profess even a general alignment with denominations, or with religion in general. The reaction that produced the Nones is not directed against faith, but against institutions, and how they behave. As the earlier Pew study noted in 2012, 'Overwhelmingly, [the Nones] think that religious organizations are too concerned with money and power, too focused on rules and too involved in politics.' ...

"Catholics meanwhile were alienated by the seemingly endless cycle of clergy abuse scandals, which entered a new and still more alarming phase after 2002. ...

"The rise of the Nones coincides closely with these twin trends, and the consequence would be to discourage individuals from admitting to generic labels with which they had been comfortable only a few years previously. ...

"Reported levels of religious affiliation thus declined quite steeply, regardless of any change in supernatural belief. ...

"Of itself, rejecting religious affiliation does not mean forfeiting a religious world view, or indeed abandoning any substantial amount of the belief system of any particular faith. To that extent, it is wildly inaccurate to see the Nones as forsaking religion. ...

"Arguably too, the growth of such publicly confessed indifference helps shape the statistics on which we base our knowledge of religious activity and participation. ... We can legitimately wonder how far the recorded drop in attendance figures represents an actual change in behavior, rather than greater honesty among respondents. Could this be a change neither in believing nor belonging, but in saying? ...

"So is American religion changing? No question. But how far is this a real decline of faith, and how much is it a reduction in people's willingness to affirm membership in institutions they neither like nor trust?"

It is worth noting that Jenkins concluded his introductory paragraph with the words "I honestly don't think American religion is in trouble to anything like the extent that is suggested." The Anxious Bench, Oct 22 '19 <www.bit.ly/35uSSly>

The New York Times (Oct 29 ‘19) advises "caution" in regard to the doomsaying in a piece by Ross Douthat (suggestive name for a skeptic) titled "The Overstated Collapse of American Christianity" speculating that what is being observed "may be clearing space for post-Christian spiritualities - pantheist, gnostic, syncretist, pagan - rather than a New Atheist sort of godlessness. ...

"Here are three points more specific to American Christianity that should be considered alongside the stark declinist story in the Pew data."

1) "Lukewarm Christianity may be declining much more dramatically than intense religiosity. ...

2) "The waning of Christianity may be still as much a baby-boomer story as a millennial one. ...

3) "There’s a strong case that any crisis facing Christian institutions is a more Catholic crisis than a Protestant one."

See for yourself at <www.nyti.ms/35Bhx7P>

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FREEDOM OF SPEECH

"Net Loss: Countries are increasingly willing to censor speech online" (no byline, The Economist, Nov 9 '19, pp53-4) -- "Many authoritarian governments already restrict what their citizen see online. China has heavily censored the internet since its early days; Twitter and Facebook are banned outright. Iran also outlaws Facebook. Saudi Arabia restricts access to information on everything from gay rights and evolution to Shia Islam. Attitudes are hardening in democracies, too. Rather than simply being blocked, big tech firms face a raft of new laws controlling what they can host on their platforms.

"This marks a big change for a global industry that has, until now, been run on techno-libertarian assumptions. ...

"Britain's proposed laws are notable for their focus on things that are merely undesirable, rather than downright illegal. ... The government envisages a new regulator, paid for by the tech firms, with the power to block offending websites, force other companies - such as payment processors or search engines - to sever ties with offending firms, and perhaps even to hold senior managers legally responsible for their companies' failings. ...

"One of the most influential jurisdictions will be the European Union (EU), a market of 500m rich consumers which restricts free speech more than America does. ...

"Still more consequential will be India's efforts. ...

"Monitoring the torrent of content that passes through their servers is a huge task. More than 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute; thousands of tweets are posted every second. For all the hopeful chatter about artificial intelligence (AI), Alex Stamos, a former chief security officer at Facebook, argues that, in the end, human labour - and lots of it - is the only solution. Algorithms already struggle to make relatively straightforward decisions. ...

"'Regulating political speech basically requires AI that's as smart as humans,' says Mr Stamos. If that ever comes, it will not be for decades. ...

"Exact figures are scarce, but in 2017 Accenture, a consultancy, reckoned tech firms already employ around 100,000 human content-moderators worldwide. Each new law will require more people to enforce it. Facebook doubled the number of moderators from 7,500 to 15,000 between August and December 2018. Its internal guidelines even now run to tens of thousands of words."

And at the same time, "harsh penalties will create incentives for firms to err on the side of heavy-handedness. ...

"In the long run, though, perhaps the biggest effect of the new laws will be the further splintering of the internet. ...

"Some American firms already find it easier to block European users rather than comply with EU privacy laws. 'Right to be forgotten' laws compel search engines to remove certain results for European users. Censorship laws will mean another set of walls dividing the global village."

I've been musing on the influence of advancing exponential complexity in our age. Visit <www.bit.ly/2KhtOIR> for a looksee. - RP

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