Culture Friday: The faith plateau

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday the 28th of February.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

It’s Culture Friday. Joining us now is John Stonestreet, president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. Good morning!

JOHN STONESTREET: Thank you. Good morning.

EICHER: John, there’s a major new study from Pew Research on the American Religious Landscape. And it suggests something of a shift. The New York Times reporting: After decades of decline, the proportion of Americans who identify as Christian may have stopped falling. Meanwhile, the “nones” —and I’ll spell this out so there’s no mistaking what I’m talking about, the N-O-N-E-S, “the nones.” This group of religiously unaffiliated, it seems to have leveled off.

These in the youngest adult cohort, these are still less likely to call themselves Christian overall. But what we find in the study is that they’re no less religious than the group just above them. So the researchers are suggesting that the long downward trend might be coming to a plateau.

How does this challenge the older narrative of inevitable American secularization? And is it fair to say we’re seeing real improvement, or just a leveling off?

STONESTREET: It is a fascinating study and it’s consistent with a number of other things we’re seeing—including things coming out of Europe, the UK, even a conversation last week with Justin Brierley of the Unbelievable podcast as part of my visit across the pond there. Brierley’s been telling the story of these high-profile intellectuals coming to reembrace Christianity, maybe not a personal faith for some of them. But these are many of the same people who just yesterday told us that God’s a delusion and religion poisons everything. I mean, things are different.

Now, in terms of how these findings align or don’t align with the old narrative, it depends on which old narrative you’re talking about. If you talk about the old narrative about secularization, that’s a little bit different.

A lot of times the narrative of secularization and the narrative of church decline are seen as the same one. Secularization is a way of seeing the world that’s “this-worldly.” One would expect, as secularization increases, that people would make all the connections that they need to make and then stop going to church. (Of course, that did happen in a sense. The more modern and agnostic that mainline liberals became, for example, they stopped going to mainline liberal churches—because, really, what’s the point?)

But secularization, I think, is more subtle.

The question about secularization still has yet to be resolved because it really depends on what we mean by religion. It is possible to be religious in a secular way—to see religion and its benefits in a purely self-referential, what is good, right, and true for me, and not connected to anything transcendent. At the end of the day, that is what secularization really is.

It is the “this-worlding” of belief. It is “this-worlding” of morality, of relationships, of design, of our understanding of reality. It’s basically disconnecting the world from God.

So, I am all for the increased religious engagement. But if all the religious engagement is about is how to do life better here and now—and not tied to things that are eternally true, particularly the God who is the source of eternal truth, then there may be still a strong secular flavor to the increase in religiosity.

But of course, what better way to get that rectified than to go to church? So maybe this will all work out in the end either way.

EICHER: Let’s shift to two high-profile figures who’ve recently made public very personal journeys to faith in Christ. First, Nicole Shanahan. Maybe she’s best known as the financier and running mate for Bobby Kennedy’s campaign for the Democratic nomination for president this last go-around. She was married to the cofounder of Google, Sergei Brin, so very wealthy. Shanahan posted on social media a dramatic baptism testimony.

The second name is Larry Sanger. He’s co-founder of Wikipedia. In telling his story, Sanger described a gradual, intellectual return to Christianity.

Both of these are very early in their faith, and they took very different paths—Shanahan’s more emotional, Sanger’s more cerebral. Our Bethel McGrew wrote about Sanger.

What are the implications of these public conversion stories, John? And how might Sanger’s intellectual approach in particular shape our understanding of apologetics and evangelism?

STONESTREET: I love to hear these stories, and they seem to be just continually rolling in in recent years. This is to the point of the conversation we were just having about this survey, about the number of the “nones” kind of having capped off.

Sanger, I think, is super interesting to listen to, his long and detailed account of his conversion—because it does involve all kinds of things from childhood misperceptions to just coming across things from reliable sources on the Internet who took seriously the intellectual life of faith.

So, yeah, I think there are implications for apologetics and for evangelism. The most notable one being the reports of the demise of apologetics were vastly overblown.

It’s never been true that people don’t want reasons for what they believe. It’s never been true that situations of life don’t send people into intellectual tailspins where they try to find consistency. It’s never been true that humans are somehow not brains, and so the brain comes into play. Now it’s never just the brain, but why have we denigrated the entire work of doing intellectual Christianity?

You know, I think the same thing is true in the conversations about worldview.

Obviously, I’ve got a little bit of a vested interest, given that my organization that God has allowed me to be a part of is called the Colson Center for Christian Worldview.

But you know, there’s a big hubbub about a book coming from an Australian scholar about how worldview is a bad way to talk about Christianity. Well, worldview is a way of trying to wrestle with the authority of Christ over every area of life—both spiritual and what are traditionally considered not spiritual but actually are.

I don’t think the problem here is that people took a word like worldview and used it. People actually think this way. We live this way.

We want consistency. We want coherence. And the distraction that our Western world gives us have just exhausted us of meaning. So we’re looking for meaning, and we’re looking for answers to our personal hurts. We’re looking for someone to help us deal with our guilt, forgive us of our sins, and give us an understanding of how better to relate to people. We’re also looking for who created the universe—and how do we know?

I mean, it’s not one thing. It’s everything—as a mutual friend of ours likes to say. Put all of this together, and I think we should never reduce Christianity to merely evangelistic tactics or intellectual nerdiness.

Do all of the above—because Christ is lord of all.

BROWN: WORLD’s Leah Savas has been reporting on the clash between pro-lifers and the in-vitro fertilization industry—something President Trump is now stepping into. He just signed an executive order directing the Office of Domestic Policy to propose IVF policy recommendations within 90 days’ time. The White House is touting it as “Make Families Great Again.” But there’s a serious debate over how IVF often treats human embryos.

Put yourself into the shoes of White House advisor, John, and tell me what cultural and ethical questions ought to be addressed—obviously, beyond the high cost.

STONESTREET: Well, listen, first of all, they’re just flat wrong that IVF is pro-life and even pro-fertility. The vast majority of embryos, and estimates are in the neighborhood of 90% that are created through IVF that will not make it to birth.

And they won’t die of natural causes. The vast majority will be eliminated through a screening process. Then the others will be left abandoned after an early pregnancy is conceived.

The other thing is the line that it’s “making families great again” is completely misleading. The reason is that IVF is such an unregulated wild, wild West, that there’s no way to limit to actual families those who are able to create embryos and plant embryos and then actually have children.

In other words, we’re talking about these new family “alternatives”—like same-sex couples—not to mention celebrities who don’t want stretch marks, and all the other reasons someone might choose to participate in this industry.

The cat so far out of the bag, it actually is astonishing to me when I hear any one who claims to be pro life, especially a Christian pro-lifer completely ignore the way that IVF violates the dignity of life and the God given design of families. These aren’t exceptions. These are the commonalities.

To do IVF in an ethical way, which not everyone agrees that there is, but I’ll grant that doing IVF in a way that only one embryo is created and implanted at a time, or a couple agrees to implant every embryo that’s created, that is such a rare case. That to celebrate an executive order that further deregulates it and makes it more widely acceptable is just unconscionable to me because of the violation of human dignity that’s built into the process and into the industry right now.

I think it’s the president’s way of fulfilling a promise. I’m hoping he’s going to fulfill the promise and listen to the right voices—and this is going to die on the vine. There’s no way to look at the current way IVF is done on a national basis—and we haven’t even talked international, which involves basically human trafficking and slavery—and say that what’s really needed here is less regulation. It’s ethically upside down.

BROWN: Finally, John, I’d like to mention the heartbreaking news from the Democratic Republic of Congo, where at least 70 Christians were beheaded last week by ISIS-affiliated terrorists.

My daughter-in-law is Congolese, so this hits especially close to home. From a Christian worldview, how should we respond to these modern-day martyrs—beyond simply pitying them?

STONESTREET: Listen, dealing with the reality of the fall in any cultural context, the most appropriate response is, “Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy,” the “Kyrie, eleison,” which has been a part of Christian liturgical repetition forever.

But I think it gets heightened at a time like this for two reasons. It’s the sheer scale and consistency that we have seen in the barbaric treatment of Christians at the hand of (1) Islamic radicals and (2) atheistic nationalists—particularly dictatorial communism like in North Korea. Every time we see a list of the persecution that happens around the world, those are the sources right there.

This just goes widely unreported by Western press outlets and by American Christians. I do think what a wonderful thing to teach about the cloud of witnesses that were a part of the worldwide body and bride of Christ, to bring this sort of barbarism to our attention.

What is our responsibility when we don’t face this kind of risk? Their responsibility is to be faithful even unto death. That’s what Revelation makes really clear. Our responsibility is to cry out on their behalf, ask God for mercy and do everything we can to advocate so that it doesn’t continue to happen.

This level of persecution has been on the rise in the DRC for a long time, and it’s looking an awful lot like Nigeria, and they have one thing in common, which is this strong presence of Islamic radicals that target Christians.

EICHER: John Stonestreet is president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. Thanks, John!

STONESTREET: Thank you both

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