A Post-Christian Society

American society is moving on from Christianity. Douthat concludes the column quoted below as a pollyanna imaging a Christian resurgence and counterrevolution. But the younger generations in the United States are more secular than the older ones, and the older ones, little by little are dying.

So on right and left alike, the nation-of-heretics framework still seems useful. But then the question, and the challenge for my thesis now, is exactly how far the decline of Christianity can go before a term like “heresy” stops being analytically appropriate. Because at some point, presumably, the influence of Christianity becomes merely genealogical, and you have to credit spiritual experimenters with reaching distinct religious territory.

A core of Christian practice and belief in this country seems relatively resilient. But the idea of a “nation of heretics” assumed a lot of Americans with loose ties to Christianity — Christmas-and-Easter churchgoers, people raised with at least some idea of the faith’s tenets. And it’s the loosely-affiliated who have separated most in recent years, further attenuating the connections between Christianity and its possible rivals or successors. . . .

When I was writing “Bad Religion” there was still interest in the various “historical Jesus” projects, the scholarly reconstructions that promised to deliver a Jesus better suited the spiritual assumptions of a late-modern United States. And it felt like there was a strong cultural incentive to recruit some version of the Nazarene — as Dan Brown did in The Da Vinci Code, for instance — for your personal spiritual project, to gain Jesus’s blessing for leaving Christian orthodoxy behind.

Today, though, my sense is that Jesus himself is less culturally central, less necessary to religious entrepreneurs — as though where Americans are going now in their post-Christian explorations, they don’t want or need his blessing.

- Ross Douthat, "The Americanization of Religion" The New York Times (December 21, 2022).