By DEACON MIKE MANNO, JD
I was listening to the latest debate by the Democratic aspirants for the presidency when, during a commercial break, Ron Reagan, the late president’s son and spokesman for the Freedom From Religion Foundation, came on the air to tell us that he — and presumably the foundation — was “alarmed by the intrusions of religion into our secular government.”
Reagan then launched into a pitch for support of the foundation as the “most effective association of atheists and agnostics working to keep state and church separate.” Then he concluded, “Ron Reagan, lifelong atheist, not afraid of burning in Hell.”
Of course the immediate response was summed up nicely by Rush Limbaugh:
“Here’s this group out there, a bunch of atheist, agnostics who want to raise money from people that hate religion, don’t believe in religion, don’t like God, don’t believe in God, don’t believe in Jesus, don’t believe in Heaven or Hell. They don’t believe anything exists beyond themselves. So where do they go to reach the maximum number of like-minded people? Why, they go to the Democrat Party debate! A smart decision.”
Well, I know a lot of Democrats who believe in God and we don’t want to paint with too broad a brush, but to Limbaugh’s point, the choice of program did make a statement. After all it was only a few months ago the DNC made an unabashed pitch for the atheist vote, claiming that the overwhelming majority of “non-religious” voters supported the party’s values.
But it wasn’t the reaction to the commercial that concerned me the most. That happened a few days later when the Pew Research Center released a report, “In U.S., Decline of Christianity Continues at Rapid Pace.”
The report began with “65 percent of American adults describe themselves as Christians when asked about their religion, down 12 percentage points over the past decade. 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 percent of U.S. adults, up modestly but significantly from 2 percent in 2009; agnostics make up 5 percent of U.S. adults, up from 3 percent a decade ago; and 17 percent of Americans now describe their religion as ‘nothing in particular,’ up from 12 percent in 2009.”
Catholic identifiers now are at 20 percent, down from 23 percent in 2009, and Protestant numbers over the same period have dropped from 51 percent to 43 percent, the survey reported.
Church attendance is also down, the Pew study reports. Ten years ago those who attended religious services “at least once or twice a month” outnumbered those that didn’t 52 percent to 47 percent. Now those numbers are reversed.
The report also reported on a “wide gap” — which should come as no surprise — between beliefs and church attendance patterns of older and younger Americans. Eighty-four percent of those born between 1928 and 1945 say they are Christian as do 76 percent of Baby Boomers. In contrast only 49 percent of Millennials identify as Christian, 40 percent are “nones,” and 10 percent are non-Christian. Of the Millennials, 22 percent say they never attend religious services while only a like number say they go at least once a week.
In a surprise, at least to me, the number of Hispanics who identify as Catholic has dropped from 57 percent a decade ago to 47 percent today. The share of Hispanics who now call themselves “religiously unaffiliated” is now 23 percent, up eight points from 2009.
Further demographic breakdowns show 57 percent of white adults only attend religious services “a few times a year or less,” while black church attendance is 58 percent for “regular” churchgoers over 41 percent who only attend sparingly. The report also found a religious “gender gap.”
“Women are less likely than men to describe themselves as religious ‘nones’ (23 percent vs. 30 percent), and more likely than men to say they attend religious services at least once or twice a month (50 percent vs. 40 percent). But women, like men, have grown noticeably less religious over the last decade. The share of ‘nones’ among women has risen by 10 percentage points since 2009 — similar to the increase among men. And the share of women who identify as Christian has fallen by 11 points (from 80 percent to 69 percent) over that same period.”
Going back to the Democrats, the report says religious “nones” now make up one-third of Democrats and 60 percent of those identifying as Democrats say they attend religious services no more than a few times a year.
“Today, fewer than half of white Democrats describe themselves as Christians, and just three-in-ten say they regularly attend religious services. More than four-in-ten white Democrats are religious ‘nones,’ and fully seven-in-ten white Democrats say they attend religious services no more than a few times a year. Black and Hispanic Democrats are far more likely than white Democrats to describe themselves as Christians and to say they attend religious services regularly, though all three groups are becoming less Christian.”
So what does this all mean, besides the point that the Freedom from Religion Foundation knew a good ad buy when it saw one?
Well, for one it shows that the U.S. is becoming less Christian (there are fewer of us) and less religiously observant. It also may explain why some of the leading politicians of the day are so quick to attack religious beliefs as well as the Church herself. Former Texas Cong. Robert “Beto” O’Rourke, for example, had no problem recommending that religious organizations who oppose same-sex marriage should lose their tax-exempt status.
And fellow Texan Julian Castro, also running for the Democratic nomination for president, said his first order of business, if elected, would be to roll back religious exemptions for those entities that do not support the LGBT agenda.
Similar anti-Christian suggestions have come from Senators Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker, as well as others in the Democratic field. But it’s not the Democratic Party that is at fault. That party’s politicians are simply following societal trends and pandering to those voters that they hope to enlist in their campaigns.
It’s us. We’ve allowed society to denigrate so much that it is, in many quarters, acceptable to believe that sex assigned at birth can be changed, that killing babies — even those in the process of being born — is socially acceptable, that man-and-man is equivalent to man-and-woman, and a host of other beliefs that 50 years ago would have been considered outrageous.
We’ve allowed our society to become so tolerant that all forms of abysmal behavior is no longer just tolerated but accepted and sometimes celebrated in the name of individual freedom, sans civic, or self, responsibility.
Pope Francis, in Evangelii Gaudium (The Joy of the Gospel), I think put his finger on the problem: “The great danger to today’s world, pervaded as it is by consumerism, is the desolation and anguish born of a complacent yet covetous heart, with the feverish pursuit of frivolous pleasures, and a blunted conscience.”
It’s called moral relativism. Pope Benedict warned us about it just before he was elected to succeed John Paul the Great. And, for the most part, we have by inaction allowed it to take hold. Standards we once measured ourselves and society by have been thrown away and replaced by relativism and the “feverish pursuit of frivolous pleasures.”
We may, in short, have reached the point the late theologian Richard Niebuhr suggested where we have created our own deity: a god without wrath who brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministry of a messiah without a cross.
As the great philosopher Pogo once said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
You can reach Mike at: DeaconMike@q.com.
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