Hmm, I'd say this report shows what's inevitable when people become so exposed to such a cacophony of so many gurus claiming that their way is the sole path to success or salvation or good hygiene:
"More than ever before, people are just making up their own stories of who they are. They say, 'I'm everything. I'm nothing. I believe in myself,' " says Barry Kosmin, survey co-author.
Among the key findings in the 2008 survey:
• So many Americans claim no religion at all (15%, up from 8% in 1990), that this category now outranks every other major U.S. religious group except Catholics and Baptists. In a nation that has long been mostly Christian, "the challenge to Christianity … does not come from other religions but from a rejection of all forms of organized religion," the report concludes.
I saw that same story with much interest.... I'd also say it's a predictable sign of the first fully "native" generation that was born into "post-modernity" figuring itself out.
(This is an oversimplification, but one theory has it that my generation - Gen X - was born right on the hinge point of when "modernity" died and "post-modernity" began, and in Gen Y and onward you see less and less of modernity's assumptions in effect)
Either way, an 11% drop in one generation is a harsh rebuke and warning to American Christianity. Hope people hear it.
Tim
Posted by: Timmy C. | March 09, 2009 at 02:06 PM
Interesting point about the generational divide. Some prominent scientists have hammered postmodernity as relentlessly as premodern theologians have done, and postmodernity is most likely transitioning to something else -- but postmodernity seems a logical evolutionary step spurred by globalization & pluralism, to be followed by more evolutions.
It brings out the dilemma of a foundational assumption of traditional proselytizing religions: "We will reach the nations of the world and colonize societies, and then the Final Day will arrive." But that Final Day keeps getting pushed back so far that "colonized societies" (America or Europe for Christendom, Pakistan or Egypt for Islam) begin to regress in ways that are embarrassing for the True Believer. Elijah keeps fighting the good fight against pluralism and postmodernity, but meanwhile Yahweh grows more passive in his battles with Baal, leaving Elijah to spend more time doing PR and mental gymnastics about how Yahweh is winning the battle in subtle and almost imperceptible ways.
Posted by: Rob A. | March 09, 2009 at 02:19 PM
Yeah: I used "postmodernity" vs "postmodernism" quite carefully.
Post-modernity=what follows modernity
vs.
Post-modernism=early philosophic ideas about what could follow modernism.
I just dug up some quotes I kept from old readings:
"Post-moderninty: The situation in which the world finds itself after the breakdown of the 'Enlightenment' Project' which lasted from the 18th to well within the 20th. That was the project aimed at getting all the world's diverse people to see things the same way -- the rational way....it followed that the world could be controlled and rationally ordered...[The Enlightenment Project was] an ideology of progress: a belief in linear progress, absolute truth." -- Oxford Professor David Harvey
"Postmodern is a makeshift word we use until we have decided what to call the baby. It is a word looking back... a word describing a world that has not yet discovered how to define itself in terms of what it is, but only in terms of what it has just-now ceased to be....
All major league belief systems are in some kind of postmodern trouble: internal civil wars, Believers commuting in and out, innovators creating strange new versions...Postmodernisms will come and go, but postmodernity -- the postmodern condition will still be here."
- Walter Truet Anderson
Posted by: Timmy C. | March 09, 2009 at 07:08 PM