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Yahoo
02-06-2025
- Lifestyle
- Yahoo
The Paradox of Our ‘Secular Age'
In Durham, North Carolina, just a few miles from major universities, teaching hospitals, and other temples of science, the Holy Spirit remains formidable. When I attended a gathering at Catch the Fire Church one Friday evening last year, a petite blond woman made her way down the aisle, laying her hand on heads and shoulders, calling on the Holy Spirit. Her magenta tunic glowed under the can lights. She breathed hard into her microphone. Here and there, the woman, a Toronto-based evangelist named Carol Arnott, paused to point a finger down a row of worshippers and shout, 'Fire on them, Lord!' Knees buckled; people collapsed back into their seats. As Arnott continued her circuit, a man in a hoodie—the 'catcher'—followed closely behind, ready to help any person 'slain in the Spirit.' One touch from her hand sent more supplicants falling to the floor. 'Don't get up too soon,' Arnott urged one dazed individual lying on the carpet. 'You're like a steak, marinating.' She preached as she walked, describing a vision in which Jesus gave her a bouquet of lilies of the valley and adorned her with a flowered crown and wedding veil. 'The bridegroom is coming. Are you ready?' Arnott asked. It was hard to hear her over the moans and guffaws, the bursts of holy laughter. Catch the Fire belongs to the fastest-growing group of Christians on the planet—charismatic Christians, who believe that the Holy Spirit empowers them to speak in tongues, heal, and prophesy, just as Jesus's first apostles did 2,000 years ago. By some measures, they represent more than half of the roughly 60 million U.S. adults who call themselves 'born-again.' This flourishing and vigorously supernatural faith points to the paradox of the secular age: The modern era of declining church attendance has nurtured some of religion's most dramatic manifestations. Instead of killing off religion, secularism has supercharged its extraordinary elements. [Timothy Keller: American Christianity is due for a revival] Charismatic Christians aren't the only ones embracing a spirituality that might seem out of place in our modern, rationalist age. Eighty-seven percent of Americans subscribe to at least one New Age belief, such as karma, reincarnation, or telepathy. During my time researching charismatic Christianity for my new book, Spellbound, I also interviewed podcast bros who hawk ayahuasca in Silicon Valley and self-described spiritual coaches who offer treatments ranging from Reiki to reviewing their clients' past lives. At a New Age congregation outside Denver, I attended a healing workshop on harnessing the invisible energies of the universe to treat cancer and arthritis, as well as a shamanic drum circle where a former software engineer named Greg led participants on a journey to the spirit world to meet their power animals. If this is a 'secular age,' then perhaps we need to rethink what secularization means. These thriving subcultures are, in part, proof that channeling the Holy Spirit or seeking an animal spirit guide doesn't carry the same stigma in America that such otherworldly adventuring once did. While I was visiting Catch the Fire, one pastor surveyed the auditorium full of chuckling, sprawling worshippers and declared that 'we choose to look silly.' But he no longer has to worry—as Christians who spoke in tongues did a century ago—about police shutting down the worship service or local doctors asking a judge to declare the worshippers legally insane. Nowadays, Americans are more inclined to shrug off other people's theological eccentricities and save their purity tests for politics. Charismatic Christians preach a message that is as much about letting go of inhibitions as submitting to the strictures of the Bible. Early in his ministry, Randy Clark, a pastor with long-standing connections to Catch the Fire Church, confessed to a friend that when he watched others get slain in the Spirit, he didn't feel anything special himself. The friend told him: 'You just resist it. Next time, don't fake it, but don't fight it either. Just become a sail in the wind.' Clark followed the instructions, and the next time someone prayed for him, 'I had a physical manifestation,' he told me. 'It started in my right thumb. I saw it moving, and thought, That is weird. I could stop that. But I made a decision. I'm going to use my will to be open, to not stop anything, not work up anything.' Openness to the Holy Spirit does not preclude adherence to orthodox religious teaching. Indeed, most charismatic churches subscribe to a traditional interpretation of the Bible, and plenty of Catholics—a distinctly doctrinal group—call themselves charismatic. Alpha, one of the most successful evangelistic enterprises in the world today, emphasizes the tangible experience of God's presence alongside classical arguments for the truth of Christianity. Founded in 1977 by a charismatic Anglican parish in London, Alpha evolved into an 11-week course on the basics of Christianity that is now available in 112 languages worldwide and culminates in a prayer-filled 'Holy Spirit weekend.' 'People who have been quite skeptical often experience something powerful, and then they try to figure out what happened,' Graham Tomlin, an Anglican priest who has been involved with Alpha for many years, told me. 'As a means of evangelism, this is not primarily a set of programs, or the explanation of doctrines—although it does that—but at its heart, an invitation to encounter God.' From a certain angle, these groups are merely taking mainstream aspirations to their supernatural conclusion. The rising popularity of Spirit-filled worship and emphasis on personal contact with God has paralleled secular society's exaltation of private experience over tradition or reasoned argument. Charismatic worship began surging across Protestant and Catholic churches in the 1960s, in tandem with pop psychology's increasing stress on 'self-actualization' and authenticity as the primary conditions of happiness. Growing interest in individualistic, experiential religion also dovetails with the erosion of Americans' trust in established institutions and expertise over the past half century. [From the February 2025 issue: The Army of God comes out of the shadows] Some religious leaders are wary of taking this subjective impulse too far. 'The emphasis on feelings and emotions is a good one, but the danger is that it starts to counter objective truth. It becomes: 'I feel it, therefore it's my truth,'' says Nicky Gumbel, an Anglican priest who led the global expansion of the Alpha course and remains involved with the program. 'Lived experience becomes the arbiter of everything.' Yet self-optimization is the riptide of American culture. It pulls hard against any traditional mandate to find and proclaim universal truth. At the New Age congregation I visited in Denver, the minister preached that all humans should claim their 'unique, authentic, God-expressed self.' On another occasion, a spiritual coach told me: 'I've done the new-moon and the full-moon ceremony. I've practiced with crystals quite a bit and sage, sweat lodges. I've done so many things, just trying to find my way, what feels right.' Understanding this cultural landscape requires resisting the temptation to reduce these groups to their voting patterns. Of course, many New Age spiritual experimenters would clash with charismatic Christians on a range of moral questions and policy issues. But the default culture-war rubric disguises the deeper, pre-political impulses that these varieties of American religion have in common: a desire for tangible contact with divine power, and trust in personal experience over so-called experts. Together, these attitudes explain the country's politics better than any theory resting on blue-versus-red narratives. This combination of spiritual hunger and distrust of elite authority invites a certain type of leader. Over the past decade, Donald Trump has drawn supporters into a story about America's breakdown and recovery that is more spiritual than political. He is the president of an anti-institutional, tradition-skeptical, experience-worshipping age, when fewer Americans go to church but plenty of them follow gurus on YouTube. The feelings of frustration and grievance that a candidate personifies are more important than his policy platform. His message that institutions are weak, corrupt, and deserve no loyalty; his tacit promise that you can imagine prosperity into existence regardless of what the economists say; his personal domination of the Republican Party: All of this has succeeded because public confidence in every institution, not just traditional churches, has collapsed. That cynicism extends to the workplace—the institution that makes the greatest stamp on most people's daily life. Only 21 percent of U.S. employees strongly affirm trust in their organization's leaders. Meanwhile, the social habits that we associate with a more devout, less tolerant age—policing boundaries, banishing heretics, expecting divine retribution to rain down on your enemies—have migrated from churches to politics. Many Americans are ready to put their faith in a political savior who says he was 'saved by God.' [From the January/February 2024 issue: My father, my faith, and Donald Trump] Even as partisan politics have come to display the dynamics of fundamentalist sects, there are signs that the 60-year slide of organized religion in the West has slowed. And it might be starting a quiet recovery. After steadily rising for 20 years, the number of Americans who say they have no religious affiliation seems to have leveled off. More young men are going to church, and many of them are joining Catholic or Orthodox congregations. In England and Wales, Gen Z is leading a spike in church attendance, which has risen from 8 to 12 percent of the population in just six years. During my reporting, I kept meeting people who had grown tired of cynicism and DIY meaning-making and made their way into ancient institutions and supernatural faith—such as Christine Flynn, who lives with her family outside Milwaukee. She spent her young-adult years perusing the New Age sections at bookstores and seeking self-actualization through her own instincts. 'I figured I'd do the research, and wherever my thoughts landed, that was correct. I didn't need to talk to anyone,' she told me. But after becoming a mother, and watching her atheist husband explore Christianity, she 'got tired of being so cynical.' She began reading the books on Christianity that her husband left lying around. Now a mom of six who homeschools her kids, Flynn published a memoir last year about her path into the Catholic Church. Conversions such as Flynn's are part of a global story. Both Christianity and Islam are exploding outside the West. Worldwide, the proportion of people who identify as atheists—about 7 percent, according to some studies—will likely decrease in coming years. Nicky Gumbel, the Anglican priest who works with Alpha, told me that the program has found some of its greatest success in Chinese-speaking communities that are reckoning with a history of communism. 'Pure secularism doesn't satisfy,' he says. In a globalized society such as the United States, prophecies of the long-term collapse of religious faith and practice seem premature. Humans are fundamentally religious, in the sense that we yearn to impose order on the chaos of existence and worship some source of ultimate meaning. As the Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor wrote in his 1989 book, Sources of the Self, everyone aspires to a sense of fullness—a 'pattern of higher action' that connects their lives 'with some greater reality or story.' He warned that 'it would be a mistake to think that this kind of formulation has disappeared even for unbelievers in our world.' Secularization may reshape how we act on these instincts, but it has not eliminated them: Unbelievers will always have more in common with the Holy Rollers than they realize. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
02-06-2025
- General
- Atlantic
The Paradox of Our ‘Secular Age'
In Durham, North Carolina, just a few miles from major universities, teaching hospitals, and other temples of science, the Holy Spirit remains formidable. When I attended a gathering at Catch the Fire Church one Friday evening last year, a petite blond woman made her way down the aisle, laying her hand on heads and shoulders, calling on the Holy Spirit. Her magenta tunic glowed under the can lights. She breathed hard into her microphone. Here and there, the woman, a Toronto-based evangelist named Carol Arnott, paused to point a finger down a row of worshippers and shout, 'Fire on them, Lord!' Knees buckled; people collapsed back into their seats. As Arnott continued her circuit, a man in a hoodie—the 'catcher'—followed closely behind, ready to help any person 'slain in the Spirit.' One touch from her hand sent more supplicants falling to the floor. 'Don't get up too soon,' Arnott urged one dazed individual lying on the carpet. 'You're like a steak, marinating.' She preached as she walked, describing a vision in which Jesus gave her a bouquet of lilies of the valley and adorned her with a flowered crown and wedding veil. 'The bridegroom is coming. Are you ready?' Arnott asked. It was hard to hear her over the moans and guffaws, the bursts of holy laughter. Catch the Fire belongs to the fastest-growing group of Christians on the planet—charismatic Christians, who believe that the Holy Spirit empowers them to speak in tongues, heal, and prophesy, just as Jesus's first apostles did 2,000 years ago. By some measures, they represent more than half of the roughly 60 million U.S. adults who call themselves 'born-again.' This flourishing and vigorously supernatural faith points to the paradox of the secular age: The modern era of declining church attendance has nurtured some of religion's most dramatic manifestations. Instead of killing off religion, secularism has supercharged its extraordinary elements. Timothy Keller: American Christianity is due for a revival Charismatic Christians aren't the only ones embracing a spirituality that might seem out of place in our modern, rationalist age. Eighty-seven percent of Americans subscribe to at least one New Age belief, such as karma, reincarnation, or telepathy. During my time researching charismatic Christianity for my new book, Spellbound, I also interviewed podcast bros who hawk ayahuasca in Silicon Valley and self-described spiritual coaches who offer treatments ranging from Reiki to reviewing their clients' past lives. At a New Age congregation outside Denver, I attended a healing workshop on harnessing the invisible energies of the universe to treat cancer and arthritis, as well as a shamanic drum circle where a former software engineer named Greg led participants on a journey to the spirit world to meet their power animals. If this is a 'secular age,' then perhaps we need to rethink what secularization means. These thriving subcultures are, in part, proof that channeling the Holy Spirit or seeking an animal spirit guide doesn't carry the same stigma in America that such otherworldly adventuring once did. While I was visiting Catch the Fire, one pastor surveyed the auditorium full of chuckling, sprawling worshippers and declared that 'we choose to look silly.' But he no longer has to worry—as Christians who spoke in tongues did a century ago—about police shutting down the worship service or local doctors asking a judge to declare the worshippers legally insane. Nowadays, Americans are more inclined to shrug off other people's theological eccentricities and save their purity tests for politics. Charismatic Christians preach a message that is as much about letting go of inhibitions as submitting to the strictures of the Bible. Early in his ministry, Randy Clark, a pastor with long-standing connections to Catch the Fire Church, confessed to a friend that when he watched others get slain in the Spirit, he didn't feel anything special himself. The friend told him: 'You just resist it. Next time, don't fake it, but don't fight it either. Just become a sail in the wind.' Clark followed the instructions, and the next time someone prayed for him, 'I had a physical manifestation,' he told me. 'It started in my right thumb. I saw it moving, and thought, That is weird. I could stop that. But I made a decision. I'm going to use my will to be open, to not stop anything, not work up anything.' Openness to the Holy Spirit does not preclude adherence to orthodox religious teaching. Indeed, most charismatic churches subscribe to a traditional interpretation of the Bible, and plenty of Catholics—a distinctly doctrinal group—call themselves charismatic. Alpha, one of the most successful evangelistic enterprises in the world today, emphasizes the tangible experience of God's presence alongside classical arguments for the truth of Christianity. Founded in 1977 by a charismatic Anglican parish in London, Alpha evolved into an 11-week course on the basics of Christianity that is now available in 112 languages worldwide and culminates in a prayer-filled 'Holy Spirit weekend.' 'People who have been quite skeptical often experience something powerful, and then they try to figure out what happened,' Graham Tomlin, an Anglican priest who has been involved with Alpha for many years, told me. 'As a means of evangelism, this is not primarily a set of programs, or the explanation of doctrines—although it does that—but at its heart, an invitation to encounter God.' From a certain angle, these groups are merely taking mainstream aspirations to their supernatural conclusion. The rising popularity of Spirit-filled worship and emphasis on personal contact with God has paralleled secular society's exaltation of private experience over tradition or reasoned argument. Charismatic worship began surging across Protestant and Catholic churches in the 1960s, in tandem with pop psychology's increasing stress on 'self-actualization' and authenticity as the primary conditions of happiness. Growing interest in individualistic, experiential religion also dovetails with the erosion of Americans' trust in established institutions and expertise over the past half century. From the February 2025 issue: The Army of God comes out of the shadows Some religious leaders are wary of taking this subjective impulse too far. 'The emphasis on feelings and emotions is a good one, but the danger is that it starts to counter objective truth. It becomes: 'I feel it, therefore it's my truth,'' says Nicky Gumbel, an Anglican priest who led the global expansion of the Alpha course and remains involved with the program. 'Lived experience becomes the arbiter of everything.' Yet self-optimization is the riptide of American culture. It pulls hard against any traditional mandate to find and proclaim universal truth. At the New Age congregation I visited in Denver, the minister preached that all humans should claim their 'unique, authentic, God-expressed self.' On another occasion, a spiritual coach told me: 'I've done the new-moon and the full-moon ceremony. I've practiced with crystals quite a bit and sage, sweat lodges. I've done so many things, just trying to find my way, what feels right.' Understanding this cultural landscape requires resisting the temptation to reduce these groups to their voting patterns. Of course, many New Age spiritual experimenters would clash with charismatic Christians on a range of moral questions and policy issues. But the default culture-war rubric disguises the deeper, pre-political impulses that these varieties of American religion have in common: a desire for tangible contact with divine power, and trust in personal experience over so-called experts. Together, these attitudes explain the country's politics better than any theory resting on blue-versus-red narratives. This combination of spiritual hunger and distrust of elite authority invites a certain type of leader. Over the past decade, Donald Trump has drawn supporters into a story about America's breakdown and recovery that is more spiritual than political. He is the president of an anti-institutional, tradition-skeptical, experience-worshipping age, when fewer Americans go to church but plenty of them follow gurus on YouTube. The feelings of frustration and grievance that a candidate personifies are more important than his policy platform. His message that institutions are weak, corrupt, and deserve no loyalty; his tacit promise that you can imagine prosperity into existence regardless of what the economists say; his personal domination of the Republican Party: All of this has succeeded because public confidence in every institution, not just traditional churches, has collapsed. That cynicism extends to the workplace—the institution that makes the greatest stamp on most people's daily life. Only 21 percent of U.S. employees strongly affirm trust in their organization's leaders. Meanwhile, the social habits that we associate with a more devout, less tolerant age—policing boundaries, banishing heretics, expecting divine retribution to rain down on your enemies—have migrated from churches to politics. Many Americans are ready to put their faith in a political savior who says he was 'saved by God.' From the January/February 2024 issue: My father, my faith, and Donald Trump Even as partisan politics have come to display the dynamics of fundamentalist sects, there are signs that the 60-year slide of organized religion in the West has slowed. And it might be starting a quiet recovery. After steadily rising for 20 years, the number of Americans who say they have no religious affiliation seems to have leveled off. More young men are going to church, and many of them are joining Catholic or Orthodox congregations. In England and Wales, Gen Z is leading a spike in church attendance, which has risen from 8 to 12 percent of the population in just six years. During my reporting, I kept meeting people who had grown tired of cynicism and DIY meaning-making and made their way into ancient institutions and supernatural faith—such as Christine Flynn, who lives with her family outside Milwaukee. She spent her young-adult years perusing the New Age sections at bookstores and seeking self-actualization through her own instincts. 'I figured I'd do the research, and wherever my thoughts landed, that was correct. I didn't need to talk to anyone,' she told me. But after becoming a mother, and watching her atheist husband explore Christianity, she 'got tired of being so cynical.' She began reading the books on Christianity that her husband left lying around. Now a mom of six who homeschools her kids, Flynn published a memoir last year about her path into the Catholic Church. Conversions such as Flynn's are part of a global story. Both Christianity and Islam are exploding outside the West. Worldwide, the proportion of people who identify as atheists—about 7 percent, according to some studies —will likely decrease in coming years. Nicky Gumbel, the Anglican priest who works with Alpha, told me that the program has found some of its greatest success in Chinese-speaking communities that are reckoning with a history of communism. 'Pure secularism doesn't satisfy,' he says. In a globalized society such as the United States, prophecies of the long-term collapse of religious faith and practice seem premature. Humans are fundamentally religious, in the sense that we yearn to impose order on the chaos of existence and worship some source of ultimate meaning. As the Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor wrote in his 1989 book, Sources of the Self, everyone aspires to a sense of fullness—a 'pattern of higher action' that connects their lives 'with some greater reality or story.' He warned that 'it would be a mistake to think that this kind of formulation has disappeared even for unbelievers in our world.' Secularization may reshape how we act on these instincts, but it has not eliminated them: Unbelievers will always have more in common with the Holy Rollers than they realize.
Yahoo
27-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Can Silicon Valley Find Christianity?
Silicon Valley, it seems, is coming to Jesus. There are no bad conversions, in my book; I was born and raised a Christian and remain one, and it's good, from that standpoint, to see erstwhile nonbelievers take an interest in the faith, whatever the reason. Thus, I was cautiously optimistic as I read a recent Vanity Fair feature, by the writer Zoë Bernard, on emerging tech-world Christianity. 'It was a time not so very long ago, mostly in the 2010s, when Silicon Valley cultivated a stance of pointed hostility not only toward conservatism but to the Protestant doctrines that underpin much of American life,' Bernard writes. But no more. Christianity is now an object of fascination to the libertarian capitalists of the tech world. In the faith, Bernard writes, the converts of Silicon Valley see a great deal of utility: a source of community and, therefore, professional networking; an index of ethics capable of checking some of the libertine excesses of their world; a signal of self-disciplined seriousness versus the flip-flop-wearing whiz-kid archetype popular in this same universe a mere decade ago. Christianity has become a potential path to fortune. Bernard's article makes clear that some converts are cynical characters merely pretending at Christianity. 'I guarantee you there are people that are leveraging Christianity to get closer to Peter Thiel,' one entrepreneur told Bernard. But even if a significant proportion of the new believers are entirely sincere, that doesn't mean their theology is copacetic. Christianity, they ought to know, is not a life hack: It's a life-upending surrender to the fact of divine love. [From the February 2025 issue: The army of God comes out of the shadows] American Christianity has a tendency to produce forms of belief and practice that are facially antithetical to Christian teaching. Consider, for example, the purveyors of the prosperity gospel, who promise worldly riches as a reward for moral uprightness. (One adherent has now been appointed the head of a new faith office created by Donald Trump.) Although the prosperity preachers still teach certain core Christian concepts—such as the resurrection of Christ—the overall drift strikes me as self-serving, devoted to money: decidedly unchristian. The emerging variety of techno-libertarian Christianity appears to have faults of a similar type. Based on Bernard's report, Christianity is gaining ground in Silicon Valley partially because it encourages a kind of orderly behavior that secular liberalism fails to enforce. 'No one wants the Palantir guy to be high on acid for two weeks at Burning Man,' the same venture-capital executive told Bernard. 'You want hard workers. People who are like, 'I learned that at West Point.' We have Israelis who served in the IDF and are religious and conservative and super libertarian. And we're like, 'Yeah, that seems focused. We'll take that.'' Religious faith is a tool for keeping people productive, in other words, a private code of ethics that enforces the kind of activity that lends itself to producing wealth. In that sense, Silicon Valley Christians perhaps see Christianity as a kind of technology, which is to say a product used to accomplish human purposes. Granted, Christianity promises certain benefits to its adherents, such as inner peace, eternal salvation, the comfort of community, and prosocial ethics. That said, Christianity at its core is not a religion that can reliably deliver socially desirable outcomes, nor is it intended to be. In Matthew 19:21, a disciple asks Jesus how to live as a model Christian, to which 'Jesus said to him, 'If you wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.'' Christianity disrupts life as we know it rather than reinforcing a self-serving status quo. It venerates generations of Christian martyrs whose examples are prized precisely because they placed obedience to God before more advantageous beliefs or activities. The formation of their faith was contingent not on temporal success, but rather on another principle altogether: that Christianity is worth following not because it has the potential to improve one's life, though it can, but rather because it is true. [Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska: Why Silicon Valley lost its patriotism] This is key, because if Christianity is true—if we really were created to love God and one another and were then rescued from our sins by the sacrificial intervention of Christ—then everything else one believes must flow downstream of that essential reality. Believers' personal philosophies, practices, and politics are all answerable to the Christian religion: There is no domain of life outside God's interest, and he requires that all things be brought in accordance with his will. This means that economics is God's business, which is bad news for techno-libertarians, because Christ's teachings decidedly militate against the rapacious acquisition of wealth. 'No servant can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other,' Jesus says. 'You cannot serve God and money.' There always have been and always will be rival interpretations of what exactly the Christian faith demands of its followers, motivated in many cases by prior commitments. In that sense, the tendency of American Christianity to result in philosophies that advance worldly aims is nothing new. But much of the faith's central traditions run counter to the aspirations of this new Christ-curious class. Christianity is about moving fast and breaking things, but not in the direction the tech Christians seem to have in mind. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
27-03-2025
- Business
- Atlantic
Can Silicon Valley Find Christianity?
Silicon Valley, it seems, is coming to Jesus. There are no bad conversions, in my book; I was born and raised a Christian and remain one, and it's good, from that standpoint, to see erstwhile nonbelievers take an interest in the faith, whatever the reason. Thus, I was cautiously optimistic as I read a recent Vanity Fair feature, by the writer Zoë Bernard, on emerging tech-world Christianity. 'It was a time not so very long ago, mostly in the 2010s, when Silicon Valley cultivated a stance of pointed hostility not only toward conservatism but to the Protestant doctrines that underpin much of American life,' Bernard writes. But no more. Christianity is now an object of fascination to the libertarian capitalists of the tech world. In the faith, Bernard writes, the converts of Silicon Valley see a great deal of utility: a source of community and, therefore, professional networking; an index of ethics capable of checking some of the libertine excesses of their world; a signal of self-disciplined seriousness versus the flip-flop-wearing whiz-kid archetype popular in this same universe a mere decade ago. Christianity has become a potential path to fortune. Bernard's article makes clear that some converts are cynical characters merely pretending at Christianity. 'I guarantee you there are people that are leveraging Christianity to get closer to Peter Thiel,' one entrepreneur told Bernard. But even if a significant proportion of the new believers are entirely sincere, that doesn't mean their theology is copacetic. Christianity, they ought to know, is not a life hack: It's a life-upending surrender to the fact of divine love. From the February 2025 issue: The army of God comes out of the shadows American Christianity has a tendency to produce forms of belief and practice that are facially antithetical to Christian teaching. Consider, for example, the purveyors of the prosperity gospel, who promise worldly riches as a reward for moral uprightness. (One adherent has now been appointed the head of a new faith office created by Donald Trump.) Although the prosperity preachers still teach certain core Christian concepts—such as the resurrection of Christ—the overall drift strikes me as self-serving, devoted to money: decidedly unchristian. The emerging variety of techno-libertarian Christianity appears to have faults of a similar type. Based on Bernard's report, Christianity is gaining ground in Silicon Valley partially because it encourages a kind of orderly behavior that secular liberalism fails to enforce. 'No one wants the Palantir guy to be high on acid for two weeks at Burning Man,' the same venture-capital executive told Bernard. 'You want hard workers. People who are like, 'I learned that at West Point.' We have Israelis who served in the IDF and are religious and conservative and super libertarian. And we're like, 'Yeah, that seems focused. We'll take that.'' Religious faith is a tool for keeping people productive, in other words, a private code of ethics that enforces the kind of activity that lends itself to producing wealth. In that sense, Silicon Valley Christians perhaps see Christianity as a kind of technology, which is to say a product used to accomplish human purposes. Granted, Christianity promises certain benefits to its adherents, such as inner peace, eternal salvation, the comfort of community, and prosocial ethics. That said, Christianity at its core is not a religion that can reliably deliver socially desirable outcomes, nor is it intended to be. In Matthew 19:21, a disciple asks Jesus how to live as a model Christian, to which 'Jesus said to him, 'If you wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.'' Christianity disrupts life as we know it rather than reinforcing a self-serving status quo. It venerates generations of Christian martyrs whose examples are prized precisely because they placed obedience to God before more advantageous beliefs or activities. The formation of their faith was contingent not on temporal success, but rather on another principle altogether: that Christianity is worth following not because it has the potential to improve one's life, though it can, but rather because it is true. Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska: Why Silicon Valley lost its patriotism This is key, because if Christianity is true—if we really were created to love God and one another and were then rescued from our sins by the sacrificial intervention of Christ—then everything else one believes must flow downstream of that essential reality. Believers' personal philosophies, practices, and politics are all answerable to the Christian religion: There is no domain of life outside God's interest, and he requires that all things be brought in accordance with his will. This means that economics is God's business, which is bad news for techno-libertarians, because Christ's teachings decidedly militate against the rapacious acquisition of wealth. 'No servant can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other,' Jesus says. 'You cannot serve God and money.' There always have been and always will be rival interpretations of what exactly the Christian faith demands of its followers, motivated in many cases by prior commitments. In that sense, the tendency of American Christianity to result in philosophies that advance worldly aims is nothing new. But much of the faith's central traditions run counter to the aspirations of this new Christ-curious class. Christianity is about moving fast and breaking things, but not in the direction the tech Christians seem to have in mind.
New York Times
12-03-2025
- General
- New York Times
The Share of Religious Americans Will Continue to Decline
My generation, millennials, has been blamed for ruining so much: cloth napkins, traditional marriage, American cheese. But in the long run, we might be credited with destroying American religion. We are not a particularly faithful generation, and there's evidence our offspring may be even less so. Last month, a new edition of Pew Research's Religious Landscape Study came out. It's a huge survey — the organization polled more than 35,000 Americans — and the last one was released in 2014. Coverage of the survey focused on the fact that the fall in popularity of American Christianity has recently plateaued, after years of continuous decline. (Non-Christian faiths, which are a very small proportion of the American population, have gone up a bit since the survey started in 2007, but their relative size makes it tough to draw conclusions about them). According to Pew, since 2007, the share of Americans who describe themselves as Christian has dropped to 63 percent from 78 percent. But between 2020 and 2024, that figure hovered between 60 and 64 percent pretty consistently. The share of Americans who describe themselves as 'nones' — a category that includes people who have no religion in particular, or who are atheist or agnostic — has leveled off at just below 30 percent, up from 16 percent in 2007. But when you look at the numbers by generation, this plateau is temporary. As the Silent Generation, Boomers and Gen X become a smaller and smaller share of the population, there will simply not be enough religious young Americans to replace them. 'The reality is that 20 percent of boomers are nonreligious and it's at least 42 percent of Gen Z,' about the same as millennials, said Ryan Burge, a political scientist and the author of 'The Nones: Where They Came From, Who They Are, and Where They Are Going.' Burge said of the Pew data: 'For every six Christians who left the faith — one joined. It's the exact opposite for the nones — six joiners for every leaver.' He added, 'You can't get away from those trend lines.' It is very unlikely that children raised without religion will later become religious, as 'none' is becoming just as sticky a religious identity as any other. According to Pew, only 40 percent of American parents of minor children are giving their kids any kind of religious education. Only 26 percent go to religious services once a week. We will eventually become a country that is 40-to-45 percent 'nones,' Burge said, though it will likely take a few more decades to get there. The move away from organized religion among younger people isn't just with their feet — it goes much deeper than church attendance. A new book, 'Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America,' by Christian Smith argues that millennials created a 'new zeitgeist' where religion is much less important to their overall worldview than it was to previous generations. Smith, who is the director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Notre Dame, told me, 'I think culturally religion is in bigger trouble than a little plateau might suggest.' For his book, Smith did over 200 interviews with 18- to 54-year-olds, and he also ran a 2023 survey he calls the 'Millennial Zeitgeist Survey.' One question he asked in that survey was about religion's relevance to daily life. 'The bottom line is that two-thirds of the millennial generation view religion as either obsolete or not a matter they have an opinion about, which is arguably an indirect expression of obsolescence,' Smith wrote. Smith described organized religion to me as having become a 'polluted' idea in the American mainstream, because of the publicity around sex abuse scandals and financial malfeasance in many different faiths in the '80s and '90s as millennials came of age. 'The scandals violated most of the virtues believed to make religion good,' Smith wrote. 'They demonstrated that religion did not make people moral, did not help its own leaders cope with life's challenges and temptations, did not promote social peace and harmony and did not model virtuous behavior for others.' Those scandals helped destroy religion's credibility — and led to millennials no longer believing that religion could be a 'glue' that held America together, Smith's research showed. And this appears in every facet of life for Americans in their 30s and 40s. Their friend groups are less likely to center religion, and they are more likely to believe that you can be a moral person without believing in God. 'The idea of obsolescence captures this sense that the old— the thing that's gone obsolete— can still be around and people can still use it. I mean, there's still people that type on electric typewriters,' Smith told me. Part of why we're seeing a particularly virulent strain of Christian nationalists' fight for power in American society right now is because, deep down, they know that they're losing the long game. But the irony that Smith points out is that the more religious Christians tightly embrace electoral politics, the more they will continue to repel many of those they seek to attract. Though there has been a lot of press about young men flocking to strict Christian denominations, their overall numbers are not significant to the big picture of American life that Pew paints. As of now, only 38 percent of 18-to-24-year-olds say that they believe in God or a 'universal spirit' with 'absolute certainty,' and only 27 percent 'pray daily' lower numbers than for any other age group. As Smith puts it, 'the movement to save Christian America for God ended up pushing many Americans away from Christianity, God and the church.' I don't think that dynamic is changing soon. 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