Posted on 04/05/2009 8:58:24 PM PDT by Alex Murphy
Newsweek editor Jon Meacham welcomed "The End of Christian America," with the arrival of new statistics from a new religious identification study. Even though he later tries to stipulate that his own magazine’s headline is a little overwrought, he’s thrilled that the country is maturing beyond uptight Christian orthodoxy and beyond any Christian claim to insist on social conservatism:
While we remain a nation decisively shaped by religious faith, our politics and our culture are, in the main, less influenced by movements and arguments of an explicitly Christian character than they were even five years ago. I think this is a good thing—good for our political culture, which, as the American Founders saw, is complex and charged enough without attempting to compel or coerce religious belief or observance.Meacham routinely argues that liberal Christianity is "theologically serious." He echoed that same thought when Newsweek made the "religious case" for gay marriage. Then, Meacham tried to talk the reader off the ledge they built in their own headline:It is good for Christianity, too, in that many Christians are rediscovering the virtues of a separation of church and state that protects what Roger Williams, who founded Rhode Island as a haven for religious dissenters, called "the garden of the church" from "the wilderness of the world."
As crucial as religion has been and is to the life of the nation, America's unifying force has never been a specific faith, but a commitment to freedom—not least freedom of conscience. At our best, we single religion out for neither particular help nor particular harm; we have historically treated faith-based arguments as one element among many in the republican sphere of debate and decision. The decline and fall of the modern religious right's notion of a Christian America creates a calmer political environment and, for many believers, may help open the way for a more theologically serious religious life.
Let's be clear: while the percentage of Christians may be shrinking, rumors of the death of Christianity are greatly exaggerated. Being less Christian does not necessarily mean that America is post-Christian. A third of Americans say they are born again; this figure, along with the decline of politically moderate-to liberal mainline Protestants, led the ARIS authors to note that "these trends … suggest a movement towards more conservative beliefs and particularly to a more 'evangelical' outlook among Christians." With rising numbers of Hispanic immigrants bolstering the Roman Catholic Church in America, and given the popularity of Pentecostalism, a rapidly growing Christian milieu in the United States and globally, there is no doubt that the nation remains vibrantly religious—far more so, for instance, than Europe.Newsweek clearly see traditional Christianity as a pestilent obstacle to the kind of libertine America they want to create. How nice to pick the week of Easter to tell Americans that Jesus is on the wane.
The only thing close to its end is Newsweek !
“That’s quite revealing on your part.”
What is that supposed to mean?
If you are insinuating that I was meaning that illegals only go to Catholic Church for Sanctuary, then you are wrong. Most are Catholic anyways, I know that. I am saying the ones (only a few) that I have heard about where the Catholic Church was harboring them....for those it wasn’t about getting much needed food and shelter, but they needed someone to harbor them from being deported and the church protected them.
Did not intend for my words to be misleading, if they were...
The editor sounds like a bartender trying to explain away the watered-down house whiskey.
TIME Magazine Cover: Is God Dead? - Apr. 8, 1966.
Cover Article: Toward a Hidden God
Even before Nietzsche, Soren Kierkegaard warned that "the day when Christianity and the world become friends, Christianity is done away with." During World War II, the anti-Nazi Lutheran martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote prophetically to a friend from his Berlin prison cell: "We are proceeding toward a time of no religion at all."
But you didn’t post my query to the question.
If, as TIME points out, God is dead, how is that working out?
JESUS CHRIST is not running a popularity contest in fact only a select few will see His face. Newsweek is no more than a new age version of the Sanhedrin who are essentially the same mob who would again today shout, ‘CRUCIFY HIM!”. Publishing this hit piece during holy week is an anti-Christian hate crime. However the left is so comfortable in their bigotry that they will be the driving force behind the coming American version of kritallnacht and the persecution of Americas’ Christians. “ The faithless filth at Newsweek (Weak News) celebrate depravity and despise innocence and morality. Pity the apostate.
“Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do. And they parted his raiment, and cast lots.” Luke, chapter 23 Chapter Book “34”:
Ahem - don't you mean 'pity the apostates'?.
I mean pity ANY apostate.
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