Post-Christian America

“One of the great strengths of the United States is . . . we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation. . .”

--Barack Obama, 4.6.09

It is common for the media to use Christmas or Easter to run attacks on religion (examples from TIME: “Is God Dead?,” Easter 1966, “Is the Bible Fiction?,” Christmas 1995, “Does Heaven Exist?,” Easter 1997). Newsweek editor Jon Meacham is in that same tradition with his current cover article, “The End of Christian America.” (Judging from Obama's April 6 statement, he must have at least looked at Newsweek’s cover.) “Christian America” is finished, Meacham says, because according to the American Religious Identification Survey, the percentage of self-identified Christians has fallen since 1990 from 86 to 76%. Oh.

Meacham’s article is confused. In one place he writes, “while the percentage of Christians may be shrinking, [b]eing less Christian does not necessarily mean that America is post-Christian." Yet he’s writing in an issue whose cover proclaims, “The Decline and Fall [emphasis added] of Christian America” that carries another article entitled, “A Post-Christian Nation,” and with Meacham’s own piece saying, two paragraphs later, “Many conservative Christians believe they have lost the battles over issues such as abortion, school prayer and even same-sex marriage, and that the country has now entered a post-Christian [emphasis added] phase.”

For sure, Meacham believes in and is delighted with “post-Christian” America. But there is something else going on. The Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism’s annual report on the state of the media found American weekly newsmagazines, including Newsweek, are the “bleakest” part of media’s declining audience, with their advertising and readership falling even faster than newspapers, as circulation dropped 4.8% last year alone. U.S. News has now ceased to be a weekly, and Newsweek, in a move to staunch losses, is giving up the mass market and trying to emulate the niche, elite model of the Economist.

So Meacham, who calls himself “an observant (if deeply flawed) Episcopalian,” therefore needs to set Newsweek apart from the Economist. And we now see he is doing so by having Newsweek take issue with the views of the Economist on religion's current strength. If you believe religion, including Christianity, is surprisingly healthy, think Economist. And Meacham, looking for circulation and advertising from the American elite, is saying, if you think Christianity is dying in America, think Newsweek.

John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, editor in chief and Washington bureau chief respectively of the Economist, have a new book out entitiled, God is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith is Changing the World. In the Wall Street Journal, they “pick up the gauntlet” and directly challenge Meacham’s perspective, adding that anyway, Meacham’s unbelieving friends on the left “are less worried about religion per se as about the fusion of religion and political power in the form of the new right.”

And in fact, that’s the truth. Meacham himself quotes the Bible in his wishful effort to march conservative Christians out of American politics:

there is much New Testament evidence to support a vision of faith and politics in which the church is truest to its core mission when it is the farthest from the entanglements of power.

But wishing won’t make it so. The sharp, partisan battle for control of America goes on. Millions of believers, in large part nonwhite, voted for Obama. Meacham and his elite friends know that if Republicans can rid themselves of their party’s racist past and successfully cobble together a coalition of all races that believes the fight for God over Mammon must begin on Sunday and continue throughout the week, Obama’s majority disappears.