Christ and Pop Culture: Keller, Douthat and Christianity's decline in the U.S.

http://www.christandpopculture.com/elsewhere/tim-keller-ross-douthat-and-christianitys-decline-in-the-us/

http://redeemercitytocity.com/blog/view.jsp?Blog_param=420


... In his second chapter, Douthat attributes the change to five major social catalysts that have gained steam since the 1960s: 1) First, the political polarization that has occurred between the Left and Right drew many churches into it (mainline Protestants toward the Left, evangelicals toward the Right). This has greatly weakened the church’s credibility in the broader culture, with many viewing churches as mere appendages and pawns of political parties. 2) Second, the sexual revolution means that the Biblical sex ethic now looks unreasonable and perverse to millions of people, making Christianity appear implausible, unhealthy, and regressive. 3) Third, the era of decolonization and Third World empowerment, together with the dawn of globalization, has given the impression that Christianity was imperialistically “western” and supportive of European civilization’s record of racism, colonialism, and anti-Semitism. 4) The fourth factor has been the enormous growth in the kind of material prosperity and consumerism that always works against faith and undermines Christian community. 5) The fifth factor is—that all the other four factors had their greatest initial impact on the more educated and affluent classes, the gatekeepers of the main culture-shaping institutions such as the media, the academy, the arts, the main foundations, and much of the government and business world.

How does Ross Douthat’s analysis compare with some older thinkers? Lesslie Newbigin blames the marginalization of Christianity in the West on the outworking of the 18th century Enlightenment—which promoted the sufficiency of individual human reason without faith in God—for a great deal of the shift. In this he understands historical patterns as being caused by ideas and intellectual trends working their way out through a society’s institutions. I see no reason why Newbigin’s history-of-thought approach and Douthat’s sociology-of-knowledge approach cannot both be right. A third kind of analysis could easily find the faults within the church itself. As H. Richard Niebuhr points out in his essay, “The Independence of the Church”, the church becomes weak and even corrupt whenever it becomes successful in a culture. This is an important factor to add. For example, why did the mainline and the evangelical church get co-opted by American political parties and lose credibility? Wasn’t this due to a lack of robust, vital orthodoxy within them? If all these approaches are right and complementary, Christianity in the West has been the victim of “a perfect storm” of trends, factors, and forces.