Christianity is Not a Means to an End Podcast by John Stonestreet and Shane Morris for Break Point
A Gallup poll released earlier this month documented a massive 20-year drop in church attendance in America. So far, there have been two responses to it. One group mourns the decline of organized religion because religion is good for society, whether or not the religion is true. For example, Jewish commentator Matthew Yglesias wrote on Twitter, “[I] think I’m becoming a Straussian/Putnamist who instrumentally wants to get everyone to go to church.” (He was referring to two socio-political theorists who emphasized the value of Christianity as a social institution.)
As Mark Tooley of the Institute for Religion and Democracy noted in a tweet, churches have always been crucial to the project of self-government, teaching people to love their neighbors, and training them in the qualities “needed for wider society” such as “compromise, sacrifice, grace, mercy, patience, [and] humility.” Even arch-atheist Richard Dawkins has, in his words, “mixed feelings about the decline of Christianity” since, he warned his fellow unbelievers, “it might be a bulwark against something worse.”
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Others, especially many believers, have a different reaction to record-low church attendance. They see this as not the demise of true faith, but of “cultural Christianity.” And, they add, good riddance to it.
