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Newsweek magazine's cover story, "The Decline and Fall of Christian America" [April 13, 2009] continues to evoke controversy and conversation, and much of it is illuminating.  Now, Stephen Prothero of Boston University enters the fray with an incisive commentary that throws a few punches.

Writing in today's edition of USA Today, Prothero asserts that almost all the warnings about an increasingly secular America are overblown and mistaken.  "Not Even Close," is the headline of his response.

Prothero is no amateur when it comes to observing religion in America.  Chair of the Department of Religion at Boston University, Prothero is also author of Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know -- And Doesn't. He is one of the most informed observers of the American religious scene, and his analysis is always worth careful attention.

When it comes to the Newsweek cover story by editor Jon Meacham, Prothero goes after both the analysis and the data Meacham cites.  First, Prothero suggests that most readers of the American Religious Identification Survey [ARIS] study undertaken by Trinity College in Hartford misread the data.  While the most recent ARIS study does indicate a significant increase in secular Americans, Prothero insists that most of these citizens are not so secular as they appear.

Even as the trend line for Christianity may look "disturbingly like the Dow Jones of recent memory," he insists that, "The fact of the matter is that only a small portion of the "nones" is truly secular."

Prothero also takes aim at my comments as recorded in Newsweek:

Newsweek editor Jon Meacham begins his cover story with a series of quotations from R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, who offers the same sad story of Christian declension that American Christians have been telling since roughly the moment the Pilgrims first clambered over Plymouth Rock. "The most basic contours of American culture have been radically altered," Mohler says. "The so-called Judeo-Christian consensus of the last millennium has given way to a post-modern, post-Christian, post-Western cultural crisis which threatens the very heart of our culture."

Prothero then describes my comments as more "timeless rhetoric" than "timely analysis."  Ouch.  His earlier paragraph sets the context for this charge:

What makes this secularization angle plausible is the fact that it aligns quite well with the desires of atheists and evangelicals alike. The so-called new atheists want to see Christianity on the retreat because to them, religion is poisonous idiocy. But born-again Christians like the faith-on-the-run story, too, because it makes their centuries-old call to re-Christianize the country only more urgent.

In other words, America's (very few) atheists want Christianity to be in retreat because they see it as false, dangerous, and anti-progressive.  The evangelicals, on the other hand, are always looking at America only to see it as a nation in spiritual decline.

There is more than a little truth in Prothero's observations.  Atheists are suddenly very hopeful about the secular trends and evangelicals are habitually prone to jeremiads about Christianity in cultural retreat.  Nevertheless, there is more to this story than Prothero allows here.  He points to this himself when he writes:

What the rise of the "nones" shows us is not how American Christianity is declining but how it is changing. The data tell us that Christians are increasingly likely to describe themselves as spiritual rather than religious, that they are increasingly wary of labels and institutions, and that they identify their faith less and less with "organized religion" and more and more with the personal power of Jesus himself.