David Brooks On Religion

I ran into a couple of almost comical passages in the current Atlantic piece by David Brooks that I linked yesterday. He disparages

the intellectual Catholics and the Orthodox Jews who have been studying Hobbes and de Tocqueville at the various young conservative fellowship programs that stretch along Acela-land.

(It should be just "Toqueville, not "de Toqueville", by the way, unless you have "Alexis" in front of it. There. That's off my chest.) Later, he says,

Evangelical Christianity has lost many millions of believers across recent decades. Secularism is surging, and white Christianity is shrinking into a rump presence in American life. America is becoming more religiously diverse every day. Christians are in no position to impose their values—regarding same-sex marriage or anything else—on the public square. Self-aware Christians know this.

The first observation to be made here is that Brooks is at best fuzzy on Christian taxonomy and isn't up on current events. According to Christianity Today,

Evangelicals in the United States are holding steady at just under a quarter of the population, according to the latest biennial figures from the General Social Survey (GSS), one of the longest-running measures of religion in America.

According to Wikipedia, "Anywhere from 6 percent to 35 percent of the United States population is evangelical, depending on how 'evangelical' is defined." Definition is a problem, because evangelicals for instance may identify as "born again" without bothering to attend church. Nevertheless, nearly every discussion of the movement says it's either holding steady or growing. On the other hand, the consensus is that mainline Protestants are the group that's declining. According to this site,

In the 1970s, the GSS indicates that over 30% of all Americans could be classified into a mainline denomination. But that quickly changed. By the late 1980s, the share of the mainline dropped below 20%. . . . [T]here’s general agreement in these surveys - mainline Protestants have declined over time and are probably between 10-13% of the population today.

So what's puzzling is that Brooks, who is supposedly a respected commentator on contemporary culture, is oblivious to a major long-term US religious trend (which is also reflected in the decline of Reform and Conservative Judaism), the sharp decline of mainline Protestant denominations. His use of the term "Evangelical" in the passage above is simply incorrect. It also says a lot about The Atlantic that his editor didn't catch this.

So, who are the "self-aware Christians" who know they're in no position to impose their values on the public square? I assume they're the right-thinking Episcopalians, Methodists, and Lutherans whose numbers are approaching insignificance. We might assume they're in no position to impose their thinking becuase there are so few of them that they can't, and Brooks is cool with this, and presumably they are, too.

In the first passage above, he takes an indirect swipe at Catholics via the young conservative ones in fellowship programs, whatever that means. But the US Bishops themselves have become more conservative in recent decades. Abp Gómez, the President of the USCCB, recently made this point in an address to the Congress of Catholics and Public Life in Madrid:

“With the breakdown of the Judeo-Christian worldview and the rise of secularism, political belief systems based on social justice or personal identity have come to fill the space that Christian belief and practice once occupied,” Gomez said.

. . . “We recognize that often what is being canceled and corrected are perspectives rooted in Christian beliefs — about human life and the human person, about marriage, the family, and more,” he said in the address.

In other words, Abp Gómez is determined that Catholics reassert their place in the public square over precisely the issues Brooks thinks Christians are in no position to argue. It's intriguing that Brooks is irritated specifically with Catholics and Orthodox Jews, when these are the groups that pursued successful legal action that lifted government restrictions on religious service attendance as a result of last year's lockdowns.

The odd thing is that Brooks regularly disparages working and middle class people in a straw-man argument that says they want to return to the 1950s, when he himself so publicly underwent a mid-life crisis of wife dumping and pseudo-religious third wave awakening so reminiscent of the me-decade 1970s.