The Week: The coming end of Christian America

America is still a "Christian nation," if the term simply means a majority of the population will claim the label when a pollster calls. But, as a new Pew Research report unsparingly explains, the decline of Christianity in the United States "continues at a rapid pace." A bare 65 percent of Americans now say they're Christians, down from 78 percent as recently as 2007. The deconverted are mostly moving away from religion altogether, and the ranks of the religiously unaffiliated — the "nones" — have swelled from 16 to 26 percent over the same period. If this rate of change continues, the U.S. will be majority non-Christian by about 2035, with the nones representing well over one third of the population. [...]

In what remains of the American church, reactions to this decline will vary. Some will see it as a positive apocalypse, which is to say a revealing of what was always true. America was never really a Christian nation. Our government and society have long made choices and embraced values that are difficult, if not impossible, to square with Christianity, so an end of any association between the two is welcome. Likewise, the proportion of Americans who actually practiced Christian faith in any meaningful, life-altering sense was always substantially lower than the proportion who would identify as Christian in a poll. What we're seeing is less mass deconversion than a belated honesty which may be an opportunity for new faithfulness, repentance, or even revival. [...]

Yet as contradictory as it may seem, I'll also suggest left-wing nones may come to find they miss the religious right when grappling with its successor. The New York Times' Ross Douthat has argued the post-religious right of which President Trump has given us a glimpse will be an ugly beast indeed. Polling shows the "churchgoers who ultimately voted for Trump over Clinton still tend to hold different views than his more secular supporters," he wrote last year, including being "less authoritarian and tribal on race and identity. ...The trend was consistent: The more often a Trump voter attended church, the less white-identitarian they appeared, the more they expressed favorable views of racial minorities, and the less they agreed with populist arguments on trade and immigration." In other words, on the right, the decline of Christianity looks to mean the rise of racism, as the communal life of active faith is replaced by darker impulses.

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The Week: Why Vladimir Putin swore allegiance to ultra-conservatism

Although ultra-conservatism has always played a major role in Russian society, particularly outside the big cities, it was granted the status of Russia's unofficial ideology in 2012, after mass protests in Moscow against Vladimir Putin's return to the Kremlin for a third term.

In a keynote speech to parliament after the pro-democracy protests had been quelled, Putin declared that social and religious conservatism were the only ways to prevent Russia and the world from slipping into what he called "chaotic darkness." In a separate speech he also accused Western countries of betraying "Christian values" and pursuing polices that "place on the same level a multi-child family and a same-sex partnership, a faith in God and a belief in Satan." [...]

This intolerance for anything that smacks of "liberal" Western values has also had serious consequences for Russia's national health, in particular its fight against a growing HIV and AIDS epidemic. Almost one million Russians are registered as having contracted HIV, out of a population of 143 million people, an almost twofold increase from 2010. Officials predict that up to three million Russians will be living with the virus by 2020. [...]

In August, Putin appointed Olga Vasilyeva, a religious scholar with deep ties to the Russian Orthodox Church, as education minister. One of her first acts as minister was to visit the Russian Orthodox Church's powerful head, Patriarch Kirill, to seek his blessing for her appointment. Vasilyeva is not only an Orthodox believer, however: She has also previously praised Joseph Stalin, the Soviet dictator who sent millions to their deaths in the gulags.

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The Week: Is Pope Francis revolutionizing the Catholic Church — or just ad libbing?

If what the pope means is that individual Christians have often treated gays badly, subjecting them to violence, overt discrimination, and abuse, and shown an egregious lack of charity toward them for pretty much the entirety of the past 2,000 years, that is indisputable — as is the contention that an apology for such mistreatment is in order.

But if Francis means that the Roman Catholic Church as an institution owes gays an apology — well, that raises some unsettling issues. [...]

Not only does this mean that the church cannot bless same-sex marriages. It also means that no act of homosexual intercourse is ever acceptable. In order to conform to church teaching, a gay man or woman must embrace celibacy — meaning, he or she must forever renounce any hope of sexual fulfillment or companionship. Because, once again, acting on homosexual desires is always and everywhere gravely immoral, innately sinful, and "objectively disordered."

Pope Francis' suggestion of an apology to gays raises the question of whether he thinks it would be possible for the church to make such an expression of contrition while continuing to affirm and teach this view of homosexuality. I'm just going to go out on a limb and speculate that such an apology would not be especially well received in the gay community.

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