Ken asks:

> What trend exactly is "accelerating"?  I'm trying to think what you could
>  possibly mean by this, but every plausible interpretation is so obviously
>  false that I must be misunderstanding you.
>  
> Clearly tolerance of homosexuals is at an all-time high, along with 
> tolerance of people of other religions, races, and nationalities.
>  
>  Church-going and religious belief continue a long-term decline: a secular
>  secular trend, if I may coin a phrase.  "Invoking God" may be somewhat
>  popular, but it looks like it's a lot less popular that it was when I was
>  born.
>  
>  So what are you talking about?

I'm surprised that you have to ask, given your penchant for arcane statistics.

Church membership or attendance is not in decline. It has remained 
essentially constant over the last 60 years, but the composition of the church-goers has 
changed signficantly over that time. Those who call themselves evangelical 
Christians have risen substantially, especially in the last ten or twelve years, 
increasing 12% since 1976 (10% since 1992). 

I'll let you look up those statistics yourself, but they are believed to be 
reliable as they are the results of Gallup polls and a study conducted by the 
National Science Foundation.

The rise of evangelicism connotes a simultaneous rise in 
anti-intellectualism. The central tenet of evangelicism is biblical literacy and inerrancy, a 
philosophical position that leaves no room for doubt or reasoned thought. One 
person wrote me privately and asked what I meant by "excessive piety." To be pious 
is to be devout to a cause or an idea. To be excessively so is to simply stop 
thinking. But mainline Christianity wasn't always so.

I doubt that many people on the list know of Harry Emerson Fosdick, but he's 
someone everyone should acquaint themselves with. Fosdick was the pastor of 
New York’s First Presbyterian Church and a leader in what was then called an 
"optimistic theology." Under that theology, the liberal Protestant church 
embraced the new ideas of Darwinism, quantum mechanics, and cosmology, preferring to 
see those ideas as indicators of the progress of mankind. 

In 1922, Fosdick delivered a sermon entitled, "Shall the Fundamentalists 
Win?" In it, he wrote:

=======================================

...I do not believe for one moment that the Fundamentalists are going to 
succeed. Nobody’s intolerance can contribute anything to the solution of the 
situation which we have described. If, then, the Fundamentalists have no solution 
of the problem, where may we expect to find it? In two concluding comments let 
us consider our reply to that inquiry.

The first element that is necessary is a spirit of tolerance and Christian 
liberty. When will the world learn that intolerance solves no problems? This is 
not a lesson which the Fundamentalists alone need to learn; the liberals also 
need to learn it. Speaking, as I do, from the viewpoint of liberal opinions, 
let me say that if some young, fresh mind here this morning is holding new 
ideas, has fought his way through, it may be by intellectual and spiritual 
struggle, to novel positions, and is tempted to be intolerant about old opinions, 
offensively to condescend to those who hold them and to be harsh in judgment on 
them, he may well remember that people who held those old opinions have given 
the world some of the noblest character and the most rememberable service that 
it ever has been blessed with, and that we of the younger generation will 
prove our case best, not by controversial intolerance, but by producing, with our 
new opinions, something of the depth and strength, nobility and beauty of 
character that in other times were associated with other thoughts. It was a wise 
liberal, the most adventurous man of his day -- Paul the Apostle -- who said, 
“Knowledge puffeth up, but love buildeth up.”

Nevertheless, it is true that just now the Fundamentalists are giving us one 
of the worst exhibitions of bitter intolerance that the churches of this 
country have ever seen. As one watches them and listens to them he remembers the 
remark of General Armstrong of Hampton Institute, “Cantankerousness is worse 
than heterodoxy.” There are many opinions in the field of modern controversy 
concerning which I am not sure whether they are right or wrong, but there is one 
thing I am sure of: courtesy and kindliness and tolerance and humility and 
fairness are right. Opinions may be mistaken; love never is.

As I plead thus for an intellectually hospitable, tolerant, liberty-loving 
church, I am, of course, thinking primarily about this new generation. We have 
boys and girls growing up in our homes and schools, and because we love them we 
may well wonder about the church which will be waiting to receive them. Now, 
the worst kind of church that can possibly be offered to the allegiance of the 
new generation is an intolerant church. Ministers often bewail the fact that 
young people turn from religion to science for the regulative ideas of their 
lives. But this is easily explicable.

Science treats a young man’s mind as though it were really important. A 
scientist says to a young man, “Here is the universe challenging our investigation. 
Here are the truths which we have seen, so far. Come, study with us! See what 
we already have seen and then look further to see more, for science is an 
intellectual adventure for the truth.” Can you imagine any man who is worthwhile 
turning from that call to the church if the church seems to him to say, “Come, 
and we will feed you opinions from a spoon. No thinking is allowed here 
except such as brings you to certain specified, predetermined conclusions. These 
prescribed opinions we will give you in advance of your thinking; now think, but 
only so as to reach these results.”

My friends, nothing in all the world is so much worth thinking of as God, 
Christ, the Bible, sin and salvation, the divine purposes for humankind, life 
everlasting. But you cannot challenge the dedicated thinking of this generation 
to these sublime themes upon any such terms as are laid down by an intolerant 
church...

========================================
 
This sermon was initially so well received that it was reprinted thousands of 
times all over the United States, but it also set in stone the battle lines 
for the fundamentalists -- and eventually the Scopes trial in Tennessee. The 
backlash, led by William Jennings Bryan, eventually caused Fosdick to resign his 
pastorship and resulted in a mass exodus of the intelligensia from the 
American Protestant Church, a trend that has only accelerated in the last two 
decades.

While it is true that the mainline Protestant churches have suffered 
decreases, those decreases have come at the expense of growth in the offshoot 
evangelical churches, and these are the groups that have become emboldened enough to 
begin to wage cultural war in the United States, one school board at a time.

Not only do these groups not only do not participate in the scientific 
exploration that will determine the nature of the America of tomorrow, they abhor 
the fact that anyone does -- and are working very hard to impose a "theistic 
science" in classrooms everywhere, where God's miracles can be used as an 
explanatory mechanism.

Of course Christianity is not a monolithic movement. The Catholic Church, in 
all of its universities, promotes very active and aggressive research 
departments into evolutionary biology, astronomy, cosmology and the origins of life 
without any form of intellectual interference. Indeed, the Vatican operates a 
large telescope on Mt. Graham in Arizona specifically in atonement for its 
treatment of Bruno and Galileo 400 years ago.

Protestant mainline churches, the inheritors of Fosdick's optimistic 
theology, do somewhat the same, but on a much smaller scale. Southwestern University, 
a Methodist university in Texas, just a few days ago advertised for a 
full-time evolutionary biologist to teach at the university. But this is clearly no 
longer the norm.

Anti-intellectualism is on the rise in the US and it's a worrisome trend. As 
I wrote yesterday:

"But in another sense, it matters a great deal. Basic research is the process 
by which high-tech jobs are created -- something everyone on this list seems 
to want -- and yet the United State's fundamental research is being 
increasingly conducted by people who have no association with Christianity at all, 
although Christians represent 86% of the population of the United States. Many 
American researchers are not American citizens, and if they are religious, they 
tend to be Hindus, Buddhists, Jews or Confucianists.

"Not thinking is easy. Invoking God to justify your non-thought is even 
easier. Easier yet is condemning to hell everyone who doesn't agree with you. But 
it's a wholly destructive process. It produces nothing, nor does it make life 
better for anyone. But what is particularly discouraging is that it seems to be 
an accelerating trend in American life."

Wirt Atmar

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