Sample 2

from You are Here

I don’t know the exact moment that I woke up to the fact that we’re not living in a neutral world, but I can back it up to four years ago when I was walking my dog down the road and saw for the first time a lawn sign stating IN THIS HOUSE, WE BELIEVE. It caught my eye. Growing up, as you entered my front door and looked around the entryway, you’d see a pile of Nikes, a fish tank, and a dog gate, and then up on the wall you’d see a photo of my parents on their wedding day alongside framed calligraphy of a phrase in the Book of Joshua, chapter 24, verse 15: “As for me and my house, we will serve the LORD.” It was posted as a continual reminder to everyone what we stood for. The lawn sign caught my eye again while I remembered walking into a Jewish friend’s home with a mezuzah and a plaque with a Hebrew house blessing. A sign demonstrating your house’s allegiance has, it turns out, been around for millennia. Then my eye lingered on it even longer, for I knew that the two words WE BELIEVE matched the beginning of the Nicene Creed: We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty. It would be fair to say that I did a double-take. I had to keep going in the direction that my goldendoodle was going, but I did look back over my shoulder to make sure I was seeing what I was seeing while she was peeing; I knew what it’s like to take what you believe seriously enough that you post a sign outside your home, but I didn’t expect a sign to pop up with a new religious creed.

This sign was, in fact, a sign of the times: for it was not long after this that I began to see signs like this one posted around town. IN THIS HOUSE, WE BELIEVE was now outside of 1950s-style ranches, townhomes, and McMansions.

On these signs were lists of progressive statements, each workshopped to sound as if disagreement with them made you a nitwit. Black Lives Matter. Science is real. No human is illegal.

Each statement implies contentious policies often rejected by referendums, and yet their phrasing had the dogmatic certainty of a suburban pope. 

When I was a seminarian fifteen years ago, the general consensus was that we were living in a neutral world. The mood might have been captured by a speech given by a theologian called “Christ and Nothing” that argued that Christianity had worked its way so far into the Western imagination that all the other gods underwent a drubbing. All the pantheons had been exposed as frauds. Now you could believe in Christ, or believe in nothing. You could be a religious person, or a nihilist. 

The West was so far down the road that you couldn’t do a U-turn back to a new religion. Either you could opt into Christianity, or not. Either you could choose to go to church on Sundays, or not. Maybe you could choose a third option to fill the void that dabbled in spirituality, art, and a watered-down version of Buddhism, but you’d still be in a void. You could fill your nihilism with drapes and a quartz countertop, but the last thing that could ever happen was that you could fill it with a new religion.

That was the mood fifteen years ago, and to an extent it may be still true, at least from the standpoint of philosophical theology. 

Yet now that I’m walking my dog past signs saying IN THIS HOUSE, WE BELIEVE, the picture of the West being either Christian, or nihilist, is in shambles.

I want to move away from Christianity at the moment and start talking about things that I think you may be wondering about concerning “religion” and “culture” and “the West.” I think we can begin here with a gut feeling. Many people have an intuition about what’s going on in our culture and in the West, and that things feel out of place. They’re unsure whether God really exists, and don’t know who to trust, but one thing they know is true, and they can’t say how, but somehow, we lost our connection to God, and it all went downhill from there.

We need the vocabulary to talk about, and to think about, the way that religion now works in the twenty-first century. It’s harder to do than it looks. We need to be precise.

I want you to walk a way with a sense of the past, present, and future so you can make sense of where we’re at.

Think of this chapter like one of the YOU ARE HERE signs you see in a shopping mall or amusement park with a red dot on a big map.

We’re now zooming out above the suburban lawns and criss-cross streets to a spot higher up, where we can look down at people like ants, and watch as countries come and go, and a picture emerges where we’re all underneath worldwide stories.

A Religion That’s Not a Religion

The claim that we live in a “neutral” or “secular” society is based upon two truths and a lie. It begins with two observations. These can be so persuasive that many feel no alternative than to demand a complete reboot of society, free from religion:

Truth 1: Religion has led people to do bad things.
Truth 2: It feels normal now not to reject religion.

Add these two impressions together, and what you end up with is that religion feels immoral and irrelevant. Are these true? Perhaps, but that’s not the point. It’s not about accuracy. It’s about a story.

Every tribe has a foundation story. The Nones place themselves near the end of an evolutionary lineup. Imagine a member of the None standing upright while religious people crouch behind like Cro-Magnons. The tribe of the Nones doesn’t begin with a founder they try to embody but with a primitive past they try to escape from.

If you looked for a place in history to see where this all got started, I think you’d find the first half of this foundation story back in the Enlightenment, but you’d find the second recently, after religious attendance plummeted, not just in Parisian salons, but in suburbs.

These two truths are undermined by a lie. Here it is: It’s possible for a society to not be religious.

This myth of a future with zero religion has persisted for quite some time. So we have to be careful. I’m not disputing that some people will disbelieve in God: but I mean that no society will lack a shared orientation to the sacred. This is a civic religion. A civic religion occurs whether we’re conscious of it or not. Civic religions are passed on from generation to the next as they embed an understanding of what humans we ought to be in the world…