Sample 2

from Yard Sign

I don’t know the moment that I woke up to the fact that America isn’t a “neutral world,” but I can back up to five years ago when I was walking my goldendoodle down the sidewalk and saw for the first time a lawn sign announcing IN THIS HOUSE, WE BELIEVE. It caught my eye. Growing up, as you entered the front door of my parents’ house and looked around the hallway, you’d see a pile of Reeboks, a fish tank, and a dog gate, and then up on the wall you’d see a wedding photo of my mom and dad alongside framed calligraphy of a verse in the Bible: “As for me and my house, we will serve the LORD.” It was posted as a message to anyone who came in the house what we stood for, sort of like this sign. Again, I remember walking into the front door of a Jewish friend’s home with a mezuzah and a plaque with a blessing in their living room. A sign demonstrating your house’s allegiance has, it turns out, been around for millennia, as the Hebrew house blessing showed; this sign wasn’t doing anything new. Then my eye lingered on it evennlonger, for I knew that the two words WE BELIEVE matched the first words of the Nicene Creed: We believe in God, the Father, the Almighty. It would fair to say that I did a double-take. I had to keep going down the sidewalk in the direction that my goldendoodle was going, but I looked back over my shoulder to make sure I was seeing what I was seeing while she was peeing; I had to make sure that the yard sign was in fact suggesting a new religious creed.

This sign was, in fact, a sign of the times. This was the year 2020: and America was entering into a period of civil unrest. In addition to the fears over a virus, people took to the streets demanding a revolution in policing, lockdowns, masking, social justice, and election integrity; the George Floyd protests brought riots, arson, and looting; this anger may have been magnified by the potential energy stored up from billions of people hunkering down from a contagious virus, but still, it wasn’t uncommon to wonder whether more was rising up from down below. The zeal felt religious. That is, if you’re open to the notion that maybe we’re all religious in one way or another, and religious in ways that perhaps we’re not even conscious of, you could begin to interpret the Black Lives Matter protests and Stop the Steal demonstrations and the genuflecting of senators in Kente cloth and the apocalyptic refusal of some to use reason in their pandemic response as the outflow from a hidden spring. We had known, of course, that Christianity was waning in the public sphere. In that vacuum arose a vague curiosity about religion in the 1990s and 2000s. We all knew that some people were starting to be interested in a higher consciousness, maybe with New Age crystals, meditation, mantras, or a choose-your-adventure spirituality. All that seemed easy to ignore. But something was different now. Fires were literally burning. Activists were kneeling in mass confessions. Academics were asking to be released from the burden of generational sin. White picket fences weren’t decorated with the red, white, and blue, but with rainbow flags and protest signs and even political effigies. Many of you lived through 2020 without yard signs being posted into your neighborhood, but the signs were all over the news and in the public consciousness. With this in mind, the IN THIS HOUSE, WE BELIEVE sign certainly wasn’t the strangest thing I’d seen that year, by any stretch of the imagination, but it was the most indicative that the times were changing.

It wasn’t only a sign of the times; this was a time for signs. After this sign, I soon began to see yard signs posted outside of 1950s-style ranches, townhomes, and McMansions. They had 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 implied contentious policies, and yet their phrasing had the dogmatic certainty of a suburban pope. 

It was becoming clear that I wasn’t living in a neutral world. A neutral world is one which says to you, “Believe what you want to believe, that’s up to you – just don’t force your belief on anyone else,” and lets you go to a church, synagogue, mosque, temple, meetinghouse, protest, prayer room, or shrine that you prefer, but asks you to please keep it to yourself. “Keep it in your own home.” Now people were taking stances and were putting signs outside their homes that implied that if you didn’t agree with them, you were a nitwit, a bigot, a racist, anti-science. The times were changing, if you could read the signs.

Religion in 21st-Century America

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.” Let’s begin Part Three 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 religion, and ever since then we’ve been trying to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

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 have to account for significant changes that have occurred in the past few years without pulling false alarms.

In this chapter, I want you to get a sense of the past, present, and future so you can make sense of where we’re at.

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 philosopher 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. Osiris, Zeus, Demeter, Odin, and the many-handed and many-headed gods and goddesses could no longer grip the imagination of Westerners who were exposed to the scientific and theological frameworks of Christianity. Now you could believe in Christ – or believe in nothingness. You could be a religious person – or a nihilist. Take your pick. There was no third religion in which you could believe because the “gods” were exposed as frauds by Christians and the materialism of scientism had made it impossible to believe in anything supernatural. The West was too far down the road. You couldn’t do a U-turn back again to a new religion. Perhaps you could toy with a third religion 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’d know that, deep down, it was all fake: you might feel something in your heart, but you would never have any dogmatic certainty in your head that this religion was true. That was the mood fifteen years ago. To an extent it may be true, at least from the standpoint of people who like to think that what they believe needs to be justified logically in a coherent system of beliefs. Yet now that I was walking my goldendoodle down the sidewalk past a sign announcing IN THIS HOUSE, WE BELIEVE, the belief that the American religious landscape had no other option but to be Christian, or nihilist, was unraveling before me.

So where are we? If we approach this question with the terms that divide us between being “secular” and “religious,” or “Christian” and “nihilist,” then I don’t really think we’re equipped to make sense of where we stand. We need to re-orient ourselves.

Think of this chapter like one of the YOU ARE HERE signs you see in an amusement park with a red dot on a big map. You’ll need to see two important parts of our surroundings: the first is called a “civic religion,” and the second is a term called the “Nones.”