I have been writing for more than fifteen years about the fact that religion, and specifically Christianity, is dying. While I feel no one within the church is listening to me, the reason I write is for those with one foot out the back door, trying to make sense of things… and there is sense to be made. But those who have physically left the church are only the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

One, but not the only factor of the submerged part of the iceberg, is that the conservative church has sacrificed truth for political power, and the progressive church has given up truth for harmony. That harmony is built on a nebulous spirituality. So, many of those who are counted in the Pew Polls¹ as “Christian” who sit in the pews (small p) on a given Sunday morning, no longer believe in the foundation of any truth, let alone a Christian truth.

¹(Pew Polls gets its name from Joseph Newton Pew, the founder of Sun Oil and funded The Pew Charitable Trusts, who does the polls)

Most religious historians consider Francis Schaeffer as the most significant Christian theologian and philosopher of the twentieth century. While I had attempted to read Schaeffer as a college student (saying “attempted” because my limited familiarity with philosophical language at that time made it hard for me to understand), in 1990, when my Christian world collapsed, I began to study philosophy seriously. With a couple of years of such study under my belt, I returned to Schaeffer and found his works not just understandable, but profoundly helpful. His direction saved me from atheism.

Schaeffer died in 1984 at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. While he was being treated for leukemia, he moved his family and a significant amount of his Swiss ministry (L’Abri) to Rochester. I decided to take a position at Mayo Clinic in 1996, and one of the motivating factors was so that I could study Schaeffer better at L’Abri. I spent six years there.

I listened to a podcast by Frank Schaeffer, Francis’s son, this morning.  It was an interview with a Catholic sociology professor, Christian Smith, from Notre Dame, on his new book, Why Religion Went Obsolete. Although I haven’t read the book yet (but it’s on my list), the interview makes it sound remarkable. I will post the interview here, and I think some of you deep thinkers would enjoy the conversation and will enjoy the well-documented book. I will mention that Frank, just like me, acknowledges that his father’s work went off the rails once he got in bed with some of the American Evangelicals, who took his ideas—stripped of their foundational concepts—and created the political movement we now see as Christian Nationalism. Francis must be rolling in his grave at what the American Evangelical Church has become.

Frank, in his own disillusionment, refers to himself as “an atheist who prays.” Having known him for many years, I see him as a thoughtful agnostic with a Christian leaning.

Enjoy:

Mike