By Austin Ruse, Crisis Magazine, May 7, 20211
Austin Ruse is a contributing editor to Crisis Magazine. His next book, Under Siege: No Finer Time to be a Faithful Catholic, is out from Crisis Publications in April. You can follow him on Twitter @austinruse.
We do not live in a secular society. Most of us think we do. It is a truism of our time. Folks are flooding out of the Church and embracing the sunny uplands of rationalism, scientism, and freedom from the shackles of dusty, old, and even dangerous dogmas. They are becoming nones, glorious nones, at a furious pace.
This certainly appears to be true. According to Pew Research, 65 percent of American adults now describe themselves as Christian. This number is down 12 percentage points over the past decade. It is down 25 percent from fifty years ago. The religiously unaffiliated continues to grow. Atheists, agnostics, or “nothing” have increased to 26 percent, a gain of 9 percent over ten years. …