by David French –  nationalreview.com – December 27, 2017

If I had to pick one of the most under-appreciated and under-reported stories of 2017, it would be that a post-Christian America is a more vicious America, and that the triumph of secularists is rendering America more polarized, not less. Remove from the public square biblical admonitions such as “love your enemies” and the hatred has more room to grow. When the fruits of the Spirit — love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control — wither, then the culture is far more coarse.

Not everyone’s missing the story, of course. Both Ross Douthat and The Atlantic’s Peter Beinart have written powerfully on the topic, with Beinart noting how the rise of a post-Christian Left has mirrored the rise of a post-Christian Right. Beinart’s conclusion is correct:

For years, political commentators dreamed that the culture war over religious morality that began in the 1960s and ’70s would fade. It has. And the more secular, more ferociously national and racial culture war that has followed is worse.

In spite of these alarms, much of the elite media celebrates religious decline without seriously and realistically grappling with the consequences. There is so much underlying ignorance of and hostility toward orthodox Christianity in elite media circles that I fear they’re still trapped in the false belief that less Christianity means a better America.

Much of this ignorance and hostility is rooted in the idea that Christianity itself is the source of contemporary cultural conflict. In reality, a propensity toward division and conflict is deeply embedded in human nature. Tribalism reigns in the human heart. Religious differences can of course be a source of conflict, but a common Judeo-Christian culture also serves the invaluable purpose of providing rules and norms for controlling that conflict and creating the conditions for reconciliation.

Source: Post-Christian America — Can a Polarized America Survive? | National Review