What the Fastest-Growing Christian Group Reveals About America
Catch the Fire belongs to the fastest-growing group of Christians on the planet—charismatic Christians, who believe that the Holy Spirit empowers them to speak in tongues, heal, and prophesy, just as Jesus’s first apostles did 2,000 years ago. By some measures, they represent more than half of the roughly 60 million U.S. adults who call themselves “born-again.” This flourishing and vigorously supernatural faith points to the paradox of the secular age: The modern era of declining church attendance has nurtured some of religion’s most dramatic manifestations. Instead of killing off religion, secularism has supercharged its extraordinary elements.
Charismatic Christians aren’t the only ones embracing a spirituality that might seem out of place in our modern, rationalist age. Eighty-seven percent of Americans subscribe to at least one New Age belief, such as karma, reincarnation, or telepathy. I also interviewed podcast bros who hawk ayahuasca in Silicon Valley and self-described spiritual coaches who offer treatments ranging from Reiki to reviewing their clients’ past lives.
At a New Age congregation outside Denver, I attended a healing workshop on harnessing the invisible energies of the universe to treat cancer and arthritis, as well as a shamanic drum circle where a former software engineer named Greg led participants on a journey to the spirit world to meet their power animals. If this is a “secular age,” then perhaps we need to rethink what secularization means.
Over the past decade, Donald Trump has drawn supporters into a story about America’s breakdown and recovery that is more spiritual than political. He is the president of an anti-institutional, tradition-skeptical, experience-worshipping age, when fewer Americans go to church but plenty of them follow gurus on YouTube. The feelings of frustration and grievance that a candidate personifies are more important than his policy platform.
His message that institutions are weak, corrupt, and deserve no loyalty; his tacit promise that you can imagine prosperity into existence regardless of what the economists say; his personal domination of the Republican Party: All of this has succeeded because public confidence in every institution, not just traditional churches, has collapsed. That cynicism extends to the workplace—the institution that makes the greatest stamp on most people’s daily life. Only 21 percent of U.S. employees strongly affirm trust in their organization’s leaders. Meanwhile, the social habits that we associate with a more devout, less tolerant age—policing boundaries, banishing heretics, expecting divine retribution to rain down on your enemies—have migrated from churches to politics. Many Americans are ready to put their faith in a political savior who says he was “saved by God.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...ty/682991/
Catch the Fire belongs to the fastest-growing group of Christians on the planet—charismatic Christians, who believe that the Holy Spirit empowers them to speak in tongues, heal, and prophesy, just as Jesus’s first apostles did 2,000 years ago. By some measures, they represent more than half of the roughly 60 million U.S. adults who call themselves “born-again.” This flourishing and vigorously supernatural faith points to the paradox of the secular age: The modern era of declining church attendance has nurtured some of religion’s most dramatic manifestations. Instead of killing off religion, secularism has supercharged its extraordinary elements.
Charismatic Christians aren’t the only ones embracing a spirituality that might seem out of place in our modern, rationalist age. Eighty-seven percent of Americans subscribe to at least one New Age belief, such as karma, reincarnation, or telepathy. I also interviewed podcast bros who hawk ayahuasca in Silicon Valley and self-described spiritual coaches who offer treatments ranging from Reiki to reviewing their clients’ past lives.
At a New Age congregation outside Denver, I attended a healing workshop on harnessing the invisible energies of the universe to treat cancer and arthritis, as well as a shamanic drum circle where a former software engineer named Greg led participants on a journey to the spirit world to meet their power animals. If this is a “secular age,” then perhaps we need to rethink what secularization means.
Over the past decade, Donald Trump has drawn supporters into a story about America’s breakdown and recovery that is more spiritual than political. He is the president of an anti-institutional, tradition-skeptical, experience-worshipping age, when fewer Americans go to church but plenty of them follow gurus on YouTube. The feelings of frustration and grievance that a candidate personifies are more important than his policy platform.
His message that institutions are weak, corrupt, and deserve no loyalty; his tacit promise that you can imagine prosperity into existence regardless of what the economists say; his personal domination of the Republican Party: All of this has succeeded because public confidence in every institution, not just traditional churches, has collapsed. That cynicism extends to the workplace—the institution that makes the greatest stamp on most people’s daily life. Only 21 percent of U.S. employees strongly affirm trust in their organization’s leaders. Meanwhile, the social habits that we associate with a more devout, less tolerant age—policing boundaries, banishing heretics, expecting divine retribution to rain down on your enemies—have migrated from churches to politics. Many Americans are ready to put their faith in a political savior who says he was “saved by God.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...ty/682991/
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
