Three recent books have stirred up a lot of discussion though, to be honest, I suspect not nearly enough. Each documents American culture and society gone haywire and each offers solutions. You may already know them. Rod Dreher has The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation. Anthony Esolen published Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture. And Archbishop Charles Chaput wrote Strangers in a Strange Land: Living the Catholic Faith in a Post-Christian World.

Commenting on the three books in First Things, Patrick J. Deneen notes that thirty years after Jerry Falwell’s optimism about the “Moral Majority,” we’ve undergone a one hundred eighty degree mood change.

Deneen writes that the three authors

assume the opposite of what Falwell believed: America is populated by an immoral majority. Not only is its leadership class dominated by progressive elites, but the American public more generally has been corrupted by constant saturation in a media of skepticism and irony, pervasive consumerism, unavoidable pornography, and incessant distraction fostered by entertainment centers in every person’s pocket. America has lost its faith, and so the faithful have begun to question their belief in America.

The “Post-Christian America” Genre

And there’s plenty of evidence that the authors are correct. In fact, the three books are part of a much larger body of “post-Christian America” literature. In the late 1990s, theologian David Wells wrote a trilogy aimed not so much at America as at the Church in America. No Place for Truth, God in the Wasteland, and Losing Our Virtue painted a gloomy picture that has not improved.

The three recent books are part of a much larger body of “post-Christian America” literature.

Then there was Douglas Groodhuis’s book Truth Decay: Defending Christianity Against the Challenges of Postmodernism (2000). Richard John Neuhaus wrote American Babylon: Notes of a Christian Exile in 2010. Os Guinness then wrote A Free People’s Suicide: Sustainable Freedom and the American Futurein 2012. And  R. R. Reno’s just-published Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society. My own book, The Liberty Threat: The Attack on Religious Liberty in America Today is part of the same genre.

Conservative scholar Charles Murray crunched the numbers and wrote about the crisis in white America in Coming Apart. Then liberal sociologist Robert Putnam crunched the same numbers. He came to the same conclusions. He wrote about them in Coming Apart’s progressive counterpart: Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis.

Dawn is Ahead — But First, Darkness?

A couple of books by James K. A. Smith of Calvin College reflect the same concerns. That’s why his Washington Post hit piece on Dreher, Esolen, and Chaput — titled of all things “The New Alarmism” — came as a depressing surprise. It dripped with trendy and secular allusions to bitter white privilege and racism.

Hope in the Savior does not demand that we remain sanguine in light of clear signs of cultural decay.

Smith’s charge that Dreher, Esolen, Chaput, et. al. have no hope in the Savior is laughable. Hope is not the same as optimism. The three authors have Christian hope. At the same time, they — and Dreher in particular — see a great deal of darkness before the dawn.

Esolen confronts the charge directly. “People are always complaining about decline and fall, but that does not mean things are actually as bad as they believe,” he admits. Then he adds (in italics), “Sometimes entire civilizations do decay and die, and the people who point that out are correct.” Indeed.

Hope in the Savior does not demand that we remain sanguine in light of clear signs of cultural decay in America and in many of our churches.

So what do we do?

What Christians Should Do

First, in addition to reading post-Christian America books, reread the book Revelation in the Bible. The book’s message is the soul of simplicity: In the end, Jesus triumphs and with Him, the Church triumphs. We need not be optimistic to banish fear and live in hope.

In the end, Jesus triumphs and with Him, the Church triumphs. 

Second, realize that predictions about the future even if done by brilliant thinkers with mountains of data can never factor in the providence and mercy of God.

Is it too late for America? Yes, the trend lines look bad. Yet we have no idea what the future holds. God is still God and His kindness can run roughshod over badtrend lines.

Third, we should follow the authors’ advice about the way we approach community, family, sexuality, education, entertainment, and spirituality.

As columnist Ross Douthat recently said in response to Rod Dreher, “Rod is right even if he’s wrong.” That is, while we can’t know the future,

Where we are right now is a place where many of the things he calls for, the cultural practices he advocates are necessary and useful and important no matter what happens in ten or twenty or thirty years.

Is this the end of the world as we know it? Given the alarming decay of our culture, perhaps so. That alone is reason to read, study, and consider these and other “post-Christian America” offerings. But we must never give up hope.