OPINION:
’Follow the science,” has been the emblematic chant of high officeholders during the age of coronavirus. Science, with its contradictory face mask and lockdown advisories, has left doubts over its foibles and flaws. Rather than place all their trust in science, Americans should ponder during the season of Passover and Easter whether it’s time put a little more faith in faith.
Religious attendance is in free fall, sadly, in America, circa 2021. A Gallup Poll finds that only a minority, 47 percent of Americans claim to belong to a church, temple or mosque. The result stands in contrast to Gallup’s initial poll on U.S. religion in 1937, when membership measured an overwhelming 73 percent. By 1999, it had slipped only slightly to 70 percent. In 2018, less than two decades later, it had fallen to 50 percent.
With its roots in ancient times, religious practice is commonly associated with the dust-covered days of yore. Accordingly, the elderly find church attendance uplifting and the youthful set, humdrum. Americans born before 1946 register membership at 66 percent; baby boomers, 58 percent; Generation X, 50 percent; and millennials, 38 percent.
Ironically, as faith atrophies during the modern era, tribalistic tendencies that beset faith traditions of the past are re-emerging. In the United States, obsession with diversity has metastasized into such divisive thought systems as critical race theory, which is indoctrinating Americans in the backward belief that human beings must be judged on the basis of skin color and ethnicity. Its characteristic condemnation of “whiteness” mirrors obsolete institutional prejudice that held persons of African descent as inferior.
Unsurprisingly, normalizing the practice of viewing fellow citizens with contempt has led to an explosion of hatred and violence. In 2020, murder — the ultimate expression of cancel culture — surged 37 percent nationwide through September. Hate crimes reached a 10-year high, with the FBI attributing 58 percent to race, ethnicity or ancestry. Some “celebration of diversity.”
To be sure, the pandemic scourged 2020 like no other year in recent memory. Trend lines point to better times ahead — at least in matters of faith. A Pew Research Center survey finds that growing numbers of Americans are feeling confident in safely returning to their houses of worship. Since July 2020, the proportion expressing assurance in church attendance without fear of COVID-19 has risen from 64 percent to 76 percent.
Still, only 39 percent of respondents say they would attend Easter services in person this Sunday — far short of the 62 percent who customarily do so. Time will tell whether church bells or Sunday brunch have the stronger appeal.
Trendy prescriptions are tearing at the nation’s traditional affirmation “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Rather than succumb to flawed remedies, Americans should keep the faith.
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