Midweek Meditation: "Making Sense of God 1" (Tim Keller)

Starting this week, I will be sharing a few excerpts from Tim Keller's recent book, "Making Sense of God."

TITLE: Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Skeptical
AUTHOR: Tim Keller
PUBLISHER: New York, NY: Viking Books, 2016, (330 pages).

In New York, almost everybody seem to be talking about Tim Keller and Redeemer Presbyterian Church. One reason for his success with many people, both believers and non-believers is his ability to connect with people living in a secular and skeptical age, yet maintaining his commitment about faith, hope, and God. Recently retired, he continues his ministry largely through writing.

Question 1: "Isn't Religion Going Away?"
Absolutely not. In a striking counter-observation of the presumed rise of secularism, Keller notes two reasons why secularism itself is shrinking.

"Why? There are two basic reasons. One has to do with the trends of retention and conversion. Many point to the rising percentage of younger adult 'nones' in the United States as evidence for the inevitable shrinkage of religion. However, Kaufmann shows that almost all of the new religiously unaffiliated come not from conservative religious groups but from more liberal ones. Secularization, he writes, 'mainly erodes . . . the taken-for-granted, moderate faiths that trade on being mainstream and established.' Therefore, the very 'liberal, moderate' forms of religion that most secular people think are the most likely to survive will not. Conservative religious bodies, by contrast, have a very high retention rate of their children, and they convert more than they lose.

The second main reason that the world will become more religious is that religious people have significantly more children, whereas the more irreligious and secular a population, the less often marriage happens and the smaller the families. This is true across the world and holds within every national group, within every educational level, and within every economic class. So, for example, it is not the case that always 'the more children, the better.' Columbia economist Jeffrey Sachs has argued well that overpopulation and exorbitant birthrates are major contributing factors to world poverty. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to think there is no opposite problem. Cultures that do not have a replacement-level birthrate die out as they are displaced by other populations and cultures. As Kaufmann and others show, the most secular societies are maintained through the immigration of more religious peoples.
...

It turns out, then, that the individualism of modern culture does not necessarily lead to a decline in religion. Rather, it leads to a decline of inherited religion, the sort one is born into." (Keller, 24-27)

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