Responding to Rod Dreher’s recent book The Benedict Option, which discusses the argument that conservative Christians—having lost the culture war and become a minority—should retreat into insular communities, Peter Berger writes:
What Dreher is saying is . . . this: don’t exaggerate. Are Christians being persecuted in America? Not really. Yes, there are regrettable power plays—as when the Obama administration wanted to force Catholic hospitals to cover contraception in the health plans offered their employees, or to threaten the livelihood of Evangelical photographers or caterers unless they are willing to serve same-sex weddings. . . . But a comparison with real persecution of Christians—massacres, enslavement, forced conversion, or prosecutions for “blasphemy” by Islamist forces in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, or West Africa—shows that there is really no comparison at all.
It is much too early to give up on the strong religious forces in American society—a still-intact and influential Evangelical community, also an intact and vital presence of the Catholic Church (now invigorated by the growing influence of Latinos), also the less-visible but nevertheless powerful presence of religious [traditions] from South and East Asia. It is, I think, too early to assess the significance of the Islamic presence.
It is also easy to exaggerate the importance of secularism in America. This is not Europe, though a sector of the American intelligentsia has been “Europeanized.” The values of sexual life have certainly been secularized, once one moves outside the relatively closed worlds of conservative religion (including its Jewish sector). The trend of sexual mores has clearly been in the direction of ever-increasing liberality. Especially young people strongly resent any “authoritarian” claims to put limits, any limits, on the ethics of autonomous “consenting adults.” . . . Any threat (real or imagined) to this [sense of] entitlement will be fiercely resented. [So] don’t figure on a neo-Puritan sexual revolution.
Read more on American Interest: http://www.the-american-interest.com/2017/03/29/so-whats-with-all-this-solemnity/