Christianity No Longer the Default Belief System

Years ago, when I first started blogging about atheism I was also President of the local atheist organization, Red River Freethinkers. I had lots of comments from both places. Christians often asked, "What happened to you?"  This was followed by speculation I must have been wronged by someone in my church or had some crisis in my life that I dealt with by abandoning the faith. Using today's language, being Christian is an American default position. We start life being Christian, it is thought, and leave only reluctantly. The faith tells us babies are born sinners. The unstated assumption is babies in the U.S. are also born Christians. The phrase, "The U.S. is a Christian nation," confirms Christianity as the default belief.

Babies, of course, are not born Christian. They are born with no religion. Slowly, too slowly for me, an understanding is seeping into our common national understanding that millions of U.S. adults do not have a default belief in orthodox Christianity or Christianity at all. The best writing I've seen so far about this by a Christian showed up on a widely read Christian site. The link reviews a book, Nonverts: The Making of Ex Christian America. The book and the review go over developments of recent decades, most of which we discuss here often: Members of mainline Protestant churches began doubting many tenets of Christianity such as sin, miracles, the afterlife, etc. However, they enjoyed or needed the community that went with church life. Along came the internet. With that people began to splinter off into groups who shared common views. Both the social life and branches of belief or non belief found new homes. Those splintering away are called "nones," a group now larger than any denomination including Catholicism. 

If there is such a thing as a "default" position about religion in the U.S. the growing consensus,  reflected in both the book and the apparently Christian professor who reviewed it, is that default is now "nones," no affiliation with any religion. This is a huge shift in what we might call the U.S. narrative or conventional wisdom about religion. Babies are no longer born sinners nor born Christian. The U.S. is not a "Christian nation." 

There is another fork in the road ahead. It is whether this new default assumption is a "problem?" Is it something which "needs to be fixed?" In reviewing the above book, the reviewer implies the book fell short because it did not address "where we are going." This implies to me, though it is not stated, that the secular nation we have become, or soon will become, is something to be fixed. 

For the life of me, I cannot see how it is a problem if the majority of our population stops believing in myths like the "original sin," the "Resurrection," Noah's Ark, the "New Covenant" or rewards or punishment in death. To leave behind that ancient fiction is "A good thing."