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2 Apr, 7 tweets, 3 min read
I have a new essay out today on why Christianity failed. Thought I'd share a few thoughts here about what inspired it. The piece brings together a few different strands of my thinking on religion. 1/x wisdomofcrowds.live/why-christiani…
In my recent Atlantic essay 'America without God,' I focused on what Christianity's decline meant for the American idea. But that still leaves open a different, challenging question on why Christian attachments have declined so rapidly. 2/x

theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…
The intellectual and spiritual vacuum intensified due to an unlikely confluence of events in the 2000s, and Trump was able to benefit from this. But there's a counterfactual history where instead of Trump filling the vacuum, Christianity could have made a return. It didn't. 3/x
The numbers are quite striking. They had held constant for most of the 20th century, despite the cultural revolutions of the 1960s and 70s. 4/x wisdomofcrowds.live/why-christiani…
The why of Christianity's decline is in part an intra-Christian question—and one that's painful for adherents, who've been hoping to reverse the trend. One possibility is that the US is simply converging with other Western democracies. It wasn't an exception. It was just late 5/x
The fact that I believe Islam is fundamentally different than other religions, including Christianity, obviously influences my view here. The contrast between how Islam has resisted secularization and how Christianity hasn't is instructive. 6/x amazon.com/Islamic-Except…
I'm really excited about this essay because it allowed me to test out a few different arguments, drawing on the work of the anthropologist Talal Asad as well as the historian @holland_tom, whose recent book Dominion is brilliant. 7/x

wisdomofcrowds.live/why-christiani…

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More from @shadihamid

Shadi Hamid Profile picture
1 Apr
Working on my first ever Friday Essay for @WCrowdsLive, a new subscribers-only feature where @dmarusic and I alternate essays each week. Subscribe here: wisdomofcrowds.live/subscribe/
Last week, @dmarusic wrote our first ever Friday Essay, and it's very, very good. I'm biased, but it's one of the most insightful pieces on American religion that I've read in a long while. Check it out.

'The Paradox of American Faith'

wisdomofcrowds.live/american-faith/
The goal is that a year from now, we'll have 50 or so essays that are high quality but also a little bit odd, because they won't be meant for tens of thousands of people to read.

We want to make the essay fun again.

wisdomofcrowds.live
Read 4 tweets
Shadi Hamid Profile picture
31 Mar
Can we live with decadence? A review of the new edition of @DouthatNYT's excellent book

Must-read from @matt_hw8 for @WCrowdsLive:

wisdomofcrowds.live/decadent-socie…
One of the main insights from @douthatnyt's book is that decadence is obviously "bad," but it's by no means the worst thing a society can experience. If the choice is between living with decadence or being "rescued" from it by a Napoleonic figure, I know which I'd choose
For me, the most fascinating thing about the new edition of @DouthatNYT's book is that COVID "hardly plays a role"

As @matt_hw8 points out: "If a once-in-a-century pandemic can’t jolt us out of our somnolent decline, maybe nothing can"

wisdomofcrowds.live/decadent-socie…
Read 4 tweets
Shadi Hamid Profile picture
30 Mar
1. New Gallup numbers are out on US religion. Yes, church membership isn't an exact proxy for religiosity. But membership tells us about the structured presence of religion in people's lives. As a measure, it's likely to have more political implications than personal belief
2. But individual religiosity has *also *decreased, if not to the same extent. There has been a significant decrease in number of Americans who say God or religion is important in their daily lives, and the numbers are particularly low for young Americans

pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020…
3. Secularization is real and rapid. "Nones"—atheists, agnostics, and those claiming no religion—today represent a quarter of the population. And this has happened over a relatively short period of time

pewforum.org/2019/10/17/in-…
Read 6 tweets
Shadi Hamid Profile picture
24 Mar
Who knows. Maybe “whiteness” doesn’t explain everything. Image
It's been hard to watch otherwise smart liberals twist themselves into knots trying to figure out how to apply absurd and arbitrary constructions around race to current events
Critical race theory, or whatever you want to call this silliness, is objectionable for a number of reasons, but at a very basic level it makes people sound ridiculous
Read 4 tweets
Shadi Hamid Profile picture
21 Mar
Yes, I know people like this. And I worry about them. Who would have thought, irrationality and science going hand in hand? COVID absolutism is its own kind of fanaticism. If you're going to believe in something (and everyone believes in *something*) this is one of the options
Then there are more normal examples of COVID absolutism. In weeks when daily cases were only *50* in a city of half a million, I knew young people with no health conditions who refused to do outdoor dining without a mask
The misinformation around indoor dining was interesting as well, where people would act like it was the most dangerous thing imaginable. To my knowledge, very few (if any?) DC restaurants closed down in recent months due to tracers finding indoor transmission as the source
Read 6 tweets
Shadi Hamid Profile picture
19 Mar
Over the last two decades, America witnessed its sharpest decline in church membership in recorded history. Secularists hoped that religious decline would make for a more rational politics. That didn't happen. Be careful what you wish for.

theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…
In my work on pluralism and living with deep difference, I keep returning to the Dutch theologian Abraham Kuyper. He argued that all strongly held ideologies were effectively faith-based, and that no human being could survive long without a "pivot."
If deeply felt conviction is sublimated religion, then this has major implications. In my @TheAtlantic article, I cite the political theorist @SWGoldman who calls this "the law of the conservation of religion"

theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…
Read 5 tweets

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