“So America often feels more secular even if Americans are not. But all of us, however unknowingly, still swim in the cultural and moral waters warmed by Christendom. Even arch-secularists, in their constant demands for ever greater rights and self autonomy, speak in the language Christendom created.”

A recent Barna study confirms other data showing increased church attendance over the last decade in ostensibly secular New York City, including increased numbers of “born-again” believers. The findings defy not only stereotypes about “godless” New Yorkers but also illustrate that, despite all the talk about secularizing America, church participation has remained remarkably unchanged nationally for most of 80 years.

The much-ballyhooed religiously unaffiliated number about 15-20 percent of Americans (some of whom still report attending religious services and most of whom still profess belief in God). About 75-80 of Americans percent say they are Christian, with Jews the next largest religious group, numbering under 2 percent.

Yet “Christendom” is reputedly over according to many Christian conservatives, who’ve declared America post-Christian. Some have heralded this reputedly new secular age as an opportunity for the church to recover its prophetic witness.

Meanwhile, religious liberals often condemn Christian conservatives for supposedly clinging to Christendom by defending traditional morals in society or civil religion. Some on the religious left deride the whole project of “Christendom” as an egregious compromise of true Christianity dating back to Constantine. For them, Christendom means centuries of theocracy, conquest, empire, slavery, and hypocrisy.

What the critics forget is that Christendom also refined the social conscience and capacity for reform to challenge its own moral failures.

Christendom indeed has included nearly all the faults alleged, but it did not invent any of them. Theocracy, conquest, empire, slavery, and hypocrisy have been intrinsic to nearly all human history. What the critics forget is that Christendom also refined the social conscience and capacity for reform to challenge its own moral failures. Christendom developed human rights and legal equality, social tolerance, constitutional democracy, free enterprise, technology, modern science and medicine, new levels of arts and literature, and refined notions of charity.

Typically most critics of Christendom are unknowingly relying on its assumptions and moral heritage. Some imply that Christians can never really be more than an alternative community, even as they rely on the institutional vestiges of Christendom for their influence and advocacy. More conventional believers on the left denounce the supposed imposition of religious beliefs about marriage or abortion on society while simultaneously urging that society adopt their own religious beliefs about the environment, poverty, or peacemaking.

At the same time, Christian conservatives think that political setbacks on marriage, and hostility from cultural elites in the media and academia especially, mean Christendom is gone, perhaps forever. They are building the barricades and preparing for the coming storm. Their concerns are legitimate. But they may underestimate the continuing underlying continued pull of Christendom in American culture.

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