A rchive Date
[ 22-06-2003 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Canada ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/byfield.html
Religion is the wave of the future
By TED BYFIELD -- Edmonton Sun
June 22, 2003
The secret of success in Canadian politics is to find which way the parade is marching and to put yourself at the head of it. This maxim is customarily attributed to Mackenzie King, our longest-serving prime minister, whether accurately I don't know.
It's noteworthy, however, that his Liberal successors and this nation's intellectuals a half-century or more after his death may have got the lesson a little wrong. They seem to have found out which way the parade was marching 20 of 30 years ago and have now put themselves at the head of that.
They may discover painfully that, unbeknown to them, the parade had reversed direction and they are now dragging up the rear. You could reach this conclusion from an article in the March issue of the much respected Atlantic Monthly, entitled "Kicking the Secularist Habit." It was written by David Brooks, a Newsweek editor and analyst for the Jim Lehrer News Hour.
"Until September 11," says Brooks, "I accepted the notion that as the world becomes richer and better educated, it becomes less religious. Extrapolating from a tiny and unrepresentative sample of humanity (in Western Europe and parts of North America) this theory holds that as history moves forward, science displaces dogma and reason replaces unthinking obedience. A region that has not yet had a reformation and an enlightenment, such as the Arab world, sooner or later will.
"It is now clear that the secularization theory is untrue. The human race does not necessarily get less religious as it grows richer and better educated. We are living through one of the great periods of scientific progress. At the same time we are living through a religious boom."
Back in 1942, he notes, the Atlantic Monthly published an essay called, "Can Christianity Survive?" Today there are two billion Christians in the world and there will probably be three billion by 2050. The most successful social movement of our age is the growth of Pentecostalism - from zero a century ago to 400 million today, a movement almost wholly ignored by the news media.
There were 10 million Christians in Africa in 1900. Today there are 360 million, a figure that is expected to rise to 633 million by 2025. There were a million Christians in China in 1950. Now there are 100 million.
Meanwhile, those Christian denominations that ignore secularism grow the fastest, "while those that try to be 'modern' and 'relevant' are withering."
Brooks says he is amazed by how "secular fundamentalists can remain smugly ignorant of enormous shifts occurring all around them." They don't notice, for instance, that "end-times" authors like Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins have sold 42 million copies of their books. Ask anybody in an American newsroom what makes a Pentecostal a Pentecostal, and only the secretaries and janitors could provide an answer.
But what about Canada? As the court decisions on gay marriages came down, followed by the fawning federal government acquiescence, it shows that Canada has plunged more deeply into secularism than the United States. The almost universal viewpoint of our bureaucracy, educators, media and above all courts is secularist. A thorough-going embrace of secularism is obviously regarded as the first qualification for a judge.
All this has been done with the tacit assumption that secularism is the wave of the future, that religion has no place in the formation of public policy and should be obstructed in any attempt to assert one, and that the schools should be used to prevent parents from passing their religious convictions on to their children. This, the secularist is sure, is the way the world is going.
Well it may be the way our little corner of the world is going, but throughout the rest if the world the parade has been moving in a very different direction and we are placing ourselves very firmly at the tail end of it.
This realization hit the Americans very hard on Sept. 11, 2001, when those planes hit those buildings. They did not hit our buildings, however, and this fact has given us unmistakable air of smug superiority.
But we belong to the same world they do, and it's getting smaller all the time and every time our courts create what they consider another "advance," we fall farther and farther behind the parade.
Maybe one day our leaders will discover this.
Letters to the editor should be sent to letters@edm.sunpub.com
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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