Evangelization After the Secular Sabbath
by Jake Meador, Mere Orthodoxy:
For Christians of a certain age, I expect a certain kind of Christian testimony will sound familiar: You grow up in a home with both of your biological parents (who are married), you grow up in and around the church, perhaps even going on Sunday nights and Wednesday nights but certainly on Sunday mornings. You’re taught a form of morality that resembles Christianity in some ways, even if it likely has some rather large blindspots. And most of the people you knew came from similar backgrounds.
As to your own profession of faith, you probably either experienced some kind of conversion experience as a child that grew with you as you matured or you left the church briefly in your teens and 20s, partied a bit, but then had some sort of experience that led to your return to faith and to church, which felt like a fairly seamless process because you already knew what church was like, you knew some Bible verses and stories, and so on.
For many baby boomer evangelicals, this is the story of their Christian life. (It’s not necessarily the experience of previous generations, though that’s another topic for another day.) They grew up in church and they either never left or they left for a short time and returned as they entered later phases of adulthood and began to get a little more serious about their life, choosing to marry, settle down, raise a family, and so on.
[Editor’s note: this is primarily about politics and religion in the US, but many of the points about secularisation are relevant for other Western countries as well.]
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