Is the poison leaving our culture?

There are those who have for a very long time suggested that religion is a poison for the soul, for our life together as a nation and society, and for humanity as a whole.  Well, take a look around you.  Religion appears to be in decline in the West and do we see any improvement in our behavior or our values or our humanity?  It does not appear that marginalizing religion has helped to make much better.  We are divided and religion accounts for some of that division but not all of it.  Without a common set of values to guide us, we are relatively free to reinvent ourselves -- much in the same way we have reinvented marriage and gender.  But has it improved anything?  Has depression declined and are people nicer and happier without the ominous shadow of faith to rain on their parade?

The reality is that in poll after poll people responding from the vantage point of faith respond more positively about their happiness and the state of their well-being.  Instead of adding to their misery, faith (even those I would never embrace) seems to help them and they freely admit it.  The goal of a solid wall between church and state, religion and life, faith and the public square has been the goal of the secularists for a very long time.  It has been fueled by the false idea that religion is the cause of our problems.  Now we are waking up to and ever less religious society in the West and we seem to have more and more problems -- among them the decline of the West in population.  We have done a very fine job of separating sex from love and from marriage and children from everything so that we might have more money and time to pursue our own happiness and fulfillment but it has not gone according to the progressive plan.  We are old and alone and facing the prospect that the generations after us may not be able to support the social net of programs once designed to ensure a long and happy and healthy retirement.  Maybe the time for assisted suicide is now.  At least the aged among us will decide when it is no longer worth living.  Is that the golden future promised by a religion free society and life?  Obviously, I am speaking tongue in cheek.

The reality is this.  Christianity IS responsible for the elevation of the status of women, for the sacred protection of life, for the well-being of the child, for the esteem of the aged, for the honor of the home, for the binding shape of marriage, for the nobility of work, for the morality which is less words than deeds, for prayers even for enemies, for the increase in mercy and institutions that practice it, and a host of other things.  I do not believe it would be farfetched to suggest that Christianity has been the source of great happiness and if not happiness then contentment.  If Christianity is a poison, it is a poison we are in dire need of having today what with the politics of hate, the rigid lines of division, the self-indulgence that leads to despair, the cheapness of life, the fragility of love and marriage, and the diminishing families and homes of our people.  Those outside love to credit Christianity with everything bad but it is a false narrative and one that we would be smart to deny and discredit.  Christianity has been a force for good and its departure from Western culture and life has resulted not in sustainable bliss but unsustainable depression and fear.  No, we Christians are not perfect and far from it but the alternative offered to us by a religion free society is and should be our worst nightmare.