The Church's Demise in the Conscience of the Country?

You can almost visualize New York Times columnist Frank Rich gleefully and smugly wringing his hands as he opines of the demise of largely evangelical Christian-led movements which have championed pro-life and other "culture-war" efforts in the United States.

The gist of Rich's point is that nobody (at least nobody who matters) really cares about things as petty as the use of live human embryos to be used for research or the proliferation of abortions overseas or the defense of traditional marriage. He points to two reasons for this. First, "the family-values dinosaurs that once stalked the earth — Falwell, Robertson, Dobson and Reed — are now either dead, retired or disgraced" and the Republican party has run found these topics to be radioactive in light of most Americans' primary concerns around the economy. So all you have left is a bunch of scattered Christian "wackos" who will huff and puff about their moral outrage but will have very little impact beyond their blustering within the walls of a church.

Oh, speaking of the Church, Rich takes some gratuitous pot-shots at that, too. Here's what Rich has to say about a theory that the bad economy will bring people back to God:

Wrong again. The latest American Religious Identification Survey, published last week, found that most faiths have lost ground since 1990 and that the fastest-growing religious choice is “None,” up from 8 percent to 15 percent (which makes it larger than all denominations except Roman Catholics and Baptists)... How the almighty has fallen: organized religion is in a dead heat with banks and financial institutions on the confidence scale.

I can't help but see this as a challenge to the Church. Is Frank Rich correct in that the Church is on the trend of becoming utterly irrelevant? What does it mean for the Church to love mercy and do justice and stand for those who cannot stand for themselves? On a previous post I had written about what new government advocacy might look like for people of faith. Mr. Colson and Mr. Rich clearly stand of different sides of their belief of how faith should play in society as a whole, with Mr. Rich seemingly being a proponent of keeping faith personal and in the closet, and never dare speaking up to challenge the new American faith as Mr. Rich sees it - the “secular religion of social consciousness” - the same one which is embraced by people like Richard Dawkins and Bill Maher. Don't take my word for it, take a gander at the reader comments.

To be sure, people of faith and the Church will always have challenges and will always need wisdom and discernment in how to effectively and rightly influence society on issues that really matter. And there have been missteps in the past. But ultimately the Church will be just fine. Many decades and even centuries from now after Frank Rich and all of us are no longer on the face of this earth, it is the Church that will still stand. It's just that Frank Rich won't be around to editorialize around its alleged irrelevance.