What's happening to religion?

The cover of the April 13, 2009, Newsweek magazine shouts in bright red words against a black background, "The Decline and Fall of Christian America."

The article that addresses this statement is actually titled "The End of Christian America" and reports that the percentage of self-identified Christians has fallen 10 percentage points in the past two decades. Even though dramatic, this pales in comparison to Europe, where only 10 percent of French Catholics attend church regularly, 7 percent of Church of England members attend church more than once or twice a month, 11⁄2 percent of Sweden Lutherans, formerly the state religion, go to church at all, and in Ireland, which has traditionally had the highest church attendance of any country in Western Europe, the percentage professing to be Christians has dropped from 85 percent to 60 percent in the past 25 years.

Back in America, the percentage of people who claim no religious affiliation at all has nearly doubled since 1990, from 8 to 15 percent; the Pew Reports says it has doubled from 8 to 16 percent.

In terms of voting, people with no religious affiliation has grown from 5 percent to 12 percent in the past 20 years, roughly the same percentage of the electorate as African Americans.

The number of people willing to describe themselves as atheist or agnostic has increased about fourfold from 1990 to 2009; from 1 million to about 3.6 million. That is about double the number of Episcopalians in the United States.

So what do we make of this? Are we turning into a Godless world on the eve of destruction or is this a natural progression, an evolution if you will, of rational thought? Obviously the answer lies in who one talks to. Religious people will say the former, secular people will say the latter. Secularism, in fact, is defined as people putting their trust in reason, science and the power of the individual.

The decline in religiosity in Europe has been going on for a long time but it's a relatively recent phenomena in the United States. We went through a period of religious decline in the 1960s and '70s where average weekly church attendance dropped from around 60 percent to 40 percent, prompting the controversial "Is God Dead?" cover on a major magazine during that period.

Paraphrasing an old line, the report of God's death was greatly exaggerated, because church attendance leveled off at about 40 percent and stayed there until just recently, making the United States a more religious country than any of its western European counterparts.

But now the decline has started again and there are many reasons for it. One can go into any church in American and find two population groups always over-represented and one population group significantly underrepresented. The old and the young go to church and most of the people in between don't. The current popular theory as to why this is says that the young are there because they're just learning, the old are there because they're much closer to the end than the beginning and they're trying to cover their bets and the people in between have other things to do.

Actually, most of the experts predicted this decline to occur much sooner around the globe. Their logic was that as man continued to answer the great mysteries of the world through science, the need for other-worldly answers would continue to decline. We remember the travails of Galileo who was imprisoned and threatened with death for religious heresy when he suggested that the Sun was the center of the Universe instead of the Earth. Of course he was right.

Later as we began to understand the weather from a scientific perspective, it became clear to most that hurricanes, floods, tornados, hail, sleet, and snow came from nature and not from God. As probes have reached the outer limits of the universe, we have had to address the fact that this planet we inhabit is nothing more than a pin prick on the body of the cosmos.

Can science disprove the need for religion or the existence of God?

It cannot.

Religion is based on faith and belief; science on observable, testable conditions that produce facts. Believers will continue to believe, regardless of scientific findings and science will continue to press on to answer the great questions still facing mankind, regardless of religion. Can they co-exist?

Of course they can if each side will allow the other the privilege of doing so. Tolerance, understanding, love, and diversity have been the hallmarks of this great country of ours and there's no reason why that can't continue to be as long as we respect the beliefs of our fellow man, regardless of what those beliefs are.