It started with a post on X<\/a> (formerly Twitter)\u2014an expression of Christianity with the brevity the site\u2019s format demands: \u201cThere\u2019s no hope for any of us outside of having faith in Jesus Christ alone.\u201d The poster in question was Lizzie Marbach, whose X bio describes her as a Republican political activist who lives in Ohio.<\/p>\n Marbach\u2019s post easily could have gone unnoticed outside her own following. But then a member of Congress decided to share it\u2014and not just to share it but to dunk on it, hard, to an audience nearly ten times the size of Marbach\u2019s own.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is one of the most bigoted tweets I have ever seen,\u201d the congressman wrote. \u201cDelete it, Lizzie. Religious freedom in the United States applies to every religion. You have gone too far.\u201d<\/p>\n As angry replies accumulated under both posts, another, better-known member of Congress came to Marbach\u2019s defense.<\/p>\n \u201cNo! Stating the core beliefs or principles of your faith isn\u2019t bigoted,\u201d the congresswoman tweeted, rebuking her colleague. It\u2019s \u201creligious freedom and no one should be scolded for that. It\u2019s also wrong to speak about religious freedom while simultaneously harassing people who freely express their beliefs.\u201d<\/p>\n If you\u2019re already imagining these latter two characters, my guess is you\u2019re imagining incorrectly\u2014just as I probably would if I didn\u2019t know the details here. The representative who dunked on<\/a> Marbach is a fellow Ohio Republican, Rep. Max Miller<\/a>. He\u2019s a Marine veteran who served as a special assistant to former President Donald Trump\u2014and he told 50,000 people that Marbach was a bigot for believing Jesus is the only hope of the world.<\/p>\n And the lawmaker who rebuked him<\/a> and defended Marbach? That was Rep. Ilhan Omar<\/a>, the Minnesota Democrat widely known for her membership in the House\u2019s progressive \u201cSquad<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n The unexpected casting of this little internet drama caught my eye and got me thinking (again, as this is a topic I find endlessly fascinating<\/a>) about the strange place religion takes in American public life today. Recent decades\u2019 rapid decline of Christian religiosity<\/a> in the US\u2014by which I mean not only sincere faith and practice but also basic cultural familiarity with the stories and habits of the church\u2014is the context that made this episode possible.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a context I always keep in mind, as both a Christian and a journalist, whenever I write for mainstream audiences. I can\u2019t assume the public understands what I\u2019m talking about when I speak of Jesus, church life, or the core tenets and demands of Christianity. (A few years ago, my mother met someone who\u2019d lived her whole life in the United States, surrounded by churches, and yet was under the impression that Jesus was burned at the stake.)<\/p>\n But it\u2019s also a context I think every<\/em> American Christian would do well to mull over from time to time. Without a foundational understanding of religion\u2019s changing place in our country, we\u2019ll be ill-equipped to talk about faith with our neighbors of other religions or none at all\u2014and we\u2019ll be unprepared for responses like Miller\u2019s dunk.<\/p>\n The dunk itself was revealing, as was the subsequent apology<\/a> in which Miller said he\u2019d \u201cconveyed a message [he] did not intend\u201d without specifying which part of his first tweet was misleading and what message he\u2019d actually like to convey.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t think Miller, who describes himself<\/a> on X as a \u201cproud Jew,\u201d has any animus toward Christians or people of faith more generally. His reaction, I suspect, was to the exclusivity of Marbach\u2019s claim and the exacting demand it implies for all who read it. If there\u2019s \u201cno hope\u201d apart from faith in Christ, the clear suggestion is that each of us should have faith in Christ\u2014and that\u2019s no small proposal.<\/p>\n Or, at least, it shouldn\u2019t be<\/a>. And that expectation is precisely the aspect of faith which is ever more incomprehensible in much of American society. Rapid, large-scale dechurching is but a visible symptom of our nation\u2019s deeper shift toward the secularism philosopher Charles Taylor famously described in his landmark work, A Secular Age<\/em><\/a>. This isn\u2019t secularism in the sense of opposition to religion but in the sense that faith is a real choice we must make, just one option of many, and not a universal norm or obligation.<\/p>\n That shift in our thinking\u2014which I find in my own mind, even though I\u2019ve made my choice\u2014has pushed religion out of a special category concerned with ultimate questions of who we are, how we should live together, and what God wants of us. Instead, religion is often bumped down<\/a> to a lower level among hobbies and sports: nice and engrossing but nonessential, something to do in your leisure time when you\u2019re not at work or dealing with basic necessities like food and sleep and childcare.<\/p>\n This reframe was perfectly encapsulated by a 2020 comment to The Washington Post<\/em> from a Harvard epidemiologist, Ranu S. Dhillon, which I\u2019ve shared at CT<\/a> before.<\/p>\n \u201cProtesting against systemic injustice that is contributing directly to this pandemic is essential,\u201d Dhillon said<\/a>. \u201cThe right to live, the right to breathe, the right to walk down the street without police coming at you for no reason \u2026 that\u2019s different than me wanting to go to my place of worship on the weekend, me wanting to take my kid on a roller coaster, me wanting to go to brunch with my friends.\u201d<\/p>\n I understand the distinction Dhillon was drawing between fundamental rights to life and liberty and more frivolous activities. It\u2019s a good distinction to make, especially in an emergency. Dhillon simply drew the line in the wrong place: Worship isn\u2019t like brunch. It\u2019s more like breathing<\/a>.<\/p>\n Or, at least, that\u2019s the Christian perspective and, I expect, the perspective of anyone serious about the practice of any faith. But this is an increasingly uncommon perspective. The demands, assumptions, and language of religion are growing stranger by the year through sheer loss of familiarity<\/a>\u2014to the point, it seems, that a Republican member of Congress briefly thought a single-sentence expression of Christian belief in public amounted to a bigoted violation of others\u2019 religious rights.<\/p>\n And maybe the fact that Omar was the one to push back on Miller\u2019s dunk shouldn\u2019t surprise us after all. She habitually wears a hijab as a sign of her Muslim faith. It\u2019s a decision which probably has her regularly thinking about the uncertain new place of religion in American public life, too.<\/p>\n
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