Jonathan S. Tobin is troubled by the recent Pew survey showing how secular American Jews have become:
Increasingly, secular Jews have come to see any effort to define group identity in ways that include some but exclude others as distasteful and even hateful. This helps explain the most shocking of the Pew findings: More than a third of those Jews polled said belief in Jesus—the one point that all Jews had once been able to agree was something that put you outside the Jewish tent—should not be deemed a disqualifier. How can this be? Simple: It is just an extreme manifestation of the logic governing the inclusion doctrine.
The very idea that Jewish identity involves drawing lines—lines as seemingly insignificant as who may be a voting member of a synagogue and who may receive honors during services—is itself the problem for many Jews. The non-observant American Jewish mind-set is increasingly uncomfortable with the notion of drawing any boundaries around Jewish identity. And that mind-set has been ironically justified by the organized Jewish community’s breathless pursuit of those [intermarried Jews] who have already chosen to place themselves outside the lines.
Dreher draws a lesson for his fellow Christians:
While we certainly have incomparably more cultural cushion, as Tobin notes, our people are being assimilated too by secularism, via religious indifferentism. Fifty years ago, there was a lot more cultural pressure to affiliate with a church. You felt that you should, that it was the right thing to do. That’s long gone. In a free society in which there is no serious penalty, social or otherwise, for not being Christian, you have to give people a reason to want to be a Christian. As we’ve observed in this space, no church has found the solution to waning Christianity (see Pew’s study on the “Rise Of The Nones”), though the Jewish experience seems to confirm the idea that a religion that does not offer something meaningfully distinctive from the mainstream will not endure. If you fling open the windows of the Church to the world as it is today, you run the real risk of the winds blowing your house down.
Or bringing in the fresh air that makes it inhabitable. It’s a difficult line to tread, but Pope Francis seems to be doing just fine with it.
The Dish 