April 18, 2001

At the pastors’ conference, a church diagnostician has been telling me and other glassy-eyed pastors that we have to start seeing things differently. Regional churches, more commonly known as megachurches, are the wave of the future. The statistics show “clearly” that megachurches will continue to draw more and more members because of their ability to provide expanded ministries to specific groups of people.

Eleven-year-old Jennifer has invited her friend Claire to spend the day. Jennifer’s younger sister, Laurie, who is eight, is trying to keep up with the older girls. None of them has any interest in Claire’s six-year-old brother, Michael, who is staying with them for about 15 minutes. As the three girls head downstairs, with the older ones leading the way, Laurie turns to Michael and says, “I’m going to tear your hair out by the roots.” Michael looks glum and says, “She hates me.”

Few bytes of humor have logged more miles on the Internet than certain bloopers and gaffes collected by Richard Lederer (in Anguished English and More Anguished English), and those excerpts having to do with religion seem to circulate most widely. Consequently, most e-mail users have seen such Sunday school gems as “Noah’s wife was called Joan of Ark,” “The seventh commandment is thou shalt not admit adultery” or “When Mary heard that she was the mother of Jesus, she sang the Magna Carta.”

What kind of relationship do you want to have with your teen in five years?” Tim Tahtinen, youth leader at the United Methodist Church of Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin, likes to pose that question to parents and then add, “What’s your plan? I have a plan that works.”

For much of this century, the waning influence of religion in American colleges and universities was viewed as a natural concomitant of modernization, and it was generally seen as a necessary or even a good thing. In recent years, Christian scholars such as George Marsden and James Burtchaell have offered a new interpretation of that history, arguing that the marginalization of religion in higher education has been lamentable and assigning the blame to institutional leaders, not to the inexorable forces of modernization.