Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Sceptical

by Timothy J. Keller

University of London professor Eric Kaufmann, in his book Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?, speaks of “the crisis of secularism” and argues that the shrinkage of secularism and liberal religion is inevitable.66 Why? There are two basic reasons. One has to do with the trends of retention and conversion. Many point to the rising percentage of younger adult “nones” in the United States as evidence for the inevitable shrinkage of religion. However, Kaufmann shows that almost all of the new religiously unaffiliated come not from conservative religious groups but from more liberal ones. Secularization, he writes, “mainly erodes … the taken-for-granted, moderate faiths that trade on being mainstream and established.”67 Therefore, the very “liberal, moderate” forms of religion that most secular people think are the most likely to survive will not. Conservative religious bodies, by contrast, have a very high retention rate of their children, and they convert more than they lose.68