Nonverts: The Making of Ex-Christian America

by Stephen Bullivant

This may turn out to be the great irony of Mormon mainstreaming. A religious group that suffered for affirming polyamory before it was cool may now be paying the price for championing the ideal of monogamous heterosexuality as (for many) it ceases to be.

rather than being America’s moral leaders—as at least segments of the mainline churches could justly claim to be in the past, from northern abolitionists to Social Gospelers19—they’re now constantly left playing catch-up to the evolving cultural consensus.

Clearly, a world in which large numbers of people who neither believe nor practice Christianity nevertheless want to identify as Christians, and quite possibly see this as an important part of who they are, must be a very different world from one where roughly the same types of people certainly don’t want to see themselves as religious at all.

“A Christianity that is without friction in the culture is a Christianity that dies. Such religion absorbs the ambient culture until it is indistinguishable from it, until, eventually, a culture asks what the point is of the whole thing.”