When I was writing about John Shelby Spong's Jesus for the Non-Religious I concluded that he had misread the mood of the times, and that "the growing churches of our time are not the intellectual, post-theistic churches of the likes of Spong and his fellow progressives. They are the booming fundamentalist megachurches of the pentecostal movement, and the bastions of conservative Catholicism promoted by John Paul II and his followers." Then I read Christine Wicker's The Fall of the Evangelical Nation. Wicker is a religious affairs reporter who spent 17 years writing for the Dallas Morning News, during which she wrote this book. It was published in 2008, conceived in the wake of George W Bush's re-election as US President supposedly on the votes of evangelical Christians who made up 25% of the US population. These figures are Wicker's first target. Using data published by evangelical churches themselves, she finds that the true number of active evangeli
'Contemplating the teeming life of the shore, we have an uneasy sense of the communication of some universal truth that lies just beyond our grasp.' - Rachel Carson