Fewer Americans are encumbered with Church affiliations

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The latest story about declining Christian Belief: from the PEW research group finds it has leveled off. I suspect church attendance has continued to plummet.

Even before I was completely turned off by the GOP drifting into the Moral Majority’s orbit my wife and I were contemplating having children. We began visiting churches in Duluth by 1980 while Jimmy Carter was still president before settling on a Presbyterian church with which both our families had been affiliated in our childhoods. I was then and still am an agnostic. That is a Greek word which basically means without knowledge. For me that would be maybe there is a God, Maybe there isn’t. I didn’t not choose to continue on with a church to baptize a child or to trick God into letting me go to heaven. I just felt my Dad’s making sure I went to Sunday School was a good practice for me to continue.

The paperback at the top is the first Christian book I read. I’d already read Jim Bishops thriller styled book the Lincoln was shot and had heard about this book too which seemed like a worthwhile book to read. I have read from cover to cover the eight books that are parallel with two qualifications about the black bible I was given in third grade. After I returned from Israel/Palestine in 2016 I decided it was time for me to finish the Old Testament. A couple decades earlier I got through four of the five books of the Torah. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy. Numbers eluded my stamina. But when I got back from the Holy land I finished it and got all the way to the Protestant end of the Old Testament Malachi. But my seminary trained wife had a larger and newer translation. That is the one I read although I took notes on note pads so as not to clutter HER book up. I regret not having my own Bible because the notes are paperclipped together and I find it hard to believe I will ever organize therm. If they were in a Bible that would be my organization.

Note II. I never finished the much, much shorter New Testament 30 years ago. I petered….or maybe I should say Pauled out near the end of his books. I’ve attended church for so long I can’t imagine I’ve not heard about the remaining books but I haven’t dedicated time to read them all with the exception of the World ending Revelations. Because that has so poisoned the Republican party and much of fundamentalist Christianity I felt I need to read that bit of Psychedelia.

What brings this book entry into place was the news today that Martin Marty died. I’d never heard of him when I found Pilgrims in their Own Land. Turns out he was the greatest American Christian writer of the last century with 60 books to his credit. Among the many things I learned was his description of so many of our Presidents as “public” or civic religion. Ben Franklin invented this idea to unite the many Christian sects together. This was similar to the ancient Romans who knew good and well that all the temples to their gods and goddeses were important to unite the empire but took for granted that their stories were fanciful myth.

I just realized my reading list is seven. The Red book Handbook of Denominations was a reference book I bought and have paged through to find out about things like the Branch Davidians during the Waco fiasco.

I found the Romance of Bible Scripts … in my church and fell in love with the collection of ancient biblical texts to test the accuracy of the Bible so much I order a copy when Amazon started selling books on the Internet. The Barbarous years is one of the books by Historian Bailyn about the whole history of America. This one started with the very early years of the Puritans whom I learned constituted perhaps the most educated collection of people on Earth clinging to the Indian territory of Massachusetts. They learned ancient Latin, Greek and Hebrew to better understand their King James Bibles. Actually I’m not sure they read the King James. They were probably reading it in Greek. That’s why they established Harvard University which continued to teach those languages up past the Revolutionary War.

Misquoting Jesus and God’s Secretaries are both fascinating. The Secretaries translated the first authorized English language Bible in the time of Shakespeare and I have my mother’s Robb family St. James which was given to Thomas and Charlotte Robb for their marriage in 1874. I had a new leather binding put on it twenty years ago.

I’ve read half of the short Reformation book and a little of the book about the five gospels including Thomas which you might recognized is not in the Bible. The final book is Bible Difficulties which was written by one of the great Bible literalists who insist every word of the Bible is just the way God wants it……..But in all 500 different English translations and 1000 translations into foreign tongues??????

I leant that book to a neighbor who was invited to debate whether there was a God or not. He muffed the debate badly. Perhaps that’s what I should have expected from someone who is a JFK assassination conspiracist. (The following week there was a follow up column to that)

About the author

Harry is a ferociously good natured eccentric in Duluth Minnesota who detests traitors dressed up as Uncle Sam. You can find somewhat better edited writings of his at the Duluth Reader "contributors." page. The URL is:

https://duluthreader.com/contributors/h/84/284-harry-welty