"The Lord of the Rings," with its subtext of God's providential guiding, and "The Passion," with its in-your-face text of Christ's suffering for us, have been the big movie successes of the past few months. Pastor Rick Warren's "The Purpose-Driven Life" was the No. 1 nonfiction hardback bestseller last year. Many churches report increasing attendance, and some observers even speculate that a great revival is underway.
At the same time, The Wall Street Journal accurately noted yesterday that "Secular absolutism is becoming the most potent religious force" in America." The WSJ blasted the "effort by liberal activists and their judicial enablers to turn one set of personal mores into a public orthodoxy from which there can be no dissent, even if that means trampling the First Amendment. Any voluntary association that doesn't comply -- the same little platoons once considered the bedrock of American freedom -- will be driven from the public square. Meet the new face of intolerance."
So what's going on? Is this the religious moment, or do secular foes have the big momentum? Sure, the current of religious interest ran very fast for several weeks after 9-11, when the World War II observation that "there are no atheists in foxholes" showed its accuracy once again. But isn't the current slower now, as many are no longer pushed to prayer by the feeling of being preyed upon?
Maybe -- but whether or not terrorists mind their manners, one grim reaping will advance: Baby boomers are aging. Because of their numbers, they have yanked press chains for a third of a century, when college protests in the 1960s, diet books in the 1980s and Viagra in the 1990s all became big news. Interest in religion generally increases as people age, and as this biggest generation contemplates God, the whole world will be watching.
The new debate about a very old matter -- How did life begin? How did man begin? -- is also likely to intensify over the next decade. From the 1860s through the 1980s, Darwin's theories waxed powerful, opposed only by a tiny, scorned group of creationists. That changed during the past decade with the advent of "intelligent design" scientists who explain how complicated processes like blood clotting could not have come about through chance mutations. As more people come to understand the necessity of creation, some will stay to praise the Creator.