IS GOD DEAD -- AGAIN?

Seems like folks have been trying to kill God ever since He threw us out of Paradise. First the pagans, then the scholars, now the nones....!

Those are the millions who check "none" when asked about their religious affiliation. Emerson smartly wrote, "A man is what he thinks about all day long." Well, to the "nones," it ain't God. In one of those unrelenting surveys in which someone insists on getting us to think about important questions, Trinity College has found 34 million adult Americans, 15% of our population, has no religious affiliation. Up sharply from 8% 20 years ago.

Different people react in different ways to different surveys. Atheists and agnostics must be delighted. Churches, temples and mosques must be concerned. Sociologists mainly just like to debate these things. To date, no one has heard from God.

Maybe that's because a slim majority of the "nones" say they believe in God, and a third assert they pray on a regular basis.Trinity study co-author, Barry Kosmin, explains: "People, especially the young, are skeptical about organized religion and clerics, while still holding to the idea of God." Is that something like saying you believe in baseball, just can't stand the Cubs?

Okay, so attendance in church, synagogue and mosque plummeted from 41% in 1971 to 31% today. Even the hot evangelical mega-churches seem to have maxed out. But what can we extrapolate from these data...?

As more young people swell the population, there is likely to be more skeptical, liberal-based "nones." Which sets us up for one of two hotly discussed possibilities. Either the "end of Christian America" as Newsweek proclaimed last April, or another "great awakening" as is being prayerfully planned in places like the Vatican and the Deep South.

There's a third prospect. Trinity study co-author Ariela Keysar speculates America may simply catch up with the religious indifference of Europeans, where churches are either empty or rented out to music concerts. "We're not there yet," she says, "but we're going in that direction."

Oh, a budding fourth prospect is "home churching" something like "home schooling." This is very much how both Judaism and Christianity first began -- with small home gatherings where worship came from holding hearts rather than heralding hierarchies. Hmmm, sounds interesting....