Survival of the Godliest?

“Is God Dead?” I was 11 years old I when spotted that still-notorious 1966 Time magazine cover story on my uncle’s coffee table. The news that God was, if not dead, then at least missing, I absorbed with the literalness of a not-yet-quite adolescent. It certainly seemed possible, since I had never seen him, despite much time in church. Nor did God seem involved in world events as I was coming to understand them. No one I knew evoked God’s handiwork to explain the world they saw coming for my generation. As Time quoted Jesuit theologian John Courtney Murray, “The great American proposition is ‘religion is good for the kids, though I'm not religious myself.’” At the end of childhood in a secular age, that seemed about right. God was in the same category as Santa Claus.