Jacobs’s essay appears in the September 2016 issue of Harper’s Magazine, one of the more influential publications remaining in what is left of America’s once-rich culture of literary magazines. That is not an accident, and it raises the question of intended audience. Does Professor Jacobs intend first to make secular liberals realize what they have lost, or does he want Christian scholars to realize what they have left undone? Perhaps both, but the fact that the essay appears in Harper’s rather than a religious journal like First Things or Books & Culture is certainly a clue.
There can be no doubt that the intellectual culture of the West has been increasingly hostile to theism in general, and Christianity in particular, since at least the nineteenth century. That hostility has only accelerated in the last half-century in the United States. But the real opposition has been directed, not to religion in a generic and harmless representation, but to orthodox Christian belief.
Read Full Article »