For demographers and social scientists who study religion in the U.S., the big story of recent years has been the rise of the “nones”—those who do not identify as belonging to any particular religion, faith, or denomination. Absent a major shift, it is likely that nones will by 2026 outnumber both evangelical Christians and Catholics. Philip Jenkins acknowledges various reasons to think that the state of American Christianity is not so dire as these data indicate at face value. But, he argues, it would be prudent to “consider the possibility that we really are seeing a precipitous decline in religion as such—in religious practice and faith—however broadly we define it.” He writes:

There are plenty of reasons why people would abandon their formal identification with churches. They might be appalled by religious activism in politics, or shocked by scandals involving clergy. However, those former adherents don’t necessarily reject religion as such. As repeated surveys show, many of those “nones” in fact seem to be quite religious-oriented, in terms of belief in God, and even of religious practice—in some cases, a surprising amount.

So perhaps what we are looking at just a restructuring, a reboot, not an actual decline. . . . But here is the problem. If a person rejects that church affiliation, and abandons the religious community, how long can he maintain that solitary or non-affiliated religious practice before it dies altogether? Ten years? Thirty? And can that attenuated practice be passed on to the next generation? When does “no religious affiliation” transform into a simple “No religion at all, seriously, and I mean it”?

European evidence suggest that countries do indeed reach this point. . . . [Moreover], there is no intrinsic reason why the changes that have overtaken Western religion should not have their impact on a global scale and, ultimately, even in Africa. If such views are correct, then Christianity has a specific expiration date, to be followed, after some delay, by the other great faiths.

In my recent book, . . . I suggested why we should take such views very seriously indeed, although my own conclusions were nothing like so pessimistic.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.