Responding to two essays on the state of evangelical Christianity in the U.S., John Wilson—an evangelical himself—describes how detached both are from his own experiences. One of the essays asserts that until about 1994, American society was, in general, favorably disposed to Christianity, and only since about 2014 has it become hostile:

Recently I wrote about how when I started college (in the fall of 1966), God used my professors’ utter contempt for “organized religion,” their certainty that no educated person could continue to hold such primitive convictions, to help draw me back to the faith in which I had been raised. In the 1980s, I worked for a reference publisher. One day over lunch, one of my fellow editors asked me (making clear he intended no offense) how someone like me (he meant, in part, someone who read a lot) could be very much a small-o orthodox Christian of the evangelical variety. His question was genuine. We had a good conversation.

As for the suggestion in the other essay, by David Brooks, that “modernity” has “left us with bitterness and division,” Wilson writes:

I have read the equivalent of those sentences (with their invocation of “modernity”) thousands of times, and yet I can’t understand how people (let alone people I myself have learned so much from) find them persuasive. This claim always seems to me to be radically ahistorical, for there has been bitterness and division among humans since the fall—it is hardly an invention of modernity.

And what of the coming post-religious future?

[W]e continue to worship each Sunday at Faith Covenant Church in Wheaton, Illinois. We share the astonishing convictions and hopes that have sustained the faithful for 2,000 years, extravagant as they sometimes seem, all too often distorted by misguided believers . . .

Surveying news websites and social media on Sunday morning, I immediately found some intelligent and well-informed observers arguing that Iran deliberately warned the U.S. of its pending assault on Israel, and calibrated it so that there would be few casualties and minimal destructiveness, thus hoping to avoid major retaliation. In other words, this massive barrage was a face-saving gesture by the ayatollahs. Others disagreed. Brian Carter and Frederick W. Kagan put the issue to rest:

The Iranian April 13 missile-drone attack on Israel was very likely intended to cause significant damage below the threshold that would trigger a massive Israeli response. The attack was designed to succeed, not to fail. The strike package was modeled on those the Russians have used repeatedly against Ukraine to great effect. The attack caused more limited damage than intended likely because the Iranians underestimated the tremendous advantages Israel has in defending against such strikes compared with Ukraine.

But that isn’t to say that Tehran achieved nothing:

The lessons that Iran will draw from this attack will allow it to build more successful strike packages in the future. The attack probably helped Iran identify the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Israeli air-defense system. Iran will likely also share the lessons it learned in this attack with Russia.

Iran’s ability to penetrate Israeli air defenses with even a small number of large ballistic missiles presents serious security concerns for Israel. The only Iranian missiles that got through hit an Israeli military base, limiting the damage, but a future strike in which several ballistic missiles penetrate Israeli air defenses and hit Tel Aviv or Haifa could cause significant civilian casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure, including ports and energy. . . . Israel and its partners should not emerge from this successful defense with any sense of complacency.