"I think that the core doctrines of Christianity - the incarnation, the resurrection, life after death-these are as strong as ever. In fact, the belief in life after death has increased in this century"
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Greeley is doing something slyly political under the cover of pastoral reassurance: he’s separating Christianity’s headline miracles from the institutional panic that often surrounds them. By naming the incarnation and resurrection with almost journalistic bluntness, he signals “orthodoxy” without sounding defensive. Then he pivots to the real provocation: not that faith is fading, but that one particular article of faith - life after death - is trending upward. In a century obsessed with “secularization,” that’s a thumb in the eye to elites who treat religion as a residue that modernity should have scrubbed away.
The subtext is a sociologist-priest’s confidence in the data and in the durability of human longing. Greeley isn’t merely claiming that Christians still believe; he’s implying that belief is adaptive. “Core doctrines” reads like a deliberate narrowing: forget denominational quarrels, sexual ethics battles, or liturgical style wars. The engine of the tradition is the promise that death isn’t the final editor.
Context matters. Greeley came of age amid postwar prosperity, Vatican II upheaval, and a late-20th-century marketplace of spirituality: therapy culture, New Age experimentation, near-death narratives, and privatized belief untethered from church attendance. His line quietly concedes that people may drift from institutions while clinging harder to metaphysical comfort. It’s both a warning and an opportunity: the church can’t rely on cultural authority, but the appetite for transcendence remains stubbornly, statistically alive.
The subtext is a sociologist-priest’s confidence in the data and in the durability of human longing. Greeley isn’t merely claiming that Christians still believe; he’s implying that belief is adaptive. “Core doctrines” reads like a deliberate narrowing: forget denominational quarrels, sexual ethics battles, or liturgical style wars. The engine of the tradition is the promise that death isn’t the final editor.
Context matters. Greeley came of age amid postwar prosperity, Vatican II upheaval, and a late-20th-century marketplace of spirituality: therapy culture, New Age experimentation, near-death narratives, and privatized belief untethered from church attendance. His line quietly concedes that people may drift from institutions while clinging harder to metaphysical comfort. It’s both a warning and an opportunity: the church can’t rely on cultural authority, but the appetite for transcendence remains stubbornly, statistically alive.
Quote Details
| Topic | Faith |
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