Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look and an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging

truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stum Street.

Many Christians, a college buddy of mine once observed, are quote-unquote secularists with

a twist.

They believe in God, they want to go to heaven, but they live lives that are indistinguishable

from secularists.

Secularism is, after all, the default way of thinking about life and the world in our

culture today.

It's the water we swim in, the air we all breathe.

In his book The Way of the Modern World, author and theologian Craig Gay described this

problem well.

The problem, he said, isn't that most people are atheists because they're not.

The more people, especially in rising generations, do identify as non-believers and religiously

unaffiliated, a red-blooded atheist is still pretty hard to find in the wild.

The real problem, wrote Craig Gay, is what he called practical atheism.

In other words, what shapes the world is not the proliferation of people who believe

that God does not exist.

It's that so many people live as if God doesn't exist, as if God is irrelevant to most

of life.

Secularism, in other words, has not nearly been as successful in disproving faith as it

has been in privatizing and dismissing faith.

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