{"id":4334,"date":"2013-12-20T11:39:33","date_gmt":"2013-12-20T15:39:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/philosophicalfragments\/?p=4334"},"modified":"2013-12-20T11:39:33","modified_gmt":"2013-12-20T15:39:33","slug":"christmas-americans-and-the-virgin-birth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/philosophicalfragments\/2013\/12\/20\/christmas-americans-and-the-virgin-birth\/","title":{"rendered":"Christmas, Americans and the Virgin Birth"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

A guest post from Mark Tooley, President of the Institute on Religion and Democracy<\/a>:<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

A new poll by Pew Research, just in time for Christmas, shows 73 percent of Americans believe in Jesus\u2019 virgin birth by His mother Mary. Even 32 percent of the self-professed religiously unaffiliated said they believe.\u00a0 White evangelicals were the most believing (97%), followed by black Protestants (94%), white Catholics (88%), Hispanic Catholics (81%) and Mainline Protestants (70%).\u00a0 By comparison, other polls show about one third of the British people profess belief in the Virgin Birth.<\/p>\n

Popular lore claims America is always growing more secular, like Europe.\u00a0 But attachment to core Christian beliefs remains high and shows no major sign of falling. For example, a 2008 Harris poll found that 61 percent of Americans believed in the Virgin Birth.\u00a0 In 1994 it was 78 percent, in 2000 it was 82 percent, and in 2003 77 percent.\u00a0 Non-Christians who said they believed in the Virgin Birth ranged from 47 to 27 percent during those years.\u00a0 A 2008 Barna Poll found that 75 percent of Americans believe the Virgin Birth, including 15 percent of atheists.<\/p>\n

The resilience of the Virgin Birth would surprise American clergy and theologians of 50 and 100 years ago, when the liberal Protestant Social Gospel held sway over nearly all America\u2019s most prestigious religious institutions.\u00a0 Harry Emerson Fosdick, the liberal Baptist who pastored New York\u2019s famed Riverside Church, insisted in the 1920s that \u201cequally loyal and reverent people\u201d could deny the Virgin Birth as \u201chistoric fact.\u201d\u00a0 Instead they could accept it as a metaphorical \u201cexplanation of great personality is one of the familiar ways in which the ancient world was accustomed to account for unusual superiority.\u201d<\/p>\n

In more recent years, retired Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong has mocked Christian \u201cliteralists\u201d who insist on a historical Virgin Birth. He counters that the story was a \u201clate developing tradition in the Christian faith,\u201d not introduced until some 90 years after Jesus\u2019 birth to help explain his special vocation. Liberal American Catholics often quote German theologian Hans K\u00fcng, who described the Virgin Birth as a \u201ccollection of largely uncertain, mutually contradictory, strongly legendary\u201d stories common in antiquity.\u00a0 When New York Times<\/em> columnist Nicholas Kristoff cited Kung in his column 10 years ago, he recalled his devout Presbyterian grandfather who thought the Virgin Birth was a \u201cpious legend.\u201d<\/p>\n

A 1998 poll of Mainline Protestant clergy with an apparently large but not scientific sample found many if not most disbelieving the Virgin Birth, from 19 percent of Lutherans, to 34 percent of American Baptists, to 44 percent of Episcopalians and 49 percent of Presbyterians to 60 percent of United Methodists.\u00a0 Most of these clergy would have been seminary educated in the 1960s and 1970s when modernist Protestant theology was cresting.<\/p>\n

In our new post-modern era, which elevates narrative and experience over the Enlightenment\u2019s definition of provable fact, rejection of miracles like the Virgin Birth is less common even among seminary trained theological liberals.\u00a0 It\u2019s not rare now in Mainline Protestant circles to find young clergy who are socially liberal but affirm the Virgin Birth and Jesus\u2019 bodily resurrection.\u00a0 On the Virgin Birth at least, there is no longer the 1920\u2019s era division between modernists and \u201cfundamentalists.\u201d\u00a0 Of course, evangelical clergy, with Catholic priests, overwhelmingly affirm the Virgin Birth as history central to their faith.\u00a0 And polls show that overwhelming majorities of Christian lay people always have, including Mainline Protestants.<\/p>\n

That so many religious unaffiliated and even some atheists assent to the Virgin Birth seems odd on the surface.\u00a0 But its story of God\u2019s dramatic intervention in the affairs of humanity on behalf of humanity is captivating and almost irresistible.\u00a0 Nativity scenes, static and living, often performed by children across generations, are part of most Americans\u2019 collective warm memory of Christmas long ago and more recently.\u00a0 The story is intrinsically so appealing, and rings true of the God we know is there, that even many religious skeptics have difficulty resisting.<\/p>\n

Continued American affirmation of the Virgin Birth is also a rebuff to once confident 20th<\/sup> century liberal Protestant modernism.\u00a0 Its great cathedrals are now mostly empty or struggling; its seminaries diminished its cultural prestige now a historical memory.\u00a0 Telling parishioners that core doctrines of their faith are not actually true except as poetry was never a recipe for success.\u00a0 Clerics like Bishop Spong claimed they were \u201csaving\u201d Christianity for a new generation that supposedly could not believe the old doctrines.\u00a0 But it was Spong\u2019s now aging generation, or at least a subset of it, that could not believe.\u00a0 The tenets they assailed, like the Virgin Birth, will long outlast them.<\/p>\n

Kristoff wrote 10 years ago that persistent \u201cfaith in the Virgin Birth reflects the way American Christianity is becoming less intellectual and more mystical over time.\u201d But distinguished and popular theologians like British Bishop Tom Wright now offer rich intellectual defense of the Virgin Birth (he prefers to call it the \u201cvirginal conception\u201d), as did C.S. Lewis in the last century.<\/p>\n

Embedded in Christianity\u2019s creeds, liturgy and hymns, and central to its faith that God miraculously became human in the womb of a young Jewish virgin, the Virgin Birth is here to stay.\u00a0 It offers hope that God so loves humanity that He became a vulnerable human Himself.\u00a0 Such a story is so cosmically powerful and wonderfully persuasive that for billions of people, including most Americans, it can only be true.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A guest post from Mark Tooley, President of the Institute on Religion and Democracy: A new poll by Pew Research, just in time for Christmas, shows 73 percent of Americans believe in Jesus\u2019 virgin birth by His mother Mary. Even 32 percent of the self-professed religiously unaffiliated said they believe.\u00a0 White evangelicals were the most […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4336,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[103,531,16],"tags":[125,1369,1326],"class_list":["post-4334","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bible","category-christmas","category-faith","tag-christianity","tag-christmas","tag-faith"],"yoast_head":"\nChristmas, Americans and the Virgin Birth - Philosophical Fragments<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"A guest post from Mark Tooley, President of the Institute on Religion and Democracy: A new poll by Pew Research, just in time for Christmas, shows 73\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/philosophicalfragments\/2013\/12\/20\/christmas-americans-and-the-virgin-birth\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Christmas, Americans and the Virgin Birth - 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