According to the Pew Research Center, there are 247,000,000 Christians in the United States. In other words, 80% of all Americans identify as Christian.
Pew just released poll showing that nearly half (48%) of these American Christians believe that Jesus will “definitely” (27%) or “probably” (20%) return to earth in the next 40 years. In other words, nearly 119,000,000 million Americans believe that Jesus will return within 40 years.
I am in the midst of a reading programme that involves the classification or human history into various kinds of epochs or periods. Though these typological schemes come in different shapes and sizes, most of them reduce to a progressive binary along these lines:
Ancient Epoch Modern Epoch
Primitive Advanced
Simple Complex
Traditional Rational
Mythic Scientific
The next time I read an anthropologist, sociologist, or historian who tells me that that the Enlightenment worked a revolution in prevailing or characteristic modes of thought and we have passed beyond mythical thinking or a mythopoeic era, my head will almost certainly explode. I’m talking to you Ernst Cassirer, Peter Gay, and Robert Bellah.
