What does this mean for conservative Christians? Keller uses the analogy of an umbrella:<\/p>\n
So what\u2019s happening is the roof has come off for the devout. The devout had a kind of a shelter, an umbrella. You couldn\u2019t be all that caustic toward traditional classic Christian teaching and truth. I spoke on Friday morning to the American Bible Society\u2019s board. American Bible Society does a lot of polling about the Bible. The use of the Bible, reading the Bible, attitudes toward the Bible. They said that actually the number of people who are devout Bible readers is not changing that much.<\/p>\n
What is changing is for the first time in history a growing group of people who think the Bible is bad, it\u2019s dangerous, it\u2019s regressive, it\u2019s a bad cultural force, that was just never there. It was very tiny. And that\u2019s because the middle ground has shifted, so it is more identified with the more secular, the less religious, and it\u2019s less identified now with the more devout.<\/p>\n
Later, he explains what the loss of this umbrella means for the devout:<\/p>\n
The roof came off. That is, you had the devout, you had the secular, and you had that middle ground that made it hard to speak disrespectfully of traditional values. That middle ground now has not so much gone secular, but they more identified with this side. They are identified with expressive individualism, and so they don\u2019t want to tell anybody how to live their lives.<\/p>\n
And so what that means now of course is that the devout suddenly realize that they are out there, that the umbrella is gone, and they are taking a lot of flak for their views, just public flak.<\/p>\n