Faith: Beloved Infidels

Religious belief, it would seem, has fallen on bad days. God is dead. Hell has cooled. Man's only heaven is what he can make of earth. Old-fashioned militant atheism may be on the wane, but to some appalled and devout Christians, unbelief seems ascendant, and Antichrist just around the corner. The trouble with the image, according to an international symposium on unbelief last week, is that it is all wrong. "The modern world," declared University of California Sociologist Robert N. Bellah without irony, "is as alive with religious possibility as any epoch...