Today, Christians remember when God really was dead. Or at least, when Jesus was really, most sincerely dead. For an appropriately morbid memento mori, here’s David Bentley Hart in First Things arguing that we’ve reached the point that conversation between the religious and anti-religious appears to be dead.

Simply said, we have reached a moment in Western history when, despite all appearances, no meaningful public debate over belief and unbelief is possible. Not only do convinced secularists no longer understand what the issue is; they are incapable of even suspecting that they do not understand, or of caring whether they do. The logical and imaginative grammars of belief, which still informed the thinking of earlier generations of atheists and skeptics, are no longer there. In their place, there is now—where questions of the divine, the supernatural, or the religious are concerned—only a kind of habitual intellectual listlessness.

His jumping-off point is an article (in part mis-reviewing Hart’s very serious latest book) by Adam Gopnik in which the latter explains that what unbelievers “really have now” is “a monopoly on legitimate forms of knowledge about the natural world.”

Uh huh.

Hart concludes,

What I find so dismal about Gopnik’s article is the thought that it represents not the worst of popular secularist thinking, but the best. Principled unbelief was once a philosophical passion and moral adventure, with which it was worthwhile to contend. Now, perhaps, it is only so much bad intellectual journalism, which is to say, gossip, fashion, theatrics, trifling prejudice. Perhaps this really is the way the argument ends—not with a bang but a whimper.

Hart’s piece (and for those who really enjoy mortification of the intellect, Gopnik’s) make strangely appropriate reading for this moribund day on the church calendar.