It is the most secure unwritten rule in American life: you don’t talk about religion in “polite” conversation. Whether it be at work, at home or out in public, we are allowed to talk about just about any topic from sports to the weather to the kids, as long as it doesn’t touch religion. This avoidance of religion extends to popular culture as well. For example, look at this list of TIME magazine’s “50 Best Websites ^[1]“, grouped by category. Can you see what category is missing? That’s right: religion. “Shopping and Travel” gets its own category (after all, consumerism does consume us these days), but religion has no place at the table.

You can also see this in popular TV and movies. I remember a scene from a popular TV show a few years back when a main character was about to die in a plane wreck. He knew he was to die in just a few minutes, but in the show he made no religious statements nor took any religious actions. Contrast that with reality: when 9/11 occurred, there was story after story of people praying in the face of death, asking God to be with them and their families.

Man is fundamentally a religious species: we are homo religiosus. Every culture that has ever existed has been religious and people naturally are pulled towards religion of some sort. So making religion the one topic that is not to be discussed is absurd; it is like banning discussions of the weather, for religion surrounds us as surely as the seasons do.

And by refusing to talk about religion, we are handing the devil a great victory. One of the greatest challenges for evangelization today is our reticence to talk about religion. Good-natured people who want to share their faith hesitate because they know they are breaking the great unwritten rule of our society and so they fear ridicule and ostracization. Yet Christ himself commanded his followers to evangelize all corners of the earth, and as I have mentioned before, evangelization is not just our actions, but requires words as well ^[2]. The American reticence to speak of religion is a major barrier to that work, but as Catholics we need to learn to speak up about our Faith, even at the risk of breaking social conventions.