The death of sacred speech

Sacred words and moral terms are vanishing in the English-speaking world. Here’s why it matters.

Bible pages.
(Image credit: Illustrated | RondaKimbrow/iStock)

America boasts more Christians than any other country on planet Earth. But you wouldn't know it from listening to us.

According to Google Ngram Viewer data, a searchable database of millions of printed works stretching back 500 years, most of the central terms in the Christian vocabulary are rapidly declining. One 2012 study in the Journal of Positive Psychology, for example, analyzed 50 moral terms associated with Christianity and found that a whopping 74 percent were used less frequently over the course of the last century:

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Jonathan Merritt

Jonathan Merritt is author of the book Learning to Speak God from Scratch: Why Sacred Words are Vanishing — and How We Can Revive Them and a contributing writer for The Atlantic.