Robert P. Jones, the author...

...of The End of White Christian America, was on Chicago Tonight this week. I can't figure out how to upload the video, but you can watch it here. It's an interesting segment (and a reminder to myself to watch this show more often), and Mr. Jones says something at about 3:45 of the interview that I've been thinking about myself a lot lately.

Talking about how younger people are less affiliated with organized religions (beginning at about 2:30), Mr. Jones mentions that almost 40 percent of Americans under the age of 30 "claim no religious affiliation whatsoever."

He goes on to say that "a litmus test issue for this generation is conflicts around gay and lesbian rights." (My emphasis.) And, "a third of them say that negative teachings about, or negative treatment of, gay and lesbian people were one of the important reasons why they left."

And this is what I've been thinking lately about the Catholic Church. If you think in the convenient terms of "three strikes and you're out," this would be the last, and most devastating, strike for the Catholic Church. It may, I submit, be the death knell for Catholicism in America.

Too harsh? Maybe. But let's consider what I would term the other two strikes against the Catholic Church in modern America.

Strike One was Humanae vitae, the encyclical written by Pope Paul VI in 1968. "Subtitled On the Regulation of Birth, it re-affirmed the orthodox teaching of the Catholic Church regarding ... the rejection of most forms of artificial contraception." (My emphasis.)

Now, regardless of how you feel about this issue, it's been estimated that as many as "98 percent of U.S. Catholic women of childbearing age have used contraception at some point while they’ve been sexually active." Even if you cut that number down to, say, 80 percent, that's still an overwhelming majority of Catholic women. And what does that say? They're ignoring a pretty important teaching of the Catholic Church. One that touches them on a pretty regular basis. And what does that further imply? That the laity is going to be the final arbiter of what's right or wrong rather than looking to some institution for moral guidance.

Strike Two against the Catholic Church was the emerging awareness in the 1980s and '90s of child sexual abuse "by Catholic priests, nuns and members of religious orders, and subsequent cover-ups [that] led to numerous allegations, investigations, trials and convictions." And this led to two problems in my opinion.

The first is that the scandals cried out for reforms to the priesthood, namely allowing married and women priests. Why they haven't done this is a separate question, but the problem for me and many other people I suspect is that not only has the Church not taken these most obvious reforms, but they still don't have a good answer (or any answer I would contend) as to why priests can't marry or why women can't be priests, especially when almost every other denomination has evolved in that manner.

But even more important than that is that many studies have claimed "that priests in the Catholic Church may not be any more likely than other men to commit abuse." Now, on the face of it, that may seem to exonerate the Church. But I would contend just the opposite. In fact, it reveals an even greater and more damning truth about the priesthood: these men are no better or worse than anyone else. In other words, they're human beings and nothing special. (When I was a kid my parents seemed to think priests almost had some sort of special pipeline to the Big Guy Upstairs.) So why would anyone look to them for spiritual or moral guidance?

And that brings me back to Strike Three against the Catholic Church: its hostility to the LGBT community. If you know anyone under the age of thirty (and I have two sons in their twenties), you would know how differently they feel toward gays and lesbians than previous generations. While I was raised to think of homosexuality as some sort of personality disorder to be "cured" or at the very least contained, young people today seem to treat it as we would have treated left-handedness: a trait that appears in a certain percentage of people but not a big deal by any means. In fact, young people can't seem for the life of them to understand earlier generations' fear and loathing of gays and lesbians. Never mind gay marriage, of which the Catholic Church will never approve, just its unspoken and subtle hostility toward gays and lesbians will drive many of the remaining straight young people out of the Church. It's as if the Mormons still excluded blacks from most rites and ceremonies. How many white Mormons would still be comfortable with that today?

So, yeah, three strikes and you're out would imply that the Catholic Church is doomed. I'm not prepared to say that (organized religion has more "legs" than I would have thought), but it's going to at least hold back membership and most likely hasten its decline. While the Catholic Church will always be here (at least in my lifetime), I could see it going the way of the mainline Protestant churches: a place to get married, baptize children and have a funeral, but not something that holds a central place in one's moral or even spiritual life.