“My eyes just about popped out of my head. We had put up Christmas lights and I wondered if we had put them up wrong.” That was Mary Horomanski’s reaction when she went online to check her electric bill and discovered that she owed $284,460,000,000.

The electric company graciously allowed her to defer the full amount until November 2018, but her minimum payment for December was $28,156. Her son called the company and was told that the amount was an error. Her statement was soon corrected to $284.46.

Mary says that after getting the $284 billion bill, she told her son she wanted a heart monitor for Christmas.

Why “religion is not going away”

While you may not have gotten what you wanted yesterday, it’s likely that you celebrated Christmas anyway. Nine in ten Americans did. However, only 46 percent said they observed the day as primarily a religious (rather than cultural) holiday. The consumerism of Christmas continues today: 9 percent of retail sales and up to a third of online sales are returned.

While we can bemoan the secularism of our culture, I think it’s a remarkable fact that nearly everyone in America celebrates a day that is intended to honor Jesus’ birth. In fact, according to Pew Research, 81 percent of non-Christians celebrate Christmas. Included in their number are a third of Jews, three-quarters of Hindus and Buddhists, and 87 percent of people who identify as nonreligious.

The popularity of Christmas is just one example of a trend that is both countercultural and encouraging. In a fascinating recent article, humanities professor Peter Harrison explains “why religion is not going away and science will not destroy it.”

Harrison cites a prediction made in 1966 by anthropologist Anthony Wallace: “Belief in supernatural powers is doomed to die out, all over the world, as a result of the increasing adequacy and diffusion of scientific knowledge.” Wallace’s prediction was conventional wisdom among social scientists,…