MARTHA SAWYER ALLEN isn’t here anymore. She’s off to new adventures.” That line ended Allen’s final column in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune (September 4). Her predecessor, Willmar “Bill” Thorkelson, who left that paper a score of years ago, continued to cover religion news as a freelancer. I hope Allen does the same, given her excellent record as interviewer and reporter. Her last column was a round-up of her “furious two decades in religion,” written with a perspective we historians might well envy.Without using the academic term “postmodern” or lapsing into the jargon we academics sometimes favor, she discusses postmodernity in American religion with insight and finesse. She begins by describing a visit to a White Bear Lake megachurch, where she learns that the name Baptist, to say nothing of which sort of Baptist (in this case, General Conference), means nothing. Cedar Valley Church used to be Bloomington Assembly of God. Now it’s downplaying its denominational ties. It’s a market world, and entrepreneurial or do-it-yourself identifiers appeal most directly.

Minnesotans tell polltakers they believe in God, but most don’t think you need to go to church to be a good Christian. The Rev. Greg Boyd of Woodland Hills Church in St. Paul mentioned a member of one-year’s standing who learned the place was Baptist and demanded his money back. Boyd says that’s a symptom of “how our culture has lost a commitment to things bigger than the individual. There’s something sad about that.”