Posted on 05/26/2015 8:18:48 AM PDT by Kaslin
"This is a Christian nation," said the Supreme Court in 1892.
"America was born a Christian nation," echoed Woodrow Wilson. Harry Truman affirmed it: "This is a Christian nation."
But in 2009, Barack Hussein Obama begged to differ: "We do not consider ourselves a Christian nation."
Comes now a Pew Research Center survey that reveals the United States is de-Christianizing at an accelerated rate.
Whereas 86 percent of Americans in 1990 identified as Christians, by 2007, that was down to 78 percent. Today only 7 in 10 say they are Christians. But the percentage of those describing themselves as atheists, agnostics or nonbelievers has risen to 23. That exceeds the Catholic population and is only slightly below evangelicals.
Those in the mainline Protestant churches -- Presbyterians, Lutherans, Methodists, Episcopalians -- have plummeted from 50 percent of the U.S. population in 1958 to 14 percent today. By accommodating the social revolution of the 1960s to stay relevant, mainline churches appear to have made themselves irrelevant to America's young.
The decline in Christian identity is greatest among the young. While 85 percent of Americans born before 1945 still call themselves Christians, only 57 percent of those born after 1980 do.
If we want to see our future, we should probably look to Europe, where Catholic Ireland just voted in a landslide to legalize same-sex marriage and where cathedrals and churches are being turned into tourist attractions and museums and even bars and restaurants.
What are the causes of a de-Christianized America?
High among them is the Supreme Court, which, since the Earl Warren era began, purged Christianity from all public schools and the public square -- and has been met with a puzzling lack of resistance from Middle America to the secularist revolution being imposed upon it.
Second, an anti-Christian elite captured the cultural heights -- the arts, elite universities, popular culture, the media -- and began, through movies, books and magazines, an assault on Christian beliefs and morality.
Third was the social revolution of the 1960s, which began with the arrival of the baby boomers on campus in 1964. Five years on, Woodstock Nation was wallowing in the mud, listening to Country Joe & the Fish.
The counterculture of the '60s would be used as a foil to build 49-state landslides for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, but then the '60s views and values were embraced by the elites and came to dominate the culture in the time of Bill and Hillary Clinton. Given his baggage, "Slick Willy" of Yoknapatawpha County would have been a comic figure in the 1950s. Today he is the Democratic Party's beau ideal of a statesman.
Many churches came out to meet the cultural revolution halfway. The results were irrelevance and scandal -- too many Elmer Gantrys in televangelist pulpits and too many predators in priestly cassocks.
What are the consequences of a de-Christianized America and West? Si monumentum requiris, circumspice. (If you would seek its monuments, look around you.)
Half of marriages end in divorce. Fewer children are being born, and of these, over 40 percent are out of wedlock. Record drug use rates and dropout rates and soaring crime rates that have declined only because we have an incarceration rate that rivals South Africa's.
Despite astonishing advances in medicine, we have far more and far more varied and deadly STDs.
As Christianity dies, individualism, materialism and hedonism replace it. "Selfies" could be the name for the generation for whom Easter Sunday long ago took a back seat to Super Bowl Sunday. More than a million abortions a year, assisted suicide and euthanasia are seen as the milestones of social progress in the new America.
"Panem et circenses," bread and circuses, were what the late Roman Empire was all about. With us, it is sex, drugs and rock, with variations on all three.
Historically, as the faith dies, the culture and civilization to which it gave birth die, and then the people die. And a new tribe with its own gods comes to occupy the emptying land.
On the old and new continents, it is the native-born of European ancestry who are de-Christianizing, aging and dying. And the nations they created are the ones depopulating.
To occupy Rome, the barbarians came from the east and north. To occupy the West, they are coming from the south. And like the Romans of the fourth century, we seem paralyzed and powerless to stop them.
Christianity was the founding faith of the West. That faith and the moral code and culture it produced once united this disparate and diverse nation and civilization.
As Christianity fades away and the moral code and culture it generated recede into irrelevance, what will hold us together?
Economically, we are dependent on foreigners for the necessities of our national life. Our politics are poisonous. Our racial divisions, once ameliorated by shared belief in the same God and Bible, are rawer than they were in the 1950s.
As for equality, diversity and global democracy, who will march and die for that?
Historian Arnold Toynbee said it well: "Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder."
Of course, there is the Treaty of Tripoli, 1797, which stated, “the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”
Agree or disagree, that is what it said.
I believe one of the points of the First Amendment is that we did not want sectarian fighting between Christian denominations. We did not want to argue about whether the government-supported church would be Lutheran or Methodist. We wanted Congress to make no laws on this issue.
But declaring a national sense of the US being a Christian nation would have helped us, I think.
You now have the government you want.
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Well said, and too sad for words.
Afterwhich, we beat the snot out of the Muslim pirates.
Christianity is being diluted by infighting of Christian sects. Every time I read about it I think of the story of the Tower of Babel.
Excellent article by Pat Buchanan.
We were a Christian nation, it isn’t the same as saying that we were created as part of the Christian religion.
Besides, that treaty wording to the Muslims, isn’t the end of discussion on America and Christianity.
Twice.
You don’t think that the democrat voting church denominations and the anti-democrat voting church denominations, might disagree occasionally?
Even within all the thousands of groups there's a constant churning of people coming and going whenever they feel uncomfortable with or disagree with something at a particular church.
Since Luther what passes for Christianity in the West has been on the glide path to, "It's all about me" with the only requirement being that someone say a few magic words which then makes them free to use the name of Christ to justify everything from queers marrying one another to masses of children born out of wedlock if that's how they personally interpret Scripture to suit their Self and Self Alone.
With no authority other than Self, there's anarchy which is the inevitable endpoint of the Protestant Revolt.
Actually, the treaty didn’t say we weren’t a Christian nation.
It said our government wasn’t founded on the Christian religion. Which is, mostly, true.
Which is what I just just pointed out to you.
7 of 10 are Christians? That’s actually more than I thought it would be.
Of course, most of those 7, don’t tithe or go to church every Sunday.
Should read - ‘The decline of America’. And why? Many reasons.
Abortion, removal of prayer in many areas, political correctness, incompetent, greedy and selfish politicians who think they are gods, no standards of conduct like the 10 commandments (just do what feels good including a marriage of men to men and women to women), right is wrong and wrong is right, an almost non-existent educational system or program ( today is little more than just a brainwashing program),a massive government out of control relative to spending, racism encouraged, class warfare encouraged, police forces under attack, our military under attack, truth, decency and virtue under attack. and voters who seem to care little about the current mess. Evil is on the Throne - Good is on the Gallows. And the Rubicon has probably been crossed.
The U.S. Constitution was the very first such document in western civilization that did not invoke God but “we the people”. It all began right there.
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