Free Republic

Why are parts of Germany formerly under the enforced secularism of the Communist party rediscovering charismatic religion? In its story of May 16, 2015, the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel carried a story tiled (on its cover at least) “Are Evangelicals Winning the World?” [That is my translation. The German wording is “Are Evangelicals conquering…” I substituted the less martial-sounding English “winning”. To the best of my knowledge, there is a remarkable scarcity of Evangelical suicide bombers.] The story states that Evangelical congregations are generally growing in Germany. But it concentrates on two congregations: one in Stuttgart, in western Germany, the...

In “This Is What Happens When A Millennial Tries To Get A Job,” we highlighted 1) high youth unemployment (U-6 at nearly 14%) and 2) the failure of America’s university system to prepare new entrants for the job market, on the way to painting a rather grim picture for America’s newly-minted college graduates. We’ve also been keen to emphasize the fact that the “strong” labor market is anything but, as wage growth is essentially non-existent and upside “surprises” benefit from the now ubiquitous “vanishing worker.” Given this, it’s no surprise that many of America’s best and brightest find themselves serving...

Tear down that cross and toss it in the wood chipper because the American church is toast. So goes conventional wisdom after recent revelations from the Pew Research Center, which found that in just 7 years, the percentage of Christians in the United States dropped nearly 8 points. The news was met with uncontrolled fits of glee from liberal publications like Salon, where author Patricia Miller gloated that the benefits from the decline of Christianity would be, “huge.” No doubt the scores of natural disaster victims around the globe who have profited from all the atheist relief trucks rolling in...

Nearly everywhere, in red states and blue, abortions are down since 2010, with an overall drop of about 12 percent.

Believe it or not, this isn’t another article about Bruce / Caitlyn Jenner, though the wider question of gender bending could probably be squirreled away in here somewhere. Gallup took time out from polling people about the presidential candidates they like and asked Americans their annual set of questions on taboo subjects and how accepting we tend to be of actions which have been traditionally shunned. If you only went by the headline (Once Taboo, Some Behaviors Now More Acceptable in U.S.) you might think that we’ve suddenly morphed into a nation of hedonists, but the phrase “more acceptable”...

Attendance at the Southern Baptist church on Scenic Drive had dwindled to about 15 most Sundays... There was another congregation...that had been meeting in living rooms and whose pastor carried business cards that quoted from John 4:35: “Look at the fields! They are ripe for harvest.” Maybe they wanted to buy the church... .... selling to the Arabic Baptists might be their best hope of keeping the church from closing. They prayed and then took a vote, and now, a few miles away in a suburban living room, the members of the fledgling Arab congregation were considering an opportunity they...

Take a look around the world and it’s hard not to conclude that the United States is a superpower in decline. Whether in Europe, Asia, or the Middle East, aspiring powers are flexing their muscles, ignoring Washington’s dictates, or actively combating them. Russia refuses to curtail its support for armed separatists in Ukraine; China refuses to abandon its base-building endeavors in the South China Sea; Saudi Arabia refuses to endorse the U.S.-brokered nuclear deal with Iran; the Islamic State movement (ISIS) refuses to capitulate in the face of U.S. airpower. What is a declining superpower supposed to do in the...

Christians decided going to church was enough, rather than advocating Christian morals and values. Jews decided even God wasn’t necessary.— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) May 12, 2015 If Ben Shapiro’s simply stated point isn’t enough to drive home the idea that the latest Pew survey on religious life in America reported absolutely nothing new, just check out one of the latest episodes of the Kardashians in which Kim Kardashian has to Google who baptized Jesus before concluding that she wanted to “find a guy named John” to baptize her daughter, North West. What’s worse, the “guy named John” concept, the...

New Evangelization, where art thou? The Pew Research Center reports that the number of Americans who identify as Christian has fallen sharply, to the tune of nearly eight percentage points in only seven years.  The survey, carried out in 2014, was the second "Religious Landscape Study" Pew conducted since 2007. Based on the 35,000 people the institute interviewed, the American populace is 21% Catholic. It was 23.9% seven years ago.  While the percentage of Americans who identify as Christian dropped from 78.4% in 2007 to 70.6% in 2014, non-Christian religions are growing. Islam showed the greatest gains, growing half a percentage point...

Yesterday, we began our high-minded graduation speech to the Class of 2015. We explained how the young graduates were not only the most heavily indebted in history, but also the least likely to be able to pay their debts. Median wages have been going down since these graduates were about five years old… So have economic growth rates. Today, we continue the speech no one wants us to give… You are heirs to claptrap, nonsense, bogus theories, and trillions of dollars in debt. The systems, programs, and institutions your parents set up are mostly worthless scams. Worse, they produce outcomes...

The U.S. has become significantly less Christian in the last eight years as the share of American adults who espouse no systematic religious belief increased sharply, a major new study found. For what is likely the first time in U.S. history – certainly the first since the early days of the country – the actual number of American Christians has declined. Christianity, however, remains by far the nation’s dominant religious tradition, according to the new report by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center. The rapid increase in the number of adults without ties to traditional religious institutions has strong implications for...

An extensive study by the Pew Research Center has revealed that Christians are declining sharply in America in terms of population share, while the religiously unaffiliated are rising, and now make up a larger share than American Catholics. The rise of religious intermarriages was one trend linked to the growth of the unaffiliated. The report, which was released on Tuesday, stated: "The drop in the Christian share of the population has been driven mainly by declines among mainline Protestants and Catholics. Each of those large religious traditions has shrunk by approximately 3 percentage points since 2007. The evangelical Protestant share...

Christianity is in sharp decline in America, according to new research from the Pew Research Center, making for a significantly less Christian country than that of just seven years ago. The number of Christians dropped by almost 8 percentage points in seven years to 71 percent, and the trend holds across race, gender, education, and geographic dimensions, though Christianity still dominates American religious identity at 70 percent, USA Today said. "It's remarkably widespread," Alan Cooperman, director of religion research for the Pew Research Center, said, according to The Washington Post. "The country is becoming less religious as a whole, and...

. . . but there is less here than meets the eye. At first, the numbers seem alarming, and there is an alarming element to it. Since the last time such a poll was taken in 2008, the percentage of Americans identifying as Christians has dropped from 78 percent to 70 percent. Yes, 70 percent is still an overwhelming majority, but an 8 percent drop in just seven years is pretty big. So how does one account for those one-time devoted followers of Jesus Christ suddenly abandoning the Kingdom of God? One doesn’t, because that’s not what’s really happened here....

The Christian share of adults in the United States has declined sharply since 2007, affecting nearly all major Christian traditions and denominations, and crossing age, race and region, according to an extensive survey by the Pew Research Center. Seventy-one percent of American adults were Christian in 2014, the lowest estimate from any sizable survey to date, and a decline of 5 million adults and 8 percentage points since a similar Pew survey in 2007.

The Christian share of the U.S. population is declining, while the number of U.S. adults who do not identify with any organized religion is growing, according to an extensive new survey by the Pew Research Center. Moreover, these changes are taking place across the religious landscape, affecting all regions of the country and many demographic groups. While the drop in Christian affiliation is particularly pronounced among young adults, it is occurring among Americans of all ages. The same trends are seen among whites, blacks and Latinos; among both college graduates and adults with only a high school education; and among...

An extensive study done by the Pew Research Center has yielded some fascinating information regarding the trajectory of world religions over the next four decades. As of 2010, Christianity was the dominant world religion with roughly 2.2 billion adherents and Muslim's were second with about 1.6 billion adherents. If current demographic trends continue however, Islam is expected to catch up to Christianity midway through the 21st century

April 28, 2015 (LifeSiteNews.com) -- I’ve been saying for quite some time that pornography is dangerous for more reasons than those that we typically discuss. Pornography is not dangerous just because it is spiritually dangerous. Pornography is not dangerous just because it is addictive, unhealthy, and unrealistic. Pornography is dangerous because it is becoming a new ideology of sex, in which women are objects to be abused and consumed and men are sexual aggressors, using the girls and women to physically extract as much so-called “pleasure” as possible.When I first spoke on this issue at the University of Ottawa with...

As someone who both cares about the mission of the church and leads a research organization, I watch the trends in the church and the culture. Occasionally, someone asks me to share some thoughts on the big picture, in the case of the North American context, questions related to "streams" of Protestantism. Based on research, statistics, extrapolation, and (I hope) some insight, I notice 3 important trends continuing in the next 10 years. Trend #1: The Hemorrhaging of Mainline Protestantism This trend is hardly news—mainliners will tell you of this hemorrhaging and of their efforts to reverse it. Mainline Protestantism...

As two of Virginia's top Democrats weigh running for governor in 2017, potentially against each other, they are embracing traditionally liberal issues in a way that would have been politically toxic just years ago in the Upper South state. The bet that both Attorney General Mark Herring and Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam are making is not only that the strongest possible progressive record would help win a Democratic primary, but that it will also help in the general election. Nationally, Democrats have grown emboldened on cultural issues over the past few years, and Virginia—where demographic shifts have widened their path...