The latest wide-ranging study on American religious life hit the presses last month, and it said that the American religious landscape is shrinking. In April Newsweek Magazine ran “The End of Christian America” as their cover story.
That’s pretty alarming unless you see it as a wake-up call, one that might help get us back on track.
Nationally the study found the percentage of Christians has declined by a smidgen over the last few years, but more notably a whole lot more people say they have no religion at all. In fact the number of people who call themselves atheists has doubled since 2001. And though many still believe in God, 15 percent of respondents reported they had no religion. That’s an increase from 14.2 percent in 2001and 8.2 percent in 1990.
Now isn’t it just a little bit interesting that this decrease in religious values, loss of faith and abandonment in belief in God was also accompanied by a period of hyperbolic, almost unnatural extraordinary economic growth (the 1990s and most of the first decade of the new century) fueled by greed, materialism, dishonesty and perverted social values?
Wow, what a surprise.
If this were a Shakespearean play or even a cheaply written soap opera, it would be all too obvious to the audience. When human beings act like God and stop thinking they need one, they fall all too swiftly to earth.
This is a no-brainer and not just from some childish God-is-punishing us perspective, but from a deeply spiritual and philosophical one. If we try to live contrary to how God designed us to live, by disregarding our spiritual reality and our spiritual needs simply for the sake of material desires and worldly needs, we will wither and die, just like someone who abuses and deprives their bodies would.
Now I don’t mean to harp on this whole God and morality thing as if it were really important, except it is! It was important enough for almost every one of our Founding Fathers make it the bedrock of our nation and our Constitution. They derived the entire justification for our democracy on rights that were endowed to us by our Creator and three branches of government to check each other so that a higher authority could prevail through such competition of voices.
Even Jefferson, the icon the religion haters bring out all the time to defend their attempt to use the important separation of church and state concept to obliterate all mention of God in the public square at all (a gross bastardization of Jefferson’s intent) derived most of his precepts for the rights of man from John Locke’s discussion on the subject a hundred years earlier. Locke based man’s right to rule himself on his agreement with the law of nature or the will of God, as he described it.
Without the justification of God’s will giving us the reason for our own rights and the reason for us to respect the rights of others there is no starting point from which to determine the rightness or wrongness of our actions. Without any kind of religious backing, even laws simply become arbitrary demands of the few that govern or the tyrannical will of the majority. Such a democratic system is doomed to eventual failure because it has no real foundation.
In such a society, people would be scavengers simply trying to grab as much as they could for themselves, giving into their base desires for self-satisfaction and self-satiation. Sound like anything that has been going on lately?
But here’s the good news: many Americans are starting to get it. Believing in something greater than ourselves is starting to catch on. Most Americans are cutting back. They are reevaluating the point and purpose of their lives. They are spending less and saving more.
Still, amazingly, the government and a whole lot of media are telling us that we are wrong to do this. They say we need to go out and buy, to worship the golden calf a little bit more.
Well, don’t be deterred or confused. We are doing the right thing. And I predict that we may just see a little change in those numbers I cited at the beginning of this article in the year to come, as more of America continues to change our ways and go with God!