Posted on 01/19/2012 7:18:48 AM PST by blam
How Will The Shocking Decline Of Christianity In America Affect The Future Of This Nation?
January 19,2012
Is Christianity in decline in America? When you examine the cold, hard numbers it is simply not possible to come to any other conclusion. Over the past few decades, the percentage of Christians in America has been steadily declining. This has especially been true among young people. As you will see later in this article, there has been a mass exodus of teens and young adults out of U.S. churches. In addition, what "Christianity" means to American Christians today is often far different from what "Christianity" meant to their parents and their grandparents.
Millions upon millions of Christians in the United States simply do not believe many of the fundamental principles of the Christian faith any longer. Without a doubt, America is becoming a less "Christian" nation. This has staggering implications for the future of this country. The United States was founded primarily by Christians that were seeking to escape religious persecution. For those early settlers, the Christian faith was the very center of their lives, and it deeply affected the laws that they made and the governmental structures that they established. So what is the future of America going to look like if we totally reject the principles that this nation was founded on?
Overall, Christianity is still the largest religion in the world by far. According to the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, there are currently 2.2 billion Christians in the world. So Christianity is not in danger of disappearing any time soon. In fact, in some areas of the globe it is experiencing absolutely explosive growth.
But in the United States, things are different. Churches are shrinking, skepticism is growing and apathy about spiritual matters seems to be at an all-time high.
Before we examine the data, let me disclose that I am a Christian. I am not bashing Christians or the Christian faith at all in this article. In fact, I consider the decline of Christianity in America to be a very bad thing. Not everyone is going to agree with me on that, but hopefully this article will help spark a debate on the role of religion in America that everyone can learn something from.
Unfortunately, the reality is that most Americans spend very little time thinking about religion or spiritual matters these days.
Just consider the following quote from a recent USA Today article....
"The real dirty little secret of religiosity in America is that there are so many people for whom spiritual interest, thinking about ultimate questions, is minimal," says Mark Silk, professor of religion and public life at Trinity College" This is backed up by the numbers. For example, a survey taken last year by LifeWay Research found that 46 percent of all Americans never think about whether they will go to heaven or not.
To most Americans, faith is simply not a big deal. This is particularly true of our young people. Those under the age of 30 are leaving U.S. churches in droves. The following comes from a recent CNN article....
David Kinnaman, the 38-year-old president of the Barna Group, an evangelical research firm, is the latest to sound the alarm. In his new book, "You Lost Me: Why Young Christians Are Leaving Church and Rethinking Faith," he says that 18- to 29-year-olds have fallen down a "black hole" of church attendance. There is a 43% drop in Christian church attendance between the teen and early adult years, he says. But it isn't just young people that are leaving American churches. The proportion of Americans that consider themselves to be Christians has been steadily declining for many years. Back in 1990, 86 percent of all Americans considered themselves to be Christian. By 2008, that number had dropped to 76 percent.
Meanwhile, the number of Americans that reject religion entirely has absolutely soared. According to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, the number of Americans with "no religion" more than doubled between 1990 and 2008.
So what is going to happen if these trends continue?
Dave Olson, the director of church planting for the Evangelical Covenant Church, has made some really interesting projections regarding what is going to happen to church attendance in America if current trends continue.
According to Olson, only 18.7 percent of all Americans regularly attend church right now. If this number continues to decline at the current pace, Olson says that the percentage of Americans attending church in 2050 will be about half of what it is today.
Other research has produced similar results.
According to a study done by LifeWay Research, membership in Southern Baptist churches will fall nearly 50 percent by the year 2050 if current trends persist.
If you are a Christian, you should be quite alarmed by these numbers.
But what is happening to the faith of our young people should be even more alarming for Christians.
The American Religious Identification Survey by the Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society & Culture at Trinity College is one of the most comprehensive studies on religion in America that has ever been done.
According to that study, 15 percent of all Americans say that they have "no religion".
That is up from 8 percent in 1990.
That is quite a change.
But the move away from religion is particularly pronounced among our young people.
One recent survey found that 25 percent of all Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 say that they have no religion.
Obviously the Christian faith is not winning the battle for the hearts and the minds of our young people. The cold, hard truth is that in America today, the younger you are, the less likely you are to consider yourself to be a Christian.
Large numbers of young Americans that went to church while they were growing up are now leaving U.S. churches entirely. A recent study by the Barna Group discovered that nearly 60 percent of all Christians between the ages of 15 and 29 are no long actively involved in any church.
But not only have they left the church, our young people have also abandoned just about all forms of Christian spirituality.
Just check out the results of one survey of young adults that was conducted by LifeWay Christian Resources....
•65% rarely or never pray with others, and 38% almost never pray by themselves either.
•65% rarely or never attend worship services of any kind.
•67% don't read the Bible or any other religious texts on a regular basis.
If this does not get turned around, churches all over America will be closing their doors. When the survey above first came out, the president of LifeWay Christian Resources stated that "the Millennial generation will see churches closing as quickly as GM dealerships."
But it is not just church that our young people are rejecting.
The reality is that they are also rejecting the fundamental principles of the Christian faith.
One survey conducted by the Barna Group found that less than 1 percent of all Americans between the ages of 18 and 23 hold a Biblical worldview.
The Barna Group asked participants in the survey if they agreed with the following six statements....
1) Believing that absolute moral truth exists.
2) Believing that the Bible is completely accurate in all of the principles it teaches.
3) Believing that Satan is considered to be a real being or force, not merely symbolic.
4) Believing that a person cannot earn their way into Heaven by trying to be good or by doing good works.
5) Believing that Jesus Christ lived a sinless life on earth.
6) Believing that God is the all-knowing, all-powerful creator of the world who still rules the universe today.
Less than 1 percent of the participants agreed with all of those statements.
That is staggering.
But it is not just young adults that are rejecting the fundamentals of the Christian faith.
Even large numbers of "evangelical Christians" are rejecting the fundamental principles of the Christian faith.
For example, one survey found that 52 percent of all Americans Christians believe that "at least some non-Christian faiths can lead to eternal life".
Another survey found that 29 percent of all American Christians claim to have been in contact with the dead, 23 percent believe in astrology and 22 percent believe in reincarnation.
Without a doubt, the religious landscape of America is changing.
Over the past several decades, church attendance has been steadily declining, the percentage of Americans that consider themselves to be Christians has been going down, and the number of people that hold traditional Christian beliefs has been dropping like a rock.
So what does all of this mean for the future of America?
( This Barna study measured youth from highly active evangelical homes. It is likely that the stats are even worse for other Christian denominations or less active Christians.)
Surely, I agree that we must take a multi-pronged approach, but a **major** part of the battle must be closing down every government owned and run K-12 school in this nation. All of them are godless and all of them are socialist. We must work to see that every child in our nation has access to a non-Prussian style, private, conservative, and Judeo/Christian based education.
Changing the culture will not necessarily mean that that our nation's system of socialist schooling will be less godless or less socialist. Simply by attending children must think and reason godlessly just to cooperate in the classroom. How could it be otherwise?
Personally, I believe that our nation's godless socialist K-12 schools are such a threat to our continuing freedom that I will not have a government school teacher for a friend. They are, in my opinion, too evil, too stupid, too much of a Useful Idiot, or they hold more tightly to their government paycheck than to their Christian/conservative principles for me to have them for a friend.
Personally,...I am done with government teachers. They are out of my life.
“If it were entirely the culture and not schooling then why do 95% of homeschoolers remain faithful in their church 2 years after graduating from high school? Why is it that 85% of government schooled children leave the faith?”
Because you’re removing all variables when you look at it, and deciding public school is the single causative factor. I would suggest that home school kids get less “culture”. Less TV, less questionable movies, and supervised internet access.
I went to public school, I haven’t left the faith.
The problem with public schools is those with the financial means, or the interest abandoned the public schools for home school, or parochial schools. We conservatives allowed the liberals to fill the void in public schools. We tended to our own while the liberals tended to everyone else.
Abandoning public schools was a catastrophe. As we are now beginning to notice, there are more of them, then there are of us.
What I was reading was that this translation to “do penance” was where the RCC went awry into the “works based salvation” realm that is the essence of every other religion, save Christianity, on the earth.
That’s kind of like the “breast-fed kids are healthier/smarter” study that was done.
It’s a correlation. Breast fed kids are paid more attention to by their parents, and the parents would be more concerned with the child’s health than the control group.
With the homeschooling & keeping the faith correlation, same deal - parents who care enough to shelter their kids from the secular indoctrination centers are also more likely to keep “the world” out of their homes in other ways as well. No TV, for one.
“That’s kind of like the “breast-fed kids are healthier/smarter” study that was done.”
You need critical thinking to see the whole picture.
Too bad they don’t teach it anymore.
That is an alarming thought. The only things that I see different is that we have an armed citizenry and that many of us know to watch the UK and see what's coming.
I know....if it were only 13 you’d have an explanation....
THAT is alarming.
A LOT of versions say *Do not kill*, instead of *Do not murder*.
http://bible.cc/exodus/20-13.htm
Good point
I would suggest that you don't know what you're talking about.
My homeschooled kids got plenty of exposure to popular culture. The difference was that I was able to defuse it by talking to them. They didn't need deprogramming every day after 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 9-10 months out of the year locked in a public education institution which they weren't permitted to leave without my permission.
Education in public schools is by default secular and godless. They are taught to think that way. Those who come out "OK" are in the vast minority.
Ping!
Actually, the health benefits of breastfeeding do insure a healthier child.
You need critical thinking to see the whole picture. Too bad they don’t teach it anymore.
That's what happens with the public education you're touting.
Many more states here: http://peacebyjesus.witnesstoday.org/RevealingStatistics.html
Also good reads relative to this:
http://www.astorehouseofknowledge.info/Education_in_the_United_States
http://peacebyjesus.witnesstoday.org/CauseEffect.html
There is no unity within Catholicism. Catholics are in no position to point fingers.
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http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/religion/2678253/posts?page=357#357
rogator: “In a manner of speaking it is correct.
Catholics look on diocesan bishops (Catholic and Orthodox) as the successors of the apostles who founded the particular church of their locale. In this manner a person could be a member of the Church of Corinth, Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Tucson or Pittsburgh.
Those of us who prefer Roman Catholic (actually Latin Catholic) are emphasizing our connection with the Roman Pontiff rather than the (e.g.) Maronite or the Melkite Patriarch.
Emphasizing the connection with the particular church rather than the Roman Church is IME common among very liberal Catholics and liberal bishops, many of whom actually see Roman Catholic as a derogatory term.”
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Not to mention the different flavors of Catholicism such as.......
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sect
Sects
Roman Catholic sects
“There are many groups outside the Roman Catholic Church which are regarded as Catholic sects, such as the Community of the Lady of All Nations, the Palmarian Catholic Church, the Philippine Independent Church, the Brazilian Catholic Apostolic Church, the Free Catholic Church, the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God, and others.
The Sodalitium Christianae Vitae started in Lima, Peru, has multiple cases of psychological abuses experienced by youth that were attracted to the movement.[16]”
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There is also Russian orthodox, Eastern Orthodox, Ukrainian Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Coptic (Egyptian) to name a few more.
They most certainly do not adhere to the doctrinal position established by Rome on a number of fronts which many FRoman Catholics consider critical to Catholic faith.
Even within the Rome rite, there is the factions divided into pre and post Vatican II.
you tube by Jonathan Cahn
shalom b'SHEM Yah'shua HaMashiach
Just read it this morning, as a matter of fact.
“I would suggest that you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I wonder if they teach manners at public school? Because if you’re responsible for teaching your kids manners, you may want to consider public school for them.
And variables, they may need some assistance there. I didn’t present what I claimed to be an exhaustive list of variables, I simply enumerated a few. You supervising your children’s consumption of popular culture is a huge mitigating factor that one can assume doesn’t happen for a majority of public school students.
But, you have your mind made up, public schools are evil, and produce nothing but godless morons. Don’t allow me to get in the way of your reality.
I'll give you one example: a lot of people died in Salem at the hands of God-fearing people because of a mistranslation. According to the footnotes in the Bible provided to me by the Church of my youth, the phrase "suffer not a witch to live" is less than correct. According to that Bible, in the footnotes, the more accurate translation of the phrase is "suffer not a poisoner to live."
http://www.hollowhill.com/fun/halloween/witch-bible.htm
This is still in hot dispute, based on what I learned in college courses of comparative religions, so you can't take the link above as gospel. But, in my gut, I believe the quote as originally published is wrong. The second possibility fits better with my perception of Christianity.
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Nah...Protestant Bibles contain more than 5% error, compared to the Catholic Bible they watered down. When you add to that, the notion that the Holy Spirit reveals different interpretations, to each of us individually, the compounded error rate is astounding. Your remarks are broad, yet the claim implicit behind them is a fundamental issue , and i think a few questions are in order. |
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That is all for now. |
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