You can bet the farm on it, Mark. God have mercy on us. And I blame the Church. Yes, every single one of us who claims to profess Christ. We have allowed all of us to creep in. I know many people have been watchmen and have been the voices crying in the wilderness, but there just were not enough of us. Let’s face it, when the Catholics vote Obama over their church’s positions on abortion and gay marriage, there is something really rotten in the pews. And I’m not going to single out the Catholic Church. The Protestant churches have been going downhill for years as well...focusing on entertainment and not scripture.
Brutally honest, and very true!
They key issue is the horrendous failure of proper formation within the Church in the last 50 years. Rome was taken over by hostile liberals in the 60's with the advent of Vatican II, and since then has been on a speeding train headed for the spiritual cliff. Proper Catholic formation has been substituted and obliterated into "smiley face pop psychology", and people (as well as clergy) have left the Church in droves since then.
In speaking with my Protestant friends who try to teach Sunday school, they too lament of the poor understanding of their students and children, of anything close to traditional Christian teachings in the last several decades . There has been an underlying malignancy (and this is not just US based) that has undermined Christian society and replaced it with underlying secularism for fear of "not to offend" those who are not Christian. As you stated PP, there have been those few of us who have had the guts to speak up against it, but the rest have either no will, or the understanding of their own faith to defend it in the first place.
Bring back the fire & brimstone.