(OPINION) Once upon a time the United States was known as a “Christian nation”, but now our country is moving away from those roots at a pace that is absolutely breathtaking.
I spend a lot of time writing about the ongoing collapse of our economic system, but the truth is that we are witnessing a collapse of faith as well. In 1972, a Pew survey found that 92 percent of all Americans identified as Christians, but the most recent Pew survey that asked this question discovered that only 63 percent of Americans still identify as Christians at this point…
Pew Research Center has been measuring religious identity since 2007 using a slightly different question wording – “What is your present religion, if any?” – as well as a different set of response options.
Since 2007, the percentage of adults who say they are atheist, agnostic, or “nothing in particular” in the Center’s surveys has grown from 16% to 29%. During this time, the share of U.S. adults who identify as Christian has fallen from 78% to 63%.
If you look at this chart, you will see that the decline has greatly accelerated in recent years. Assuming that this trend continues, it won’t be too long before we are under 50 percent. And it is very important to note that many Americans that still identify as “Christians” want absolutely nothing to do with traditional Christian values.
Church attendance in the United States has been steadily falling for decades as well, and the shift that we have seen since the pandemic started has been particularly dramatic…
Protestant pastors reported that typical church attendance is only 85% of pre-pandemic levels, McConnell said, while research by the Survey Center on American Life and the University of Chicago found that in spring 2022 67% of Americans reported attending church at least once a year, compared with 75% before the pandemic.
As a result, large numbers of churches are being forced to close all over the nation. In fact, a recent Guardian article claimed that “thousands of churches are closing each year”… Churches are closing at rapid numbers in the US, researchers say, as congregations dwindle across the country and a younger generation of Americans abandon Christianity altogether – even as faith continues to dominate American politics.
As the US adjusts to an increasingly non-religious population, thousands of churches are closing each year in the country – a figure that experts believe may have accelerated since the Covid-19 pandemic. We are going down the exact same road that almost every other western nation has already traveled.
At one time, virtually every nation in the western world was heavily Christian, but now most of them have been transformed into post-Christian societies.
It could be argued that the United States is already there as well, and one recent survey found that most parents do not consider it to be important to pass their faith on to their children…
“Parents place less importance on their children growing up to have religious or political beliefs that are similar to their own. About a third (35%) say it is extremely or very important to them that their children share their religious beliefs, and 16% say the same about their children’s political beliefs,” Pew researchers Rachel Minkin and Juliana Horowitz said in Parenting in America Today released on Tuesday.
Numbers such as these should make all of us very sad. As Americans increasingly move away from what they have previously believed, it is inevitable that even more churches will close. Meanwhile, many of the institutions that still remain are bitterly divided over sexuality. Here is just one example…
The United Methodist Church announced a proposal Friday to split the denomination over what it called “fundamental differences” regarding its beliefs on same-sex marriage and LGBTQ clergy.
The proposal, signed by 16 church leaders from around the world, will be voted on at the church’s 2020 general conference in May. If passed, it would allow for a “traditionalist” denomination to separate from the United Methodist Church, the second largest Protestant denomination in the U.S., with more than 12 million members worldwide.
And Roman Catholicism is also being torn apart by controversies related to sexuality… Gay “clubs” operate openly in Catholic seminaries, the institutions that prepare men for the priesthood, the late Pope Benedict XVI has claimed in a posthumously published book scathing of Pope Francis’s progressive agenda.
In a blistering attack on the state of the Catholic Church under his successor’s papacy, Benedict, who died on Dec 31 at the age of 95, said that the vocational training of the next generation of priests is on the verge of “collapse”.
He claimed that some bishops allow trainee priests to watch pornographic films as an outlet for their sexual urges. Our culture is being fundamentally transformed all around us, and many prominent Christian leaders are deeply concerned about where things are headed. During a recent interview, Franklin Graham warned about what will happen if we do not change course… (READ MORE)
