Christianity in America

Even More Good News!

leeduigon(patty)March 9, 2019

He’s still a mighty fortress! Turn up the volume.

Is this a case of “seek and ye shall find”? More good news–it’s out there.

According to a recently-released study by Harvard and Indiana University Bloomington, Christianity in America is not shrinking, but growing stronger (http://thefederalist.com/2018/01/22/new-harvard-research-says-u-s-christianity-not-shrinking-growing-stronger/?fbclid=IwAR2XkMLvWJzF3P4lTkrhMg-wSVxzmAdiCKhMoGsjhpNuM9s8U-Tu5n2YX9U#.XH7kV-iIzB6.facebook).

Yes, the mainline/flatline denominations are declining like mad, people leaving them in droves. But at the same time, overall church attendance, regular Bible reading, trust in the Bible as God’s word, and daily prayer, have held “steel-bar” steady for the past 50 years. It seems people who leave the loosey-goosey liberal churches don’t stop being Christians. They just go somewhere else.

Not only that: in 1989, studies found 39% of Christians held to “strong beliefs and practices.” In the 2018 study, that number had risen to 47%. And according to a Pew poll, the growth of Christianity in America is not within the church denominations, but in “the non-denominational family.” Meanwhile, Christians have more children than the secular crowd.

It all adds up to a “persistent and exceptional intensity” in American Christianity, says the Harvard-Indiana study.

And gee whiz, for some reason, you don’t hear the nooze media shouting it from the housetops. Probably because it makes them sad.

Couple this with Christianity growing stronger and stronger in Asia and Africa, and what we’ve got is some very good news indeed.

[Thanks to Susan for the news tip.]

My Answer (Part 1)

leeduigon(patty)February 10, 2016

If I really, for sure, knew the answer to this question, I wouldn’t be sitting here. But for now, at least, I’m more in the role of a watchman trying to wake people up.

I want to answer you carefully, because you’re entitled to a careful answer, and trying to come up with one is pertinent to my ministry.

Let me start by addressing “separation of church and state,” which our country’s founders never envisioned as a means of driving Christianity out of public affairs and making government the exclusive province of unbelievers.

In fact, we got along quite well for most of our history before anyone realized that the First Amendment gives atheists the right to shut down all public expression of religious belief. Or at least of Christian belief: in my neck of the woods, atheists got rid of our town’s century-old Christmas parade, but don’t seem at all bothered by the annual Hindu festival.

The American people and the American church are to blame for allowing this state of affairs to develop.

If most Americans belong to your Group C, which I grant seems likely, then they won’t care, may not even notice, when Group B goes around Christian-bashing.

But how did so many of us wind up in Group C?

I think it’s because too many of the churches, for 100 years and more, sank into self-involved pietism first and then went on to mutate into “seeker-friendly” houses of entertainment, or even into heresy or outright paganism. About ten years ago I wrote a series of articles about paganism in Mainline Protestant denominations. [Note: most of those articles are available in this blog’s Archives.] It was pretty bad then. I doubt it’s gotten better since.

Long-range, I believe we need political victories which will eventually result in a Supreme Court whose members don’t see themselves as on a mission to disable Christianity and Christians, and who will have the courage to reverse certain abuses. We will also need both national and local leadership that embraces America’s Christian foundation instead of rejecting it.

Short-term, though, Job One has got to be to get Christian children out of teachers’ union-controlled, anti-Christian public schools. Without that, no other victories can be sustained and built upon, in the unlikely event that any victories are won at all. The anti-Christian Left has long known that controlling the culture leads to control of everything, politics included, and they have succeeded in totally dominating public education.

Christian-friendly “reform” of the public school system is simply not possible. It’s too far gone.

Tens of millions of Christian children need to be taken away from those schools and given Christian educations, either at home or in a Christian school. Homeschooling has never been easier or more practicable than it is today, and it will get easier still, less costly, and more efficient as the technology continues to improve and more and more people are involved in it.

Homeschooled children, by the way, routinely outperform the publicly schooled in every academic area.

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Everybody, please feel free to weigh in on these discussions with comments of your own. And pray for me to find good answers to the questions.

I fervently hope this isn’t boring for you. But if it is, blame my editor–it was her idea for me to post this material. And I guess you could blame me, too, because I thought it was a good idea.

A Challenge to Me

leeduigon(patty)February 10, 2016

In my “Playground Player” forum at Chessgames.com ( http://www.chessgames.com ), a many-sided theological discussion has been going on for some two weeks now. I would like to bring part of it here, for my readers.

“Robed Bishop” (we are mostly anonymous at Chessgames) has posed a question to me. It’s a serious question, deserving of a serious answer. I will post it here, with minimal editing.

***

RB: PP, I have a question for you. Given the threat that you see to Christianity in America, as you document daily, what do you think should be done? But before you answer that, let’s see if we can agree on a few fundamentals first.

The Environment

1.We can generally divide Americans into three groups. Group A are vocal Christians, those who fight for Christianity and live it daily. Group B are vocal atheists, non-believers who right to remove prayers from schools, etc., enforcing the separation of church and state. Group C are those who are everyone else, including those who believe in God but do not practice their religion and would not fight to keep Christianity as part of the “American way,” non-vocal atheists (those not trying to influence anyone), Jews, Buddhists, etc.

2. Group C is the largest group, followed by Group A, then Group B. It’s not important that Group A be bigger than Group B, but it is important that Group C be the largest.

The Background

That America was founded on Christian ideals (indeed, settlers fled England at least in part to avoid religious persecution). That historically American has been a “Christian nation,” using Christian symbols, etc.

2. That grounded in the First Amendment and Supreme Court opinions is the fact of separation of church and state.

3. That to the extend that these two propositions are contradictory, vocal atheists have been using the separation argument to eliminate Christian symbols and traditions in America by removing prayer in school, etc.

The Current Situation

1 That by removing Christianity from our schools, courts, etc., we have weakened or eroded Christianity generally in America.

2. That one way Christianity is weakened in America by the separation of of Christian ideals described in #1 is that Christianity is not reinforced in schools, etc.

3. That as our children fall away from Christianity, they go from Group A to Groups B and/or C, but mostly Group C. Therefore, as time goes on, unless something changes, Group A will continue to shrink and Groups B and C will get bigger. As group B expands, the rate of change will accelerate.

So to the question.

If you agree that this is generally accurate, then how do you propose to reverse the trend. And let’s eliminate changing the separation of church and state because that ain’t gonna happen.

If you don’t agree that this is generally accurate, then let’s see where we disagree and see if we can come to some agreement. The foundation I’ve laid out is simply a way to define the problem so we can look at solutions. If we cannot agree on the problem we won’t be able to discuss solutions.

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That’s a hard question, very well laid-out, and it’ll take me some time to answer it. But for the moment, this post is long enough.