Why faith is declining in America

The Barbarian

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What has happened? One opinion attributes the growing religious indifference of young people to scientific knowledge that has made a creator of natural phenomena irrelevant. God didn’t design the evolution of species or arrange for the big bang. Yet American universities sanctified Darwinian biology for many decades along with the demystifying explanatory powers of physics loosening the ties of young Americans to their traditional faiths. True, there is a correlation between higher education and religious skepticism. However, even after most colleges and universities had broken ties with the religious denominations that had founded them and ended compulsory chapel, pollsters in the post World War II years had no need for the category “none” in recording the religious beliefs of college students. Theologians, Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich among them, attracted large audiences on college campuses and wrote best sellers used in college courses.

What is new and epitomizes what’s gone wrong with American religion is the moral bankruptcy of the single largest group of American Protestants, white evangelicals. A moral pecking order seems to have been turned on its head. In August 2017, President Trump had to dissolve two of his business advisory councils, composed of people not normally regarded as obsessed with ethical reflection, because of a massive defection of CEO’s. They emerged as moral giants compared to the members of his Council of Evangelical Advisors who remained steadfast in their loyalty to the president.

It was already hard enough to keep a straight face when James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, claimed on the eve of the 2016 election that Trump was “tender to things of the spirit.” Dobson’s endorsement dismissed the candidate’s taped remarks demeaning women as past history. Trump was a changed man, and his sins washed away.
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The moral corruption apparent in the largest segment of American Protestantism began in the ’80s when Jerry Falwell Sr.’s Moral Majority and Ralph Reed’s Christian Coalition started to cozy up to politicians with a conservative social and economic agenda. It’s precisely at that moment when pollsters began to record a retreat from religion by an important segment of the population. Religion disguised as partisan politics may energize evangelical voters, but with respect to faith it has backfired. Yet it goes on. President Trump’s effort to remove restrictions on church political activism has encouraged evangelical leaders to organize their troops to vote Republican in the 2018 midterm elections.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/blame-evangelicals-for-the-decline-in-christian-faith
 

Nang

TOL Subscriber
What has happened? One opinion attributes the growing religious indifference of young people to scientific knowledge that has made a creator of natural phenomena irrelevant. God didn’t design the evolution of species or arrange for the big bang. Yet American universities sanctified Darwinian biology for many decades along with the demystifying explanatory powers of physics loosening the ties of young Americans to their traditional faiths. True, there is a correlation between higher education and religious skepticism. However, even after most colleges and universities had broken ties with the religious denominations that had founded them and ended compulsory chapel, pollsters in the post World War II years had no need for the category “none” in recording the religious beliefs of college students. Theologians, Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich among them, attracted large audiences on college campuses and wrote best sellers used in college courses.

What is new and epitomizes what’s gone wrong with American religion is the moral bankruptcy of the single largest group of American Protestants, white evangelicals. A moral pecking order seems to have been turned on its head. In August 2017, President Trump had to dissolve two of his business advisory councils, composed of people not normally regarded as obsessed with ethical reflection, because of a massive defection of CEO’s. They emerged as moral giants compared to the members of his Council of Evangelical Advisors who remained steadfast in their loyalty to the president.

It was already hard enough to keep a straight face when James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, claimed on the eve of the 2016 election that Trump was “tender to things of the spirit.” Dobson’s endorsement dismissed the candidate’s taped remarks demeaning women as past history. Trump was a changed man, and his sins washed away.
...
The moral corruption apparent in the largest segment of American Protestantism began in the ’80s when Jerry Falwell Sr.’s Moral Majority and Ralph Reed’s Christian Coalition started to cozy up to politicians with a conservative social and economic agenda. It’s precisely at that moment when pollsters began to record a retreat from religion by an important segment of the population. Religion disguised as partisan politics may energize evangelical voters, but with respect to faith it has backfired. Yet it goes on. President Trump’s effort to remove restrictions on church political activism has encouraged evangelical leaders to organize their troops to vote Republican in the 2018 midterm elections.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/blame-evangelicals-for-the-decline-in-christian-faith


The waning of faith has nothing to do with humanistic politics.

For faith to believe in and live according to the will of God is solely the manifest of the supernatural gift of God of His saving grace bestowed upon souls in this world.

If it is waning or lessening, it is only because of God’s judgment and more than likely a sign that the times of salvation are ending and this world as we have known it is reaching conclusion.
 

The Barbarian

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For faith to believe in and live according to the will of God is solely the manifest of the supernatural gift of God of His saving grace bestowed upon souls in this world.

If so, we are merely puppets, doing as He directs us. But puppets who feel love, fear, anger, and pain. Some of whom He created with the sole purpose of eternally torturing us for something He compelled us to do or created us as incapable of doing. That is not the behavior of a good and eternal God.
 

7djengo7

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Yet American universities sanctified Darwinian biology for many decades along with the [highlight]demystifying[/highlight] explanatory powers of physics loosening the ties of young Americans to their traditional faiths.

When are the Darwin cheerleaders going to get around to demystifying their use of their venerated word, "evolve"?

They want to tell me that, say, "Dinosaurs are ancestors of birds"? Fine. That's meaningful. It's false, and patently ridiculous. But, it's meaningful. There are dinosaurs, yes, and there are birds, and it is, indeed, the case, that some things are ancestors of other things (for instance, how Great, Great, Great, Great, Great, Great Grandpa Joe is an ancestor to Joe VII. Consider just how immensely stupid one must be in order to be able to say, in all seriousness, something like, "Great, Great, Great, Great, Great Grandpa Joe EVOLVED INTO Joe VII", or, "Fred's father EVOLVED INTO Fred."

But, "Dinosaurs evolved into birds"?? What the heck is that? It's merely a stretch of gibberish formed out of words of the English tongue. I have never gotten a coherent response to the question of what (if anything) it is for one thing to "evolve into" another thing.

Try this: Ask Darwin cheerleaders to try to tell you exactly what it is for, say, Dino the Dinosaur, an individual dinosaur, to "evolve into" Rudy the Robin, an individual bird.

They say, of course, that dinosaurs (plural) "evolved into" birds (plural). If they imagine they are, in so saying, really uttering a proposition--something that's either true, or false--then they have a burden to try to explain what it is for an individual dinosaur (singular) to "evolve into" an individual bird (singular). For, consider how abjectly stupid someone must be who can, in all seriousness, out of one side of his/her mouth, say "Dinosaurs evolved into birds", and, out of the other side of his/her mouth, say "No dinosaur ever evolved into a bird."
 

Bradley D

Well-known member
Evolution is still theory! A big problem with the church is that people want to live as they want. Jesus tells us that "few" will be saved." An old gospel song goes "Everyone wnats to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die."
 

The Berean

Well-known member
First, the article is nonsense. The Daily Beast is a well known leftist rag. The article seems like it was just an attempt to demonize more (conservative) white people. Besides their premise is wrong anyway. The decline of faith has nothing to so with Trump or the Moral Majority back in the 1980's.

I do not believe faith is declining. It was never there to begin with. For generations a large portion of Americans simply attended Sunday church services as a matter of cultural and familial obligation. They went to church because their family and pretty much everyone they knew went to church. But for many either their faith was weak or they never truly had any faith. I want to be clear here. By "faith" I mean believing the Gospel of Jesus Christ, that he is the Messiah and that he died and was resurrected three days later, becoming a new creation in Christ.

Today, there isn't societal pressure to conform to the "religious culture" and not attending church services is no longer viewed in a negative light. So the people who have a weak faith or no faith at all simply do not attend church anymore. They can proclaim to be atheists, or pagans, or new age, or homosexuals or whatever. In previous generations such admissions would be extremely shocking. Today, for the most part no one cares. But believe me there are still true followers of Christ today spreading the Gospel and loving people. I know many of them. My wife and I attend a church which is led by a pastor who takes the Christian faith very seriously. He used to be a God hating atheist. Now he teaches and preaches with fire in the belly. And he encourages everyone to be an active participant in the Body of Christ (not just our local body). And this pastor is a Millennial. ;-)
 

Nang

TOL Subscriber
If so, we are merely puppets, doing as He directs us.

No, the sons of God (Christians) willfully obey His Scriptural directions because they believe they are right and good.

But puppets who feel love, fear, anger, and pain. Some of whom He created with the sole purpose of eternally torturing us for something He compelled us to do or created us as incapable of doing. That is not the behavior of a good and eternal God.

Your description of Christian believers is inaccurate. And your defense of reprobate unbelievers is telling.
 
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