The difference between post-America and the United States of America

What this portends for our nation hopefully disturbs you:

Americans are becoming less religious, judging by such markers as church attendance, prayer and belief in God, and the trend is more pronounced among young adults, according to a poll released on Tuesday.

The share of U.S. adults who say they believe in God, while still high compared with other advanced industrial countries, slipped to 89 percent in 2014 from 92 percent in 2007, according to the Pew Research Center's Religious Landscape Study.

The proportion of Americans who say they are "absolutely certain" God exists fell even more, to 63 percent in 2014 from 71 percent in 2007.

Young people are less likely to pray daily. There's also a partisan line running through the findings: Freedom-Haters are more likely to drift away from faith than Pubs.

I myself am just coming back to a life based on faith. The length of, and reasons for, my drift, have much to do with my demographic makeup. I grew up as a middle-class white person during the period from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s. Saw all the big events of that time span covered live on television: MLK's career as a civil-rights activist, Kennedy assassination, space travel, Selma, Watts, Detroit, Vietnam, mainstreaming of marijuana, LSD, Summer of Love, 1968 (which was so packed with culture-jarring events it's best to here just use numerical shorthand), feminism, the musical soundtrack to the whole thing. I was a high-school senior in the spring of 1973, and I used to skip school when I could to watch the Watergate hearings.

I'm aware that many of my contemporaries lived though the exact same stream of developments and kept focused on studies and goals, married their sweethearts and lived out the ensuing decades much as their American forebears had done for generations. Many, but not all. And even many of them became inured to the overall effect on our civilization, so that when those upheavals began to bear their recent fruit - the immigration flood changing our very demographic makeup, the swallowing of the fiction that the global climate is in some kind of trouble, the federal government making an Illinois high school let a boy whose mental illness has led him to conclude he's a girl use the girl's locker room - they would often shrug and say, "Yeah, it's getting crazy out there" and resume tending to their personal lives.

I spent years as a snot-nosed rebel, with hair past my shoulders, studying everything about Buddhism and Hinduism I could get my hands on, living very loosely.

I won't recount here the particulars of the conversion experience that began my journey back to a forthright embrace of Western values, but let me say that the ideological conversion preceded a serious spiritual turnabout by many years. I finally discovered that I wasn't even "spiritual but not religious." I was just an agnostic, who, when I was honest with myself, didn't really consider the question of whether there was a God and the nature of that God very high on my list of life's important matters.

I was, in microcosm, what had gone wrong with our nation.

What turned me back? What put my tail end in the pew of a country church where the small assemblage that decidedly skews older belts out "Love Lifted Me" and "What A Friend We Have in Jesus" each Sunday right after the pastor booms, "Isn't it good to be in the house of the Lord?"?

It was this: a sense that a demonic force is at loose in our civilization, that our nation's soul is being eaten away as if the damage were being inflicted by cancer, or one of those flesh-eating microbes one reads about.

I came to remember why I'd named this blog as I did.

We're losing our birthright.

God saw fit to bless us with a unique understanding of the preciousness of liberty. He also chose to bless the world with a nation so constituted, that it might serve as an example of how a nation-state can truly thrive for the long haul.

But we may well be the swine before which pearls have been thrown.

And those who see what is happening are already seeing persecution for speaking out, a trend that will continue.

As never before, let us pray for guidance.