Post-America is officially post-Christian

I've recently come across two blog posts about the Pew Research Center's report on the state of cultural Christianity in our nation. One is by Erick Erickson at The Resurgent and the other is by Shane Van Der Hart at Caffeinated Thoughts.

I'm going to take the liberty of reprising Erickson's piece in its entirety:

Pew has a survey on the state of Christianity in America. There really is no good news for Christianity in it. The religion is on the decline in every part of the country. Whether rich or poor, black or white or hispanic, college educated or without a degree, regardless of region of the country Christianity is declining.

Millennials will be the first generation that is predominately atheist or agnostic.

It is important to note that it is very likely that the number of self-described evangelicals already does exceed and certainly will exceed the number of actual church going Christians in the country too. Evangelical is rapidly becoming an ethnic identifier of someone who loves Jesus, but doesn’t really have a relationship with him.

Parents have a lot to do with the faith of their children and to the extent Baby Boomers identify as Christian but have a deeply shallow faith, their millennial children do too. More interestingly, when you dig into data on church decline in this country, it turns out that actual orthodox Bible believing churches are experiencing less of a decline than their mainline counterparts. It really is true that the last Episcopalian and probably the last of the PCUSA has already been born.

The Southern Baptists, PCA, and other denominations that believe in the inerrant word of God will continue, if in reduced numbers.

Therein lies both a problem and a path forward. Many Bible believing churches that practice expository preacher are practicing shallow faith. It is increasingly common to encounter Christians with no concept of church doctrine. They do not recognize or understand the necessity of belief in the trinity and will argue that since the word isn’t in the Bible that they don’t have to believe it.

The doctrines of the church are falling by the wayside as even some orthodox churches transition their scriptural exposition to self-help messages and pastors who engage in exposition of the Bible leave the deep waters out of sermons.

One of the major problems in Christianity today is the church that uses Sunday service not to recharge the Christian, but lure in the unconverted. These churches deliver shallow sermons that might avoid being off-putting to new believers, but don’t nourish the souls of the believers. If church is a hospital for the wounded saint, more care needs to go into the church’s nursing.

Concurrently, a lot of evangelical churches have ceded the social gospel to the left. The Bible is full of admonitions to take care of those in the church community and to seek the welfare of the local community and a lot of evangelical churches have gotten really bad at doing that. When local communities fall on hard times, even local churches willingly step aside for the government to help. Churches need to do a better job of being parts of their whole community and step up even more to be a part of their internal community.

Hard times are coming to the American church. As those in power are less likely to appreciate or even understand the faith, they will begin structuring society differently. Churches need to build stronger communities within and need to strengthen and deepen the faith and understanding of their congregants.

As an aside, this is a big bonus for seminaries like RTS and Southern that do not cut corners and insist on scholarly depth. The practical preacher needs to become a real scholar and teacher who can help his flock understand the nuances of their faith. That is going to matter more and more as the world becomes more tempting and the faith looks more absurd.

Let's take the points I've put in boldface one at a time.

Millennials, due to what  Erickson points out, are a historically unprecedented lot. Elsewhere in his post, he talks about shallow-faith Christians. At least they had swelled the ranks of Christians of any degree or type sufficiently that the faith, or at least its trappings, informed the secular culture, with traditions and customs that reinforced everyone's notion that ours was a Christian nation. That goes away now that millennials are what they are.

The lack of knowledge of church doctrine that Erickson notes is want makes possible such vapid pronouncements as "Jesus basically just wants us to all love each other," which is nothing more than excuse-making for sinful living.

And, as he says a little further on, sermons in even doctrinally sound churches steer clear of anything that might ruffle feathers. The result is that, as he says, souls go unnourished. Fewer and fewer people develop any kind of spiritual maturity, any sense of relationship with the triune Creator.

And the plain speaking about hard times should be a wake-up call. We are going to find out what it means to be really tested. Maybe we won't be firebombed in our churches as happens in Nigeria, but there's going to be a cost to professing what we know to be true.

Van Der Hart gives us some specifics from the report:

• Twelve percent fewer Americans identify as Christian (65 percent) while religious “nones” (atheists, agnostics, and the unaffiliated) now consist of 26 percent of the population up 9 percent.
• In 2009, a majority of Americans identified themselves as Protestant. In 2019, only 43 percent of Americans do. Only one in five Americans now identify as Catholic, down 3 percent from 2009.
• Atheists have doubled their numbers from 2 percent in 2009 to 4 percent in 2019. There are three percent more agnostics in 2019, 5 percent, than in 2009. The unaffiliated or “nothing in particular” subset of Americans has grown by five percent from 12 percent to 17 percent.
• Only 49 percent of Millennials identify as Christian and four-in-ten identify as a religious “none.”

The going away of those trappings of the faith that used to inform the secular culture means that the general society no longer has our backs as truly hostile societal elements attack and try to silence us.

I'm also currently reading How the West Really Lost God by Mary Eberstadt, and its contention is that , while there's undeniably going to be a chicken-or-egg element to the question of whether Christianity's decline or the decline of the traditional family structure preceded the other, the argument is strong that family decline came first.

I'm not too far into it yet, but she has already discussed the fact that bonds of kinship, which used to be the central identifying factor for anyone and everyone, are now considered fungible. To be someone's sister or uncle or even spouse or child is merely a conditional arrangement. Traditions and customs within a family have been diluted to the point of being effectively inconsequential. One result of this is that understanding of the basics of the faith are not getting passed down.

We're going to have to muster a degree of strength and courage that we hadn't anticipated. We're going to find out firsthand what our Lord meant when he said it would cost us to follow him.