The ebb of Christianity's tide in America, Part I

Pick a news website, any news website, and with a few key strokes you'll find some article on the recent American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS). What the articles will tell you is that Christianity is dying in America (USA Today has a whole smorgasbord of giddy articles). What the articles won't tell you is that most evangelical denominations and Roman Catholics have increased their total numbers, but against the total population, the percentage of religious proclaimers has dwindled.

Okay. I didn't need a survey to point out that which comes alive in spades anytime I look for a parking spot at the local mall. Or when I get out of my car, walk to the door, and have the person who enters in front of me let the door shut in my face.

Or on my way home, I see it when the tiny dot in my review mirror becomes a streaking SUV with a cell-phone-occupied driver who has to pass as many drivers as he can before entering the road construction and grinding to a halt only to get home 37 seconds faster than if he'd merely merged where he had been in the flow of traffic.

Or when I boot up the computer to dip into Drudge, Fox or CNN and see it in vomitous color, live from Washington DC.

No, it doesn't take a doctorate in theology to determine we've stiff-armed our Deity.

Michael Spencer tackled this topic in a recent essay, examining evangelical Christianity specifically (here). He believes that the evangelical Church in America will shrivel and die in what remains of century twenty-one. He gives a few peripheral reasons, but two of them deserve attention, one with which I agree , the other with which I don't. I'll deal with them in separate posts for the sake of size (and your time).

Point #1 (his second): Abandoning orthodoxy has hobbled the church. Christ Himself made it clear. You build on the rock, your house stands. Build in the goo, and all bets are off. Higher criticism birthed in Germany in the 19th century infected the Church in America in the twentieth. It gutted the Bible. Professors started staring over their reading glasses and telling the rabble that they just couldn't understand the Bible and much of it was suspect anyway. Problem was, they had no basis for such assertions. The archaeological evidence and the manuscript evidence (ancient copies of Scripture) pointed to a Bible as accurate as the day it left the writers' pens. The internal evidence points to the fact that what the writers recorded was the very word of God.

This increasing irreverence for the Bible has led to the increasing impotence in mainline denominations in America. Lutheranism and Methodism are all but dead. Few strong remnants remain. Those that do have clung tenaciously to the veracity of God's word. Evangelicalism grew strong in the 1900's because of a for God that grew out of knowing him in and through his word. That was the beautiful fruit of the Protestant Reformation. Man could read the Bible himself. As the evangelical church abandoned that biblical foundation and sought passion and relationship through entertainment-worship or through experience, they grew anemic.

When it's my opinion versus yours, religion becomes a matter of choice, but when the creature seeks to know the Creator through what the Creator has revealed, choice evaporates. We either choose to bow the knee or go our own way.

You want to know God? He's revealed himself in his word and in the Word, Jesus Christ. You start getting off that foundation, you end up creating God in your own image. Not a good idea.

Tomorrow: Church and politics - for good or ill?