DRAMATIC FALL IN BIBLE-BELIEVING CHRISTIANS IN THE U.S.A

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These findings come from The American Worldview Inventory 2023, conducted by the Cultural Research Centre at Arizona Christian University under the supervision of George Barna, director of research at the Cultural Research Centre. While born-again Christians make up about one-third of all U.S. adults and are considered “the backbone of local church activity because of their higher level of commitment to the Christian faith,” the study shows that between 2020 and 2023, the share of those who say they believe Jesus did not commit sins during his lifetime on Earth fell from 58% to 44%.

Jesus being sinless is central to the hope Christians have in Him as Saviour explains the apologetics website Got Questions because, “If Jesus were not sinless, there would be no sacrifice for sin.” The apostle Peter stated it clearly: ‘He committed no sin, and no deceit was found in His mouth.’ (1 Peter 2:22) Indeed, as Jesus Christ is God, He has no capacity to sin,” the Christian website explains.

This shift in belief among born-again Christians was among six that showed a significant decline in the past three years that Barna characterized as “indefensible.”

Fewer than half of born-again Christians also now believe they have a unique, God-given calling or purpose. The share of those who held that belief fell from 88% to a staggering 46% during the pandemic.

A downward trend was also observed among those who say the Bible is unambiguous in its teaching about abortion. That belief fell from 58% to 44%. Those who say human life is sacred fell from 60% to 48%.

The number of born-again Christians who say God is the basis of all truth fell from 69% to 63% over the period. The share of born-again believers who say they are deeply committed to practicing their religious faith fell from 85% to 50%, while the share of those who say they read or study the Bible at least once a week fell from 60% to 55%. When it comes to the general population of U.S. adults, Barna said the share of the population that claims to hold a biblical worldview fell from 6% to 4% in the last three years, while less than half now claim to be “deeply committed to practicing” their religious faith. That measure fell from 60% to 48%. Barna also found that only 33% of adults now say they attend church service during a typical week which shows “a decline representing the loss of about 15 million churchgoing adults each week.”

The veteran researcher said the findings on the drastic shift in Christian belief over such a short period of time are “highly unusual” because “religious beliefs and behaviors have typically been a hallmark of consistency.” “Most religious beliefs change over the course of generations, not a few years,” Barna said.

Barna noted that a significant driver behind the decline in Christians holding on to a biblical worldview is syncretism, an ideology described as “the worldview that merges otherwise incompatible philosophies of life, particularly evolution and a Cosmos that has existed for billions of years, into a made-to-order worldview that incorporates enough biblical elements to be minimally Christian in nature.”

These statistics highlight how successful Satan’s strategy to undermine the foundations of God’s Word has been. Thankfully God has raised up ministries such as Creation Ministries International (CMI) and Answers in Genesis to show that evolution and its history of billions of years for this Cosmos is not defensible. In fact, the audacious claim by secular scientists in the New Scientist book How Evolution Explains Everything About Life (2017) cannot be substantiated. On page 69 they claim ” The only thing we know for certain is that life must have popped into existence sometime between Earth’s formation 4.5 billion years ago and the appearance of the first undisputed fossils about 3.4 million years ago.” Living cells require information (DNA) and decoding machinery. Even the simplest living cell has an enormous quantity of information on its DNA (about 600,000 letters) and it has the decoding machinery to read these letters. Also, the instructions to build this decoding machinery are encoded on its DNA. DNA can’t be decoded without the machines, but the machines can’t be built without the DNA coding for them. An impossible vicious circle for chemical evolution. There is simply no way “life must have popped into existence“.

MAKING SENSE OF THIS WORLD

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Today in the west, many consider the church to be dead or dying. Christianity is seen as outdated, bigoted, and responsible for many of society’s problems. This leaves many believers embarrassed about their faith and many outsiders wary of religion. But what if the Christian message is not the enemy of our modern Western values, but the very thing that makes sense of them?

Author Glen Scrivener is a minister, blogger, speaker, and filmmaker. He wrote the book, The Air We Breathe – How we all came to believe in freedom, kindness, progress, and equality, particularly for non-Christians, both those without any religious affiliation and those who, through disillusionment, have moved on from Christianity. The book is also richly rewarding for Christians. Please purchase it directly from CMI at http://www.creation.com.

Some Commendations:

  • “A really excellent book. The last time I read apologetics this compelling, it was by CS Lewis”—Steve Holmes, lecturer in theology, University of St Andrews, Scotland.
  • “This gripping book is apologetics gold: historically informed, cogently argued, relevant and contemporary, and sparkles with interest from start to finish”—Philip Bell, CEO CMI-UK/Europe

CHRISTIAN WORLDVIEW

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Kristin Kobes Du Mez is a professor of history and gender studies at the increasingly liberal Calvin University, so she’s ostensibly an academic scholar, a trained historian. She is the author of Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. It was published on June 23, 2020.

In the book, Du Mez argues — and read this slowly — that “white evangelicalism is characterized by patriarchy, toxic masculinity, authoritarianism, nationalism, anti-gay sentiment, Islamophobia and indifference to Black people’s lives and rights.” 

Kristin Du Mez, with podcasting mic and earphones on

The claims that “scholars” like Du Mez, Gushee, and Jacob Allan Cook are making are so cynical and unbiblical, not to mention corrosive to constructive discourse, that they merit attention and correction. 

Because a Christian worldview is not and has never been about “whiteness.” It’s about being faithful to God’s Word in all of life. And we shouldn’t let any progressive, elitist academic tell us otherwise. 

Du Mez is not the first, it began with David Gushee, professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University and senior columnist for Baptist News Global, publishing a piece called “The deconstruction of American evangelicalism.” Now, that title alone should raise your eyebrows. 

In his article, he highlights a rogue’s gallery of recent authors (Du Mez, Jemar Tisby, Samuel Perry, Andrew Whitehead, Beth Allison Barr) and their newly published books (The Color of Compromise, Taking America Back for God, etc.), contributing to this “deconstruction.” 

Arguably, each of these books makes the same, progressive, new-but-old argument, just from a different intersectional lens, depending on the book: “You (white) Christians think you are being biblical, but really you’re just a bunch of bigots.”

But Gushee makes a point to pay special attention to a book by a former student of his, Jacob Allan Cook. In Cook’s new book, Worldview Theory, Whiteness, and the Future of Evangelical Faith, Gushee exclaims that:

“Cook shows quite powerfully that what white evangelicals have labeled ‘the Christian worldview’ bears a striking resemblance to ‘whiteness,’ that is, white-centered and white-hegemonic ways of viewing and arranging the world and responding to human difference. In other words, all those worldview conferences and seminars really may have been about teaching us how to think like white people, not like Christian people.”

That’s right. Your Christian worldview isn’t actually a Christian worldview. It’s just whiteness.

This type of thinking, and pseudo-scholarship, is running rampant in some evangelical circles. They functionally deny Sola Scripture (by Scripture alone). They are sociologists and historians masquerading as theologians.

A Christian worldview, when applied correctly, both

1. interprets and challenges the culture, calling it to repentance, and

2. convicts the Christian when they, too, are out of line.

The newly formed Center for Biblical Worldview at the Family Research Council defines it like this: “We believe a person exhibits a biblical worldview when their beliefs and actions are aligned with the Bible, acknowledging its truth and applicability to every area of life.”

Dr. Andrew Walker, professor of ethics at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, in his pushback on Du Mez, said it well:

“It is astonishing to me the incredulity of scholars who are unable (or unwilling) to understand that individuals might hold a good faith conviction due to honest biblical interpretation, and not out of some ulterior motive to protect one’s power or privilege.” 

FUTURE OF AMERICA – Part 2

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2020 has proven to be a challenging year for Christians. But I believe God is using Covid to get His church to move back to church as He had planned it as described in the Book of Acts, largely house churches. Good examples of how God has used catastrophe to refine His church are China and even more recently nations such as Iran. Persecution has refined His church to get it to be totally dependent upon Him, even for survival.

Christians must meet in person for corporate worship. On line communication is a dreadful replacement for real community. Come pandemic or martyrdom, we must find a way to meet in person. Isolated we are prone to wonder from the faith, tempted by the world’s allure, and even more prone to depression.

We were never promised safety in Christ. The opposite is true; we are promised persecution (2 Timothy 3:12). A time is approaching when going to church will be dangerous (and I do not mean because of a virus). Now is the time to prepare and reinforce healthy habits. Instill in your children the need and benefit of attending church weekly. Go and be fed the gospel. Even if your church is not perfect (none are), be present and love others.

On the importance of attending church, it is helpful to look at Mosaic Law. While Christians are no longer slaves to the law. The law reflects the character of God. The law is good, valuable, and worthy of our delight. We can learn much about God’s holiness and desires in the law. Consider the absolute seriousness by which God treats the Sabbath, the day of worship, and rest: Exodus 31:12-17.

God cares deeply about the Sabbath. He cares about how He is worshiped. At one point in time, failure to honor the Sabbath as God intended was a crime punishable by death! Friends, corporate, in-person worship is non-negotiable for Christians. Go to church and do not stop.

If Christians are to spiritually flourish in a nation that hates them, they must dedicate time to understanding the significance of worldview, how it is formed, and how it can rightly engage our culture. The following summary of a Biblical world view is the only one that presents an accurate history of the cosmos:- 1. Creation by God of a perfect cosmos 6000 years ago. 2. Entrance of sin and death by man’s rebellion against God. 3. God’s judgement of the World with the worldwide flood of Noah’s day. 4. Confusion of languages at the Tower of Babel that established the nations. 5. God establishes his nation Israel that would birth the Redeemer, Jesus, God’s Son, born of a virgin. 6. Birth of the church at Pentecost. 7. 2000 year history of the church which is soon coming to its prophesied end with Jesus return, first to rescue the Saints at which time His wrath will be poured out on an unbelieving world. Then Jesus returns to earth with the Saints to rescue His nation Israel at the battle of Armageddon. 8.We then have the Millennium. Jesus will rule the nations with the glorified Saints with a rod of iron for 1000 years.

Part an extract from the article in Patheos: Persecution: The New Reality for Biblical Christianity in America by Jack lee