Is Christianity dying?

Posted on May 13, 2015 
Filed under Opinion

Russell Moore“Bible Belt near-Christianity is teetering. I say let it fall.

For much of the twentieth century, especially in the South and parts of the Midwest, one had to at least claim to be a Christian to be ‘normal.’ During the Cold War, that meant distinguishing oneself from atheistic Communism. At other times, it has meant seeing churchgoing as a way to be seen as a good parent, a good neighbor, and a regular person.

It took courage to be an atheist, because explicit unbelief meant social marginalization. Rising rates of secularization, along with individualism, means that those days are over—and good riddance to them.…”

– Russell Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention responds to a recent study on church attendance in the USA. (h/t Justin Taylor.)

ACL News March 2001Related: Back in 2000, Peter Jensen (then Principal of Moore College) spoke at the ACL Synod Dinner and made these observations about Sydney –

“The 1950s saw large church and Sunday School attendances. The churches seemed to be flourishing. But an acute observer would have been very worried even then. The Christianity of the people was not evangelical. It was a sort of ‘common Christianity’, a ‘lowest common denominator’ Christianity. It had a strong moral emphasis; Christianity was about behaviour not belief; parents sent their children to Sunday School in the hope that they would grow up decent citizens rather than committed Christians. To be born once was enough; to be born again was excessive. The ranks of church-goers were swollen with the unsaved. The real religion was materialism.”

– Read it all in the ACL News of March 2001 – PDF file. (Text-only version here.)