A recent study is causing a great amount of alarm and soul searching in the American church. The study, reported in Newsweek, found that the number of self-identified Christians has shrunk rather significantly – from 86% to 76% – in the past two decades. Notwithstanding that the overwhelming majority of Americans still claim to be of the Christian faith, the trend is cause for great concern among the remaining Believers.
Whenever reports like this come out, twice the number of suspects are routinely rounded up (to paraphrase a famous line from that old classic, Casablanca). Blame in the case of spiritual decline has been placed at the feet of all sorts of culprits, from the 1963 ban on school prayer to creeping socialism. The trouble with a panic approach to systemic problems is that other much more plausible causes are overlooked.
Americans love statistics. Throw a few stats into any argument and you can sustain the silliest of reasoning because we like to think that figures prove scientific expertise. As with most anything else, statistics need to be both verified and clarified as to what they are really saying. I recall a well educated and monied family in the church I attended as a boy blaming strange weather patterns on the astronauts landing on the moon that summer. Their lofty logic completely escaped my lesser brain.
In the case of the decline of the Christian faith in America, do these stats mean that this is a newly developing problem? No. This decline is only newly surfacing evidence of a trend that began long before it became outwardly evident. Given that people tend to report changes after they have already taken place, the dip in actual faith identification most likely started a couple of decades earlier (meaning forty years ago) with the religious ground actually beginning to shift generations before that.
Do these stats readily identify the causes? Definitely not. In the 1960s, many American neighborhoods experienced what was called “white flight.” White people were alarmed that blacks were moving in and “taking over” entire neighborhoods. What was really happening was that when a single house in a previously “white only” neighborhood was bought by a black family, other whites would suddenly sell out of fear, causing a rapid exodus and a resulting lowering of housing prices, making those homes affordable for lower income families, often nonwhite, also to move in. In short order the neighborhood had become highly mixed or even all-black, though even a small percentage of blacks gave the perception that the neighborhood had gone “black.” Blacks didn’t invade as much as whites fled.
Such cause-effect relationship confusion reminds me of the old story about the boy tormenting his cat. The boy’s mother told the boy to stop pulling the cat’s tail, to which the boy replied, “I’m not doing the pulling, the cat is; I’m just holding on.” Yeah, right.
The influence of atheists and secularists in our nation is still more like moss than some invasive species – they only “take over” where faith “plants” have died out. An increase in the number of atheists or unbelievers or people of other religions does not indicate the infidels are moving in and taking over our uniquely special American “neighborhood.” In reality, a high percentage of immigrants in recent years, especially of Latin origin, are strong Christian faith-oriented. Newsweek reported, for example, that the percentage of professing Muslims is still very minimal.
Contrary to popular hype, we are not being infiltrated. Rather, the loss of faith is a problem in our own Christian backyard.
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