Modern Christians often refer to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire as an example of what happens to a nation consumed by moral decay. When that historic example of national degeneration is brought up, what we fail to notice is that Rome’s greatest decline and its eventual fall came after the Imperial Cult (that is, the worship of the Emperor) was replaced by Christianity. The decline of the Roman Empire and the rise of the Christian faith progressed in tandem. Things are not always as they seem or as we would like for them to be.
So to get back to my original question: Why is the percentage of Believers shrinking in America on such a dramatic scale? The first question that should be asked is, what is shrinking? Two decades ago, was it really true that 86% of Americans were Christians? By what definition?
I do not want to go around using a litmus test to determine who among my neighbors is a bona fide Believer in Jesus Christ. I will leave that to God’s discretion in the final judgment. As Jesus said, don’t mess up the wheat crop by tearing the tares out now – wait until the wheat is harvested and then sort them out.
Without saying who is and who is not a true Christian, it is possible to extrapolate that, of the number of people who call themselves Christians, a high percentage are so in name only. As the overall numbers decline and Christianity loses its popularity, we will see an even greater decline in the number of claimants. True believers will always acknowledge their faith. But those who are “Christians” for cultural identification purposes or for convenience sake only will find it less culturally appropriate and convenient to be so identified. As a result, we will likely see an even more rapid decline in the percentage in the coming decades.
Does that mean that the Christian faith is really declining? No, it only means that Christianity as the dominant culture is declining. But what might seem bad for the faith could be a very good thing. The bloated, controlling burden that being a culture’s faith requires of us has left us as Believers far adrift from the robust faith of the New Testament Church.
I have never advocated abandoning our culture and moving into Christian ghettoes as some promote. But at the same time, the American Civil Religion of the 1950s was, I firmly believe, a significant contributing factor in any impotence we as a People of Faith have experienced in the half-century since.
Go back to the first half of the Twentieth Century. It was a time of great cultural and economic progress in America on many fronts. The Church, as is always true, had its strengths and weaknesses. But on the whole the American Church was, sadly, in a time of retreat.
From the time of Finney’s revivals until late in the 19th Century, American Evangelicalism had been experiencing great revival and was in the forefront of much social change, including the abolition of slavery, the right of women to vote, the priority of serving the poor, and the promotion of child labor laws. Finney’s revivals in particular greatly fueled and funded the antislavery cause and women’s rights.
But then around 1900, the devastating Fundamentalist-Modernist split occurred, the great divide in which some Evangelicals took correct doctrine and went into defense mode on every front. For decades after, theologically conservative Christians fled the public square, reversing their fight to liberate blacks and women, for example. When we talk about that 1950s “Christian nation” feeling, what we are really talking about is a theologically liberal or lukewarm faith that had as its defining feature a very low common denominator of “God and Country” and usually not in that order. What we look back at as a moral high ground in American history was neither morally high nor very solid ground when it came to faith.
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