Monday, July 16, 2018
609 - I Don't Believe It
Spirituality Column #609
July 17, 2018
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary
I Don’t Believe It
By Bob Walters
Religion is in decline.
The “None’s” (no religious affiliation) are ascendant. Religion in
America is faltering just like it is in every other developed Western country.
Jesus just
isn’t that important! OMG!
I’m telling
you, I do not believe it. Not for one
second. “Figures never lie but liars
always figure” is a great way to interpret the wiles of the Great Deceiver. Opinion polls will never affect the truth of
Jesus Christ, but academics and the media are regularly complicit in the scare
tactics of hopelessness. If it bleeds,
it leads.
It turns
out that for all the hue and cry over the decades-old growth of the non-religious
“Nones” component in American society, not even the usually religion-friendly
Pew Research folks seem to get what’s going on.
That the mainline protestants are drifting away from churches in
disinterest, and public schools are in a general state of denial over the whole
“God” thing thereby raising a current generation of highly uninformed young
adults, ecclesiologically speaking, is true enough. But the faith number that remains steady is
the 30-35 percent of our population that takes religion seriously enough to attend
church, pray, and crack open a Bible once in a while. Maybe everyone doesn’t have the Jesus thing
figured out, but we’re trying. America is
an anomaly in the Christian world, and God shed His grace on … us.
A report published late last year
by Harvard and Indiana University, “The Persistent and Exceptional Intensity of
American Religion” (link) lays out the evidence that the
cling-lightly-and-let-go non-religious citizen cohort has risen from around 10
percent to around 20 percent tracking trends from 1989 through 2016.
But I knew I was right in not
taking all the “religion is dying” negatives too seriously. It’s this milquetoast group that’s becoming
less interested because … their religion is so much less interesting. I may have been a late-to-the-party believer,
finally “getting it” and being baptized at age 47, but there is a lot of action
in the Bible, with Jesus, with the Holy Spirit, with Church, and with life all
around. God has a multi-ring circus of
truth, love, grace, history, drama, suspense, and salvation going on. In the “developed” world, surveys show,
Americans seem to be the only ones who get it.
As with politics, religion is a
source of great polarization, and these religion numbers bear that out. But … so what? Jesus has always been polarizing – the Bible
says He will be polarizing, Jesus says he will be polarizing. Why?
It is His nature to be polarizing as a force for supreme good in a world
that is grievously fallen. He came for
all, but folks have to pick – He gives us that freedom to accept His grace or
not.
This particular Harvard-IU study on
“religion,” tellingly enough, can’t quite say “Christian,” even though it keeps
talking about the Bible and church. It
reveals an important national direction that even though folks are dropping off
one end – and we must continue to witness – the Jesus train is roaring along
the tracks just fine.
Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) knows that fear is a great seller of
goods, but love is the best seller of ultimate good. And if you mean Jesus, say
“Jesus,” not “religion.”
0 comments:
Post a Comment