The percentage of self-identified Christians has fallen 10 points in the past two decades!

How that statistic explains who we are now—and what, as a nation, we are about to become.

By Jon Meacham | NEWSWEEK

Published Apr 4, 2009

From the magazine issue dated Apr 13, 2009

It was a small detail, a point of comparison buried in the fifth paragraph on the 17th page of a 24-page summary of the 2009 American Religious Identification Survey. But as R. Albert Mohler Jr.—president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, one of the largest on earth — read over the document after its release in March, he was struck by a single sentence.


For a believer like Mohler — a starched, unflinchingly conservative Christian, steeped in the theology of his particular province of the faith, devoted to producing ministers who will preach the inerrancy of the Bible and the Gospel of Jesus Christ as the only means to eternal life — the central news of the survey was troubling enough: the number of Americans who claim no religious affiliation has nearly doubled since 1990, rising from 8 to 15 percent.


Then came the point he could not get out of his mind: while the unaffiliated have historically been concentrated in the Pacific Northwest, the report said, "this pattern has now changed, and the Northeast emerged in 2008 as the new stronghold of the religiously unidentified."


As Mohler saw it, the historic foundation of America's religious culture was cracking.


"That really hit me hard," he told me last week. "The Northwest was never as religious, never as congregationalized, as the Northeast, which was the foundation, the home base, of American religion. To lose New England struck me as momentous." Turning the report over in his mind, Mohler posted a despairing online column on the eve of Holy Week lamenting the decline—and, by implication, the imminent fall—of an America shaped and suffused by Christianity.


"A remarkable culture-shift has taken place around us," Mohler wrote. "The most basic contours of American culture have been radically altered. The so-called Judeo-Christian consensus of the last millennium has given way to a post-modern, post-Christian, post-Western cultural crisis which threatens the very heart of our culture."


When Mohler and I spoke in the days after he wrote this, he had grown even gloomier. "Clearly, there is a new narrative, a post-Christian narrative, that is animating large portions of this society," he said from his office on campus in Louisville, Ky.


There it was, an old term with new urgency: post-Christian. This is not to say that the Christian God is dead, but that he is less of a force in American politics and culture than at any other time in memory.

To the pleasant surprise of liberals who fear the advent of an evangelical theocracy and to the dismay of religious conservatives who long to see their faith more fully expressed in public life, Christians are now making up a declining percentage of the American population.


According to the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) that got Mohler's attention, the percentage of self-identified Christians has fallen 10 percentage points since 1990, from 86 to 76 percent. The Jewish population is 1.2 percent; the Muslim, 0.6 percent.


A separate Pew Forum poll echoed the ARIS American Religious Identification Survey finding, reporting that the percentage of people who say they are unaffiliated with any particular faith has doubled in recent years, to 16 percent; in terms of voting, this group grew from 5 percent in 1988 to 12 percent in 2008—roughly the same percentage of the electorate as African-Americans.

(Seventy-five percent of unaffiliated voters chose Barack Obama.)


Meanwhile, the number of people willing to describe themselves as atheist or agnostic has increased about fourfold from 1990 to 2009, from 1 million to about 3.6 million. [That is about double the number of, say, Episcopalians in the United States - (and approximately equal to the Assemblies of God)]


While we remain a nation decisively shaped by religious faith, our politics and our culture are, in the main, less influenced by movements and arguments of an explicitly Christian character than they were even five years ago.


"I think this is a good thing—good for our political culture, which, as the American Founders saw, is complex and charged enough without attempting to compel or coerce religious belief or observance. It is good for Christianity, too, in that many Christians are rediscovering the virtues of a separation of church and state that protects what Roger Williams, who founded Rhode Island as a haven for religious dissenters, called 'the garden of the church from the wilderness of the world'."


As crucial as religion has been and is to the life of the nation, America's unifying force has never been a specific faith, but a commitment to freedom — not least freedom of conscience [NOTE - This is Meacham's spin, our constitution knows no such things as freedom of conscience. which is contrary and opposite of law! - pure modern liberal nonsense].

At our best, we single religion out for neither particular help nor particular harm; we have historically treated faith-based arguments as one element among many in the republican sphere of debate and decision.


?b> The decline and fall of the modern religious right's notion of a Christian America creates a calmer political environment and, says Meacham, for many believers, may help open the way for a more theologically serious religious life.


Let's be clear: while the percentage of Christians may be shrinking, rumors of the death of Christianity are greatly exaggerated. Being less Christian does not necessarily mean that America is post-Christian.


A third of Americans say they are born again; this figure, along with the decline of politically moderate-to liberal mainline Protestants, led the ARIS authors to note that "these trends … suggest a movement towards more conservative beliefs and particularly to a more 'evangelical' outlook among Christians."


With rising numbers of Hispanic immigrants bolstering the Roman Catholic Church in America, and given the popularity of Pentecostalism, a rapidly growing Christian milieu in the United States and globally, there is no doubt that the nation remains vibrantly religious—far more so, for instance, than Europe.


Still, in the new NEWSWEEK Poll, fewer people now think of the United States as a "Christian nation" than did so when George W. Bush was president (69 percent in 2009 versus 76 percent in 2008). Two thirds of the public (61 percent) now say religion is "losing influence" in American society, while just 26 percent say religion's influence is on the rise.

The proportion of Americans who think religion "can answer all or most of today's problems" is now at a historic low of 54 percent. During the Bush 43 and Clinton years, that figure never dropped below 65 percent.

Many conservative Christians believe they have lost the battles over issues such as abortion, school prayer and even same-sex marriage, and that the country has now entered a post-Christian phase.

[NOTE: This negative attitude needs smashed! What a buch of negative whining Christian Cry-babies]


Christopher Hitchens — a friend and possibly the most charming provocateur you will ever meet—wrote a hugely popular atheist tract a few years ago, "God Is Not Great."

As an observant (if deeply flawed) Episcopalian, I disagree with many of Hitchens's arguments — I do not think it is productive to dismiss religious belief as superstitious and wrong — but he is a man of rigorous intellectual honesty who, on a recent journey to Texas, reported hearing evangelical mutterings about the advent of a "post-Christian" America.

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To be post-Christian has meant different things at different times. In 1886, The Atlantic Monthly described George Eliot as "post-Christian," using the term as a synonym for atheist or agnostic.

The broader — and for our purposes, most relevant — definition is that "post-Christian" characterizes a period of time that follows the decline of the importance of Christianity in a region or society. This use of the phrase first appeared in the 1929 book "America Set Free" by the German philosopher Hermann Keyserling. [NOTE: Seems this this contradicts the date give in the paragraph above!]


The term was popularized during what scholars call the "death of God" movement of the mid-1960s—a movement that is, in its way, still in motion. Drawing from Nietzsche's 19th-century declaration that "God is dead," a group of Protestant theologians held that, essentially, Christianity would have to survive without an orthodox understanding of God.


Tom Altizer, a religion professor at Emory University, was a key member of the Godless Christianity movement, and he traces its intellectual roots first to Kierkegaard and then to Nietzsche. For Altizer, a post-Christian era is one in which "both Christianity and religion itself are unshackled from their previous historical grounds."


In 1992 the critic Harold Bloom published a book titled "The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation." In it he cites William James's definition of religion in "The Varieties of Religious Experience": "Religion … shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they consider the divine."


Which is precisely what most troubles Mohler. "The post-Christian narrative is radically different; it offers spirituality, however defined, without binding authority," he told me. "It is based on an understanding of history that presumes a less tolerant past and a more tolerant future, with the present as an important transitional step."


The present, in this sense, is less about the death of God and more about the birth of many gods. The rising numbers of religiously unaffiliated Americans are people more apt to call themselves "spiritual" rather than "religious." (In the new NEWSWEEK Poll, 30 percent describe themselves this way, up from 24 percent in 2005.)


Roughly put, the Christian narrative is the story of humankind as chronicled in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament—the drama of creation, fall and redemption. The orthodox tend to try to live their lives in accordance with the general behavioral principles of the Bible (or at least the principles they find there of which they approve) and anticipate the ultimate judgment of God—a judgment that could well determine whether they spend eternity in heaven or in hell.

What, then, does it mean to talk of "Christian America"?

If the church believes the theory of evolution conflicts with a literal reading of the Book of Genesis, then the public schools should tailor their lessons accordingly.

If the church believes abortion should be outlawed, then the legislatures and courts of the land should follow suit.


The intensity of feeling about how Christian the nation should be has ebbed and flowed since Jamestown; there is, as the Bible says, no thing new under the sun. For more than 40 years, the debate that began with the Supreme Court's decision to end mandatory school prayer in 1962 (and accelerated with the Roe v. Wade ruling 11 years later) may not have been novel, but it has been ferocious.

Fearing the coming of an Europe-like secular state, the right longed to engineer a return to what it believed was a Christian America of yore.


But that project has failed, at least for now. In Texas, authorities have decided to side with science, not theology, in a dispute over the teaching of evolution. [NOTE: Not true, just Meachem's spin. The Texas evolution case had two components, each side winning one, with Creationism with the more important one]

The terrible economic times have not led to an increase in church attendance. In Iowa last Friday, the state Supreme Court ruled against a ban on same-sex marriage, a defeat for religious conservatives.


Such evidence is what has believers fretting about the possibility of an age dominated by a newly muscular secularism. "The moral teachings of Christianity have exerted an incalculable influence on Western civilization," Mohler says. "As those moral teachings fade into cultural memory, a secularized morality takes their place. Once Christianity is abandoned by a significant portion of the population, the moral landscape necessarily changes.


For the better part of the 20th century, the nations of Western Europe led the way in the abandonment of Christian commitments. Christian moral reflexes and moral principles gave way to the loosening grip of a Christian memory. Now even that Christian memory is absent from the lives of millions."


Religious doubt and diversity have, however, always been quintessentially American. Alexis de Tocqueville said that "the religious atmosphere of the country was the first thing that struck me on arrival in the United States," but he also discovered a "great depth of doubt and indifference" to faith.


[NOTE - More Meacham spin coming . . .how twisted out of context!] Jefferson had earlier captured the essence of the American spirit about religion when he observed that his statute for religious freedom in Virginia was "meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindoo and infidel of every denomination" — and those of no faith whatever.

The American culture of religious liberty helped create a busy free market of faith: by disestablishing churches, the nation made religion more popular, not less.


America, then, is not a post-religious society—and cannot be as long as there are people in it, for faith is an intrinsic human impulse. The belief in an order or a reality beyond time and space is ancient and enduring. "All men," said Homer, "need the gods." The essential political and cultural question is to what extent those gods—or, more accurately, a particular generation's understanding of those gods—should determine the nature of life in a given time and place.


If we apply an Augustinian test of nationhood to ourselves, we find that liberty, not religion, is what holds us together. In "The City of God," Augustine — converted sinner and bishop of Hippo—said that a nation should be defined as "a multitude of rational beings in common agreement as to the objects of their love." What we value most highly — what we collectively love most — is thus the central test of the social contract.

[NOTE More Meacham spin: Communism, Socialism, Naziam, Fascism are all "Social Contracts" Christianity is not, it is Bible Covenant!

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Judging from the broad shape of American life in the first decade of the 21st century, we value individual freedom and free (or largely free) enterprise, and tend to lean toward libertarianism on issues of personal morality. The foundational documents are the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, not the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament (though there are undeniable connections between them).


This way of life is far different from what many overtly conservative Christians would like. But that is the power of the republican system engineered by James Madison at the end of the 18th century: that America would survive in direct relation to its ability to check extremism and preserve maximum personal liberty. [NOTE: More Meacham spin]


Religious believers should welcome this; freedom for one sect means freedom for all sects. As John F. Kennedy said in his address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association in 1960: "For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew — or a Quaker — or a Unitarian — or a Baptist. . . Today I may be the victim — but tomorrow it may be you — until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped."


Religion has been a factor in American life and politics from the beginning. Anglican observance was compulsory at Jamestown, and the Puritans of New England were explicitly hoping to found a New Jerusalem. [NOTE CORRECT! And this is how America grew from Pioneers in the wilderness to the greatest nation on Earth: ABSOLUTE CHRISTIANITY!]

But coerced belief is no belief at all; it is tyranny. [NOTE: More Meacham spin. No one was "coercing belief" at Jamestown or among Pilgrims, they were coercing behaviour! Belief and behaviour are far from one and the same. Law legislates behaviour. This is the goal of Scripture for the non-believers in society until life's tragedies awaken their seared consciences!]

"I commend that man, whether Jew, or Turk, or Papist, or whoever, that steers no otherwise than his conscience dares," said Roger Williams. [NOTE: Yeah! Roger Williams. Thrown out of the Puritans for being a malcontent compromising liberal, stated a great earth-shaking ministry (so he thought). GOD REFUSED TO BLESS HIS PLURALISTIC MINISTRY" - it was soon dead. Williams resigned and walk away a within a year, an abysmal failure: lived and died confused and useless - except for people like Meacham to quote!"]


By the time of the American founding, men like Jefferson and Madison saw the virtue in guaranteeing liberty of conscience, and one of the young republic's signal achievements was to create a context in which religion and politics mixed but church and state did not. The Founders' insight was that one might as well try to build a wall between economics and politics as between religion and politics, since both are about what people feel and how they see the world.


Let the religious take their stand in the arena of politics and ideas on their own, and fight for their views on equal footing with all other interests. American public life is neither wholly secular nor wholly religious but an ever-fluid mix of the two. History suggests that trouble tends to come when one of these forces grows too powerful in proportion to the other. Political victories are therefore intrinsically transitory

Enter Attorney-theologian Charles Finney

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The columnist Cal Thomas was an early figure in the Moral Majority who came to see the Christian American movement as fatally flawed in theological terms. "No country can be truly 'Christian'," Thomas says. "Only people can. God is above all nations, and, in fact, Isaiah says that 'All nations are to him a drop in the bucket and less than nothing'."


Thinking back across the decades, Thomas recalls the hope—and the failure. "We were going through organizing like-minded people to 'return' America to a time of greater morality. Of course, this was to be done through politicians who had a difficult time imposing morality on themselves!"


Experience shows that religious authorities can themselves be corrupted by proximity to political power. A quarter century ago, three scholars who are also evangelical Christians — Mark A. Noll, Nathan O. Hatch and George M. Marsden — published an important but too-little-known book, "The Search for Christian America."


In it they argued that Christianity's claims transcend any political order. Christians, they wrote, "should not have illusions about the nature of human governments. Ultimately they belong to what Augustine calls 'the city of the world,' in which self-interest rules … all governments can be brutal killers."


Their view tracks with that of the Psalmist, who said, "Put not thy trust in princes," and there is much New Testament evidence to support a vision of faith and politics in which the church is truest to its core mission when it is the farthest from the entanglements of power.


The Jesus of the Gospels resolutely refuses to use the means of this world — either the clash of arms or the passions of politics — to further his ends. After the miracle of the loaves and fishes, the dazzled throng thought they had found their earthly messiah. "When Jesus therefore perceived that they would come and take him by force, to make him a king, he departed again into a mountain himself alone."


When one of his followers slices off the ear of one of the arresting party in Gethsemane, Jesus says, "Put up thy sword." Later, before Pilate, he says, "My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight."[NOTE: What a gross misquote: Meacham needs to lose his job over such careless ignorance and misunderstand. Jesus said "NOW, my Kingdom is not of this world (the whole Kingdom being Himself - ready to die - and a few disciples with no resources, it would take a really stupid Liberator-Christ to take on the Roman Empire - then), the implication in the Greek, that 'not now but later, why my Kingdom is of worldly renown it will fight to the death for truth!'


Thus Jesus commanded His disciples in anticipation: "He that hath not a sword, let him sell his garment (if need be - it was that important) and buy one!"


Jesus only advocated non-resistance for personal behaviour, anger, etc., but NOT for duly authorized behaviour, or personal defense of truth and righteousness. Thus Jesus took a weapon and cleared the moneychangers out of the Temple, and Scripture commands us to "Walk in His Steps!"]


The preponderance of lessons from the Gospels and from the rest of the New Testament suggests that earthly power is transitory and corrupting, and that the followers of Jesus should be more attentive to matters spiritual than political. [NOTE: As grossly in error as error can be. See Charles Finney's quote above.


Finney was a lawyer and theologian - Meacham is neither - but rather a modern liberal gay-loving journalist who has no respect for the authority of God's word! I'll take Finney's understanding of what true Christianity is!]


As always with the Bible, however, there are passages that complicate the picture. The author of Hebrews says believers are "strangers and exiles on the earth" and that "For here we have no lasting city, but seek the city which is to come."


In Romans the apostle Paul advises: "Do not be conformed to this world."


The Second Vatican Council cited these words of Pius XII: the Catholic Church's "divine Founder, Jesus Christ, has not given it any mandate or fixed any end of the cultural order. The goal which Christ assigns to it is strictly religious … The Church can never lose sight of the strictly religious, supernatural goal." [NOTE" We certainly agree with that, so disband all "civil (co-called) law and allow the church to impose 100% spiritual law!]


As an archbishop of Canterbury once said, though, it is a mistake to think that God is chiefly or even largely concerned with religion. "I hate the sound of your solemn assemblies," the Lord says in Amos. Religion is not only about worshiping your God but about doing godly things, and a central message of the Gospels is the duty of the Christian to transform, as best one can, reality through works of love.


"Being in the world and not of it remains our charge," says Mohler. "The church is an eternal presence in a fallen, temporal world—but we are to have influence. The Sermon on the Mount is about what we are to do—but it does not come with a political handbook." [NOTE: YES! Jesus did mandate a "Proven Handbook!" See Definition of "Church" by NewtonStein


How to balance concern for the garden of the church with the moral imperatives to make gentle the life of the world is one of the most perplexing questions facing the church. "We have important obligations to do whatever we can, including through the use of political means, to help our neighbors—promoting just laws, good order, peace, education and opportunity," wrote Noll, Hatch and Marsden.

"Nonetheless we should recognize that as we work for the relatively better in 'the city of the world,' our successes will be just that—relative. In the last analysis the church declares that the solutions offered by the nations of the world are always transitory solutions, themselves in need of reform."

Back in Louisville, preparing for Easter, Al Mohler keeps vigil over the culture. Last week he posted a column titled "Does Your Pastor Believe in God?," one on abortion and assisted suicide and another on the coming wave of pastors.

"Jesus Christ promised that the very gates of Hell would not prevail against his church," Mohler wrote. "This new generation of young pastors intends to push back against hell in bold and visionary ministry. Expect to see the sparks fly."

On the telephone with me, he added: "What we are seeing now is the evidence of a pattern that began a very long time ago of intellectual and cultural and political changes in thought and mind. The conditions have changed. Hard to pinpoint where, but whatever came after the Enlightenment was going to be very different than what came before."

And what comes next here, with the ranks of professing Christians in decline, is going to be different, too.

Newsweek Poll Meacham cites

The poll also shows changing perceptions about the religious makeup of the United States and its politics. Since Barack Obama took office earlier this year, the number of people who consider the U.S. a Christian nation has fallen to 62 percent, down from higher numbers during the Bush administration (69 percent last year and 71 percent in 2005).

Last summer, when George W. Bush was still in office, one third of Americans thought that religion played too big a role in U.S. politics, compared to 25 percent who said it had too little influence. The numbers have switched in the new Obama era. Now, 26 percent think religion is too influential, compared to 31 percent who say faith doesn't carry enough weight in the political system.

"It has to do with the context of the White House," says Larry Hugick, chairman of Princeton Survey Research Associates, the firm that conducted the poll. "When you talk about religion in politics, it usually has to do with the role of evangelicals. Bush was an evangelical, but Obama isn't, so people see the leadership of the country differently now."Quantcast

Sixty-eight percent said religion is losing influence on American life, up from 58 percent in 2000, 39 percent in 1984 and 32 percent in 1962. Previous periods where more than 60 percent thought religion was losing influence included 1994 and 1968.

When asked about their attitudes on social issues, survey respondents revealed a continued shift toward liberalism. One quarter of those surveyed say school boards should be able to fire homosexual teachers, down from 51 percent in a 1987 poll.

Those who claim to have "old-fashioned values about family and marriage" has also decreased 13 points in that time, to a current 74 percent.

Still, Americans' personal beliefs about religion haven't changed much in the last 20 years. The number of Americans with faith in a spiritual being at 96% has not changed much over the past two decades, according to historical polling.

85% percent said prayer was an important part of daily life, an increase of 2 points since 1987. Eighty-eight percent said religion is "very important" or "fairly important" in their own lives—a number that hasn't changed much since 1992.

Nearly half (48 percent) described themselves as both "religious and spiritual," while another 30 percent said they were "spiritual but not religious." Only 9 percent said they were neither religious nor spiritual.

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An interesting measurement of the poll looked at the number of people who leave one faith for another. The percentage of Americans who identify as non-evangelical Protestant (25 percent) is 5 points lower than the number who said they were raised that way.

While 22 percent of respondents said they were Roman Catholic, 26 percent said they were born into Catholic families.

The faith groups with net gains in believers were evangelical Protestants (29 percent compared to 25 percent who were brought up in the faith) and people who are agnostic, atheist or report no religion (also called "seculars"), up 3 points to 11 percent.

The pursuit of both religious and secular voters in the 2008 presidential race required candidates to walk a middle line, as it appears voters are evenly split on whether faith dictates their politics.

The new poll measured that 51 percent of those surveyed, the vast majority of them evangelical Protestants, said their religion can have an impact on their personal politics. A bit less, 46 percent, reported that their faith is much less likely to affect how they vote on a candidate or an issue.

Measuring party identification by religion is not predicted as intuitively, but the poll shows that the GOP has lost ground to Democrats among all measured faith groups. The number of religious respondents who identify with the Republican Party has fallen nearly 10 percent among non-evangelicals and Roman Catholics.

Often viewed as a Republican stronghold, more evangelicals now identify as Democrats (35 percent) than Republicans (34 percent).

And other religions contain bigger divides. Among Catholics, the spread was the biggest—50 percent Democrats to 17 percent Republicans.

Seculars also include a higher percentage of Democrats than Republicans (35 percent to 13 percent), but the majority (44 percent) of seculars identify as independents.

The survey was conducted among 1,003 adults, age 18 and over, on April 1 and 2, 2009. The margin of sampling error is 3.5 percentage points for results based on total adults. In addition to common sampling error, the practical problems of conducting surveys can also introduce error or bias into polls.