A new report was released saying that Christians are in serious decline across the USA, especially with the Evangelicals:,
White Christians in the US are in the minority and declining, amid increasing ethnic diversity and growing numbers of people who identify as religiously unaffiliated, according to a new survey.
The poll from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) found that just 43 per cent of Americans now identify as white and Christian. This is in contrast to 81 per cent of Americans identifying as white Christians in 1976.
Past surveys have detailed a decline among Catholics in the US.
But what is most striking about the new PRRI survey is that it shows a relatively recent decline among evangelicals – from 23 per cent to 17 per cent from 2006 to 2016.
‘This report provides solid evidence of a new, second wave of white Christian decline that is occurring among white evangelical Protestants just over the last decade in the US,’ said Robert P Jones, the PRRI’s CEO and author of The End of White Christian America.
‘Prior to 2008, white evangelical Protestants seemed to be exempt from the waves of demographic change and disaffiliation that were eroding the membership bases of white mainline Protestants and white Catholics. We now see that these waves simply crested later for white evangelical Protestants.’
Today, fewer than half of all states are majority white Christian, the survey found. As recently as 2007, 39 states had majority white Christian populations.
As TIME magazine pointed out, the survey reinforces the findings of a separate one in 2015 by the Pew Research Center, which found that the number of white Christians in the US had fallen to 46 per cent.
Overall, a majority of Americans today are Christian, bolstered by a growing percentage of black and Hispanic believers.
At the same time, the new PRRI survey identified a specific decline in the percentage of Americans who identify as white Protestants — now at just 30 per cent.
And a further sign of the apparent, gradual decline of Christianity in the US comes with the fact that although non-Christian religions still account for less than 10 per cent of the American population, they are growing and are made up of higher percentages of young people, compared to the ageing group of white Christians.
The PRRI’s director of research, Daniel Cox said: ‘The young are much less likely to believe this is a “Christian nation” or to give preference to Christian identity. Young people and seniors are basically inhabiting different religious worlds.’
Almost a quarter (24 per cent) of Americans now identify as religiously unaffiliated, and around a third of those are under 30.
Meanwhile, around one in 10 white Catholics, evangelicals and mainline Protestants are under 30, compared with one-third of all Hindus and Buddhists.
Muslims and Mormons are the youngest faith groups in the US, with 42 per cent of all Muslims and nearly a quarter of all Mormons being under 30.
‘Prior to 2008, white evangelical Protestants seemed to be exempt from the waves of demographic change and disaffiliation that were eroding the membership bases of white mainline Protestants and white Catholics. We now see that these waves simply crested later for white evangelical Protestants.’
Today, fewer than half of all states are majority white Christian, the survey found. As recently as 2007, 39 states had majority white Christian populations.
As TIME magazine pointed out, the survey reinforces the findings of a separate one in 2015 by the Pew Research Center, which found that the number of white Christians in the US had fallen to 46 per cent.
Overall, a majority of Americans today are Christian, bolstered by a growing percentage of black and Hispanic believers.
At the same time, the new PRRI survey identified a specific decline in the percentage of Americans who identify as white Protestants — now at just 30 per cent.
And a further sign of the apparent, gradual decline of Christianity in the US comes with the fact that although non-Christian religions still account for less than 10 per cent of the American population, they are growing and are made up of higher percentages of young people, compared to the ageing group of white Christians.
The PRRI’s director of research, Daniel Cox said: ‘The young are much less likely to believe this is a “Christian nation” or to give preference to Christian identity. Young people and seniors are basically inhabiting different religious worlds.’
Almost a quarter (24 per cent) of Americans now identify as religiously unaffiliated, and around a third of those are under 30.
Meanwhile, around one in 10 white Catholics, evangelicals and mainline Protestants are under 30, compared with one-third of all Hindus and Buddhists.
Muslims and Mormons are the youngest faith groups in the US, with 42 per cent of all Muslims and nearly a quarter of all Mormons being under 30.
Cox links this to the rise of conservative evangelicals – who oppose same sex marriage, abortion access and the legalisation of marijuana – and their alienating effect on the young.
‘It is no longer the case among young people that being religious is necessarily a positive attribute,’ said Cox.
The survey also shows that white Christians are a minority in the Democratic Party: fewer than one in three Democrats are white Christians, down from almost half 10 years ago.
And among Democrats under 30, only 14 per cent now identify as white Christian, while 40 per cent are ‘nones’.
In the Republicans meanwhile, white evangelicals remain predominant, with more than one-third (35 per cent) of GOP supporters being white evangelicals.
Elsewhere, the survey found that almost half (46 per cent) of LGBT Americans are religiously unaffiliated — which is around twice as many as the general population (24 per cent).
Rabbi Denise Eger, founding rabbi of the Kol Ami synagogue in West Hollywood and an LGBT activist, told the Catholic news website Crux that fundamentalism, especially in Christianity, Islam and, to a lesser extent, Judaism, was to blame for this.
‘The truth is that all of religion becomes tainted, even though there are many denominations that welcome them, that it becomes “why bother?”‘.
Speaking about the rise of the ‘nones,’ Jennifer W Davidson, an associate professor of theology and worship at the American Baptist Seminary of the West, said that the rise in the religiously unaffiliated means people must now ask old questions in new ways.
‘We need to begin asking people, “How do you make meaning in your life? What sustains you when you suffer? How do you cultivate a sense of wonder?”‘ she said.
‘It is fully possible to answer these questions from a secular perspective, and if we asked them, we might be able to see abundantly fruitful connections among people who are religiously affiliated, religiously unaffiliated, secular, agnostic and atheist.’
The study, ‘America’s Changing Religious Identity,’ contacted 101,000 Americans in 50 states, and has an overall margin of error of plus or minus 0.4 percentage points.
(source)
Yes, it is true there is a decline. But the problem is not a “rise in fundamentalism.” When people use the term “fundamentalism” when discussing religion, it is almost always meant in the pejorative sense. “Religious fundamentalism” has been propagated to the public as such to conjure images of foolishness, ignorance, and blind obedience. With respect to the people who say this, much of this is indeed true, as there are many people, including people with good intentions, who act in ways that propagate ignorance or are just plain wrong but insist on doing so because they believe something is true without understanding why it is true outside of “I was told so.” Now while religion is always in part an act of faith- believing that something is true because God has said so- it is also inseparable from reason and the consequences of the belief can be deduced by reason and proved or disproven by taking a systematic look at how one belief accords or does not accord with another belief.
Simply put, this is the union of “faith and reason” that the Catholic Church so often speaks about. The purpose of this is to demonstrate not only how Faith is a real thing that can be proven, but that a man’s actions are a direct product of his beliefs, and how to follow God more closely by belief one must also accord his actions as well. Likewise, and very importantly, the union of faith and reason provides a means for well-meaning people who may lack the intellectual capacity to understand detailed theology to execute the tenets of their faith in a way that is easy to understand, practical, and morally consistent. The proper union of faith and reason inevitably generates two results- one one hand it will allow for limitless commentary and explanation about matters of faith and being, and on the other hand as mentioned above, it distills complex ideas into easy to follow, fundamental beliefs and practices. Indeed, true fundamentalism- teaching and following the fundamentals of one’s religion- is not a product of ignorance, but of very detailed and specific beliefs made simple to understand.
This idea was the inspiration for the title of the Fundamentals, a series of American Protestant essay that were first published in 1909 meant to outline the fundamentals of Protestant Christianity. This was published around the same time the Popes were writing in similar ways. Both were meant to combat the idea of “modernism,” which is essentially Darwinian philosophy applied to religion, stating that divinely revealed truth can and does change and that it is for religion to “update” its teachings in order to be more “modern.”
This is not to say that certain changes were not necessary in so far as disciplines were concerned. Indeed, it is well known there were many problems in the Church and its ability to relate to the contemporary world, which was becoming increasingly hostile towards it. However, this is not a new problem at all, as the Church has always been disliked even at the height of Christendom. This was foretold in Sacred Scripture and will persist until Christ returns. Discipline, or the instruction of the Faith, can and has often times changed. It is dogma, or divinely revealed truth, that cannot change because it has been revealed from God.
The essence of the decline is about matters of truth- how we know truth, how we understand it, and what is the authority from which we define our understanding. Modernism is simply an attempt to justify in current times what men have been trying to do since the fall of Adam and Eve, which is to re-define moral truth on their terms and set themselves up as an authority based on their own assertions. This takes many different forms, but as far as the last 500 years of Christian history are concerned, this is over the issue of whether or not doctrine can change or not, and it goes directly to the ideas the built up and manifested during the Protestant Revolution and was brought to America with her founders during the 18th century.
The idea that divinely revealed truth can change is a heresy, but it is a heresy that has been a characteristic of Protestantism and has been with America since its earliest days. While it is an issue for both Catholics and Protestants, the Catholic issue is actually far easier to deal with because the Church merely has to articulate the positions she already possesses. Any deviations or disagreements with this done persistently and without a genuine attempt to understand is just heresy and can be easily labeled as so and dealt with accordingly. The problem that the Catholic Church in America has is that many of her people and bishops want to “assimilate” their faith into the American philosophy, and since this is impossible because America is based on an anti-Christian, Freemason philosophy, people who persist in attempting to do this find themselves placed into a Hegelian dialectic where they compromise parts of divinely revealed truth and if followed far enough, simply abandon the Faith in the name of “fitting in.” The biggest problem for the Catholic Church today is either simple ignorance due to decades of absolutely poor catechesis on one hand, or cowardice or apathy from whose who are aware of what the teachings are out of fear of social ostracism on the other hand.
The Protestant Churches have a far bigger problem in the USA because there is absolutely no unity among the sects except in their rejection of the Catholic Church. This has been the situation with Protestantism for centuries, and since Protestantism by its very nature has to first define itself in terms of its rejection of THE POPE and the authority of the Church, it has to likewise reject or ignore the history of Christianity itself from Constantine until around the time after the Black Death because it is, like every heresy, a heretical anomaly that left the Church and attempted to start its own cult acting as its own independent authority. Since all of the different sects that left the Church based their heresy on differences with divinely revealed teaching, each heresy will naturally disagree with the Church while at the same time being unable to doctrinally reconcile with each other, and thus creating even more division. For centuries Protestants fought wars against each other and still viciously debate with each other to this day about basic matters of Christian belief that were settled well before the fourth century. In the name of “FOLLOWING THE BIBLE” and “REJECTING THE EVIL POPE,” these sects simply dug up old heresies, put new clothes on them, gave them new names and are parading them around as though they are teaching something unique. While they may be “unique” in terms of they have not been seen for centuries, such as the infamous Judaizing heresy that is common today among certain Protestants (and is the only Christian heresy explicity mentioned by the Bible too), the fact is that the ideas are nothing new, both their opposition to the Faith as well as their particular heretical ideas.
Heresy has always been a problem in Christendom, but just like with weeds in a garden, heresy needs to be rooted out when it appears in order to prevent them from taking over and destroying the garden. Heresy becomes a major problem when it remains unchecked because it attacks the philosophical and moral underpinnings of a society, through which the subsequent structural weakening will cause a social collapse or decline if not fixed. It is the reason why notorious, unrepentant, and persistent heretics were put to death, not because it was THE EVIL CHURCH TRYING TO SILENCE BIBLE TRUTH, but because these people were, whether they were intending to or not (and often times they were intending) to cause a social and political revolution using religious discontentment just as the National Socialists today use racial discontentment or the International Socialists use economic discontentment to achieve the same end.
Heresy is always rooted in the rejection of authority, namely of the Church. But since heretics cannot clearly identify who is the replacement authority, the natural result of heresy is first a “spiritual anarchy” in which different sects fight with each other for power. This can go on for a time, but eventually the fighting will subside, and after which in order to make any kind of peace between their irreconcilable views, they will submit their difference to a mutually agreed upon third party to act as a broker, which for centuries always has been the government. As such, the churches are surrendering their traditional role as the “second estate” in society- the buffer between the people and the government- and make themselves vassals of the government itself, in which obedience to the Churches becomes obedience to the state. This has been a signature problem of Protestantism and all of its previous movements, including the heresies of old, because by rejecting the Church each heresy either lead to fighting with other heresies or attempted to make herself a “national church” based on some form of identitarianism, but with both paths leading to the same end of subjugation to the first estate. In the case of Luther, it was the creation of a “German church” with “a German god for a German people.” The English under King Henry VIII did the same, as the English did not per se see themselves as “separating” from Rome, but rather King Henry declaring himself the head of the Church in England.
It is only natural that if being a “Christian” means obedience to the state, then in time one will naturally reason that there is no reason to actually go to Church because since worship of God is tied to social obedience, then one only needs to be “a good person” as far as the society is concerned and all will be well.
There is a tremendous amount of criticism today about the “church of nice” and the people who want to “good people” and not go to church. However, it is wrong to say the people who do this are simply malicious, because whether they understand it or not, these people see themselves as “good citizens” based on their following the social commands of the day. They see themselves as no different than Christians, except that Christians have a particular “club” they go to called “church,” whereas they want to go to a different “club.”
Likewise, there is another issue that Protestantism causes, which is the private interpretation of moral truth. I do not use the word “Scripture” here because that is automatically implied. What I speak of is the idea that all heretics promulgate, which is that individuals or groups can make moral proclamations outside of the teaching of the Church. This is a consistent theme throughout all of Christian history but is a veritable tenet of Protestantism and again feeds into the reason why they have to ignore most of Christian history and that which they do pay attention to they have to meticulously re-write to fit their own conception of of the past, because they have absolutely no way to justify their beliefs in the same way that no amount of of lipstick on a pig can hide the fact that it is a pig wearing lipstick and not a person.
Just as with the issue of nationalism, it is only a matter of time that if a sect can say they can define moral truth independently, then others will say they can do the same too. This is the reason behind the explosion of the “evangelical” movement in the USA, because as the mainline Protestant churches began to decline and finally be forced to face the fact that they cannot hide or reconcile their differences, that individuals would appear and attack the institutions, creating their own “churches” to take their place. What happened in Europe simply replicated itself in the USA and with the same vitriol against the Catholic Church, except the evangelical movement is formed around cults of individual personalities. People do not go to the Lutheran, Methodist, Episcopal, or Presbytarian churches so much any more as they go to see “Pastor Bobby Ray” or “Brother Jimmy Earl” at churches with names like “Cinema Church” or “The Gathering.” The reality is that these are for the most part Baptist and Pentecostal churches, and to a far lesser extent the Presbytarians that have re-named and re-branded themselves to try and make themselves relevant and attract new members, but as we have noted above are still in terminal decline long-term.
As mentioned above, the Protestant revolutionaries of old used the corruption of the Catholic Church as the social point of leverage to form their own sects and ultimately pursue power over others. The “evangelicals” do this by a different means, and that is through using the real heresies and divisions of the mainline churches not just to form their own churches “because it is right,” but so by making their own cults of personality they can becomes famous, rich, and powerful. It is a well-known fact among these “ministers”- and I do not speak of the obvious examples such as Joel Osteen, Pat Robertson, or Billy Graham- that even a small-time minister in a poor neighborhood with a small and impoverished congregation can earn a six-figure salary. It is the reason why throughout poor areas across America, be they poor whites in the mountains of Appalachia or poor blacks in the urban ghettos, there is a church on nearly every street corner (or road junction if in the country) and a “pastor” who is usually at a disproportionately higher income bracket with respect to his area or congregation that is funded by the tithes from his “church.”
At the same time the structure of these heresies themselves change, the exodus of people will continue out of the churches because, using the same structure of logic, if a “Christian minister” can make himself an independent authority for moral teaching, why can’t some random non-Christian man on the street do the same? If as noted before the obedience to the “church” was obedience to the government, and if a man sees himself as a “good person” who conforms to the social tendencies of his day but does not go to Church, why can’t he, in his own mind, become his own “church” that he worships at, for as long as he understands that he is not “harming” anybody according to his own defined moral code, he is philosophically at liberty to do so?
Christians get upset when they hear Crowley’s words, and rightly so. However, the essence of Protestantism IS what Crowley said, because his teaching was to make oneself the authority for right and wrong. This is the essence of all satanism and evil, and is the sin of the Garden of Eden.
The descent into the depths which Crowley reached was slow and took centuries, but the fact is that the path which Crowley taught was the end product of Protestant philosophy. Again, I am not saying the Protestants worship satan, but the reasoning behind Protestant philosophy naturally leads to the decline and disappearance of Christianity to be naturally replaced with the Crowlean mantra of “do what thou wilt” because the anti-authoritarianism of Protestantism is the anti-authoritiarianism of Crowley. It is the same line, just different points on the line.
Yet man is a religious being, and because he was made for worship, he will always attempt to worship something. The vacuum created by the decline of Christianity will be filled always, and there are two things that will attempt to fill it.
The first thing is satanism. This can take many different forms, and most of these forms are not the obvious that one would think of. The way it almost always presents itself is in the form of a worship of the self by the deification of the things dear to a person, which are usually his family, his home, and those he loves and that which he knows. This is the essence of all paganism, as it worships a man’s family, his homeland, and his race. It is also essential for today because the rise of Nationalism in Europe, as we have demonstrated through our investigations at Shoebat.com, directly connected to the rise of paganism, and major pagans leaders are working with the nationalist movements so much that the movements themselves are actually pagan in their philosophy. Millions of people, including many Christians, are being deceived into supporting pagan ideas under the guise of “protecting their homelands from Muslim invaders” when as we have pointed out the reality is that the governments themselves have invited these people into their nations for the express purpose of causing destabilization in order to present nationalism and paganism as the solution to the problem which they created.
As we have pointed out, anybody who supports the paganism or nationalism is deceived because those at the top of these movement, just like the Protestants of old or many of the “new preachers” today, are not so much interested in truth or righteousness, but rather about getting power at all costs and making themselves the authority over the Church. It is a struggle for power at all costs with respect to none.
The second thing that will fill the vacuum in society will be Islam. As many Catholic writers and saints have pointed out, Islam is the final form of all Christian heresy, and all Christian heresies if left unchecked will culminate in Islam because the Arabia out of which Islam emerged was the dumping ground for Christian heretics and so the religion absorbed the practices and beliefs of these men:
Mohammedanism was a <heresy>: that is the essential point to grasp before going any further. It began as a heresy, not as a new religion. It was not a pagan contrast with the Church; it was not an alien enemy. It was a perversion of Christian doctrine. It vitality and endurance soon gave it the appearance of a new religion, but those who were contemporary with its rise saw it for what it was_not a denial, but an adaptation and a misuse, of the Christian thing. It differed from most (not from all) heresies in this, that it did not arise within the bounds of the Christian Church. The chief heresiarch, Mohammed himself, was not, like most heresiarchs, a man of Catholic birth and doctrine to begin with. He sprang from pagans. But that which he taught was in the main Catholic doctrine, oversimplified. It was the great Catholic world_on the frontiers of which he lived, whose influence was all around him and whose territories he had known by travel_which inspired his convictions. He came of, and mixed with, degraded idolaters of the Arabian wilderness, the conquest of which had never seemed worth the Romans’ while.
…
Cultures spring from religions; ultimately the vital force which maintains any culture is its philosophy, its attitude toward the universe; the decay of a religion involves the decay of the culture corresponding to it_we see that most clearly in the breakdown of Christendom today. The bad work begun at the Reformation is bearing its final fruit in the dissolution of our ancestral doctrines_the very structure of our society is dissolving.
In the place of the old Christian enthusiasms of Europe there came, for a time, the enthusiasm for nationality, the religion of patriotism. But self-worship is not enough, and the forces which are making for the destruction of our culture, notably the Jewish Communist propaganda from Moscow, have a likelier future before them than our old-fashioned patriotism.
In Islam there has been no such dissolution of ancestral doctrine or, at any rate, nothing corresponding to the universal break-up of religion in Europe. The whole spiritual strength of Islam is still present in the masses of Syria and Anatolia, of the East Asian mountains, of Arabia, Egypt and North Africa.
The final fruit of this tenacity, the second period of Islamic power, may be delayed: but I doubt whether it can be permanently postponed. (source)
People wonder why there are men converting to Islam today, or how Islam spread so far across the Christian world, and the answer is found in the fact that much of the area of what is today the “Muslim world” that was once Christian was in fact overrun by heresy at the time of the Islamic conquests. As we have noted before, Islam does not so much “conquer” areas as it fills a vacuum from which Christianity has either retreated or been evicted by the people, who have a basic knowledge of the religion yet reject its teaching and are still searching for some kind of truth, usually because they are looking for a easy means of salvation- they want truth and to be saved, yet they do not want to invest the moral rigor and work on their own. Christianity forces a man to do this, for as St. Paul warns, each man has to work out his salvation and to struggle to do what is right. Islam promises a man salvation but as we and many others have pointed out, for each rule in Islam there is a loophole so much to the point that a Muslim can find an Islamically-compatible excuse for any kind of moral effort or rigor and a Islamically-suitable justification for any immoral behavior. It is a religion that gives license to license and promises a man eternity in this life that will continue to the hereafter with the acceptance of a few simple beliefs and the permission to mistreat others who are not Muslims if they so will.
This right here is the reason why notorious heretics were put to death. Heresy is not about a mere difference of opinion. It is an outright attack on God Himself and His Church done in the name of power but will always lead to social discord, then spiritual anarchy, then secularism, then Satanism either explicitly by returning to paganism or implicitly by the ascent of Islam.
The way to fight against heresy, apostasy, and all evils and forms of error is simple. It is to follow the teachings and way of the Church, because when followed it is a guarantee to lead down the road of salvation. This is not to say that it is a simple or easy matter, because one must walk down the via dolorosa that leads to Calvary with Christ, and it is a difficult path. However, to walk this path and persist in it is to gain eternal life.
The wage of sin is death, and as heresy is the sin of pride and rebellion against God, it is only to be expected that “Christianity” would decline in America, for much of what America calls “Christianity” is just the repackaged heresies of the ancient world. The decline can be reversed, but it will only come from a true conversion and return to the one and true Faith, not by attempting to repair a vehicle that was already broken and is inevitably going to break again.
On a final note, the article mentioned “White Christians.” I intentionally did not discuss this aspect because while race has become a major topic of discussion today and for good reasons, the reality is that the decline of Christianity in America has nothing to do with race at all. Heresy is as just a blind to skin color and national affiliation as is truth, because ultimately the struggle is not between different ethnic groups, but between good and evil.