My wife and I were having a conversation after dinner last evening about how the American church, the Western church is in such a state of erosion and decline while elsewhere around the world there is a great movement of the Spirit of God among many people in many nations.

If I were an illustrator or a cartoonist I would create and place an image here of my view of the average American, including the average American that professes to be a Christian today. It might show a person not just looking into a mirror closely, but so close that their nose would be distorted from pushing it into the mirror as they wore blinders. Kind of like that.

Now that image might irk you and really tick you off but pause and be objective. If you are reading, hearing, or seeing anywhere near the volume of information I am on a daily basis I believe you might not be as blunt as I am here, but you’d have to agree the condition of the Christian church in America, in the United Kingdom, throughout the rest of Europe, in Canada, Australia — and every Western nation is in great decline. Rife with false teachers and inner turmoil. Saturated in the earthly, the political, the distracting noise that will all pass away without maturing spiritually, without having the Lord Jesus Christ uppermost in their hearts and minds.

Churches in America and throughout Europe are emptying out and deserted churches are being converted into nightclubs, snooker or pool halls, personal residences, restaurants, and the like.

The average American professed Christian making elections, politicians, voting, and bills before Congress their focus and garnering their attention. All under the guise of doing so to please the Lord! Justifying placing their attention and hearts on nationalism, patriotism, the economy, the environment, approving of homosexuality, and aligning with a political party more than with the Word of God, the Lord Jesus Christ, or God the Creator!

Yes, the Church in America, in England, in Scotland, in Wales, in Ireland, in France, Belgium, all of Scandinavia, Germany, Italy, Canada, Australia, and throughout any Western nation is in disarray and turmoil. Yes, under attack from the enemy without, but also under as great an attack and threat from within — where evil and rebellion have been permitted to enter and grow. A lot.

Yes, as Mr. Stephen Bullivant writes in his book discussed below, from his in-depth research no society has ever declined religiously as quickly or as much as America has in the last 20 to 30 years.

The swift descent and turning from God, turning from Christ, turning from the Holy Spirit, and turning from the Word of God has never happened so quickly, so vastly in human history.

This decline coincides with the parallel erosion within the traditional family, the rise of sexual immorality, and adopting of paganism. It’s all related. And not political as is the cry shouted, wailed, and heard throughout the land drowning out the wee voices that are saying, no, hold on, it’s ALL SPIRITUAL, friends and countrymen and women. It’s ALL SPIRITUAL.

Warfare.

In a war that is escalating daily with greater attrition and casualties.

The rise of false teachers and unsound doctrines are equal to the demise of the American and Western church.

Meanwhile…the Good News of the Lord Jesus Christ, God, the Holy Spirit, and all within the living infallible Word of God is being poured out and eagerly drunk and eaten elsewhere. The Spirit of God is working greatly in many people in the nations of Africa, throughout Asia Minor, and in places such as Communist China. I read just yesterday how presently more people in Central America identify as evangelical Christians than any other denomination or subset within Christianity.

And while from all the noise, jockeying for attention and power, and what constitutes the American Christian church — all the whining, complaining, turmoil, disunity, lack of genuine Christian love, the love of many waxing cold — many, oh so many elsewhere are losing everything. They are losing their family members, their occupations, their homes, their churches, their lives as they remain steadfast and firm in the faith of the Lord Jesus Christ!

America, American professed Christian, pull back from planting your face so close to the mirror. Remove the blinders. Look around. Listen. See the Lord at work in these last of the last days as His Spirit is poured out among the people of the world while in America and the West the people scoff, mock, imagine they are gods, turn with itching ears to fables and follow unsound doctrines.

God is working greatly in Islamic nations and states. In tyrannical nations and places. In dictatorships and in lands that deny the existence of God and blaspheme against Christ!

Meanwhile in America, in England, in Scotland, in the West…

Does anyone in America ever read and believe what is in the Holy Bible? The God-breathed words given to us for life, for light, for salvation, for knowledge and understanding, for how we are to fashion and conduct ourselves to be found pleasing to God? Does anyone want to hear the words, “Well done, good and faithful servant…” spoken to them personally by the Lord Jesus Christ!?

More than they want to hear the words spoken by some talking head on a broadcast news network spewing election results to see if their guy or gal won!?

Wake up America. American professed Chrisitan. Let us all repent and turn to our God, turn to the Lord Jesus Christ, turn to the Holy Spirit, turn to the Holy Bible and live lives as a light unto the world rather than the dimming, the extinguishing of the light that once shone throughout this nation as many hearts, minds, spirits, and lives lived here were lived with Christ, for Christ, with God, for God, trusting in the Holy Spirit, turning daily to the Bible, turning daily in fervent humble prayer to God as Father, and Jesus as Saviour.

I will be writing more on this subject.

Ken Pullen, A CROOKED PATH, Friday, December 2nd, 2022

Why Americans are leaving their churches

December 1, 2022

Story by Religion News Service

Reprinted from Religion News Service

(RNS) — As many as a third of Americans now claim no religious affiliation, and British sociologist Stephen Bullivant has some ideas about why.

In his new book, “Nonverts: The Making of Ex-Christian America,” due this week from Oxford University Press, Bullivant reflects in often highly entertaining fashion about the trend lines. Although it’s full of statistics, “Nonverts” remains a lively read for ordinary people — a rare feat in a sea of dry data-driven books.

As a researcher, Bullivant wanted to know why Americans, once considered the exception to the secularization that has happened in Europe and elsewhere, are suddenly losing their religion.

And it is sudden, he notes. “This kind of religious change in a society doesn’t normally happen in the space of 20 or 30 years,” he told Religion News Service in a Zoom interview. “It’s been within the space of one or perhaps two generations that we’ve seen a sudden surge.”

In the 1990s, nonreligion began climbing from its baseline of around 7% of the population to what is between three and five times that figure now, depending on the survey. (All national surveys show the same rising trendline, but they differ as to the degree.)

Bullivant says the majority of this shift is caused by people actively leaving the religion of their childhood (the “nonverts” of the title), not because they were born into nonreligious families (though that trend is coming).

“So there is a story about why there is this rise of the nones. But to me, the more interesting story is why it didn’t happen earlier.” Why did this change start not in the 1960s, when American culture was in a state of upheaval, but in the ’90s?

Politics, say other scholars, who see nonreligion as a backlash against the GOP’s “Contract with America” and the rise of the religious right. That’s likely part of it, Bullivant said, pointing to how quickly the American public changed its mind on homosexual marriage. But he looks to three other developments to help us understand why people are leaving the fold.

First, there was the end of the Cold War. For decades, “there was a big threat of ‘godless communism,’” making it hard for anyone with religious doubts to admit to them publicly. The social cost of being considered un-American was just too high, keeping the numbers of religious nones artificially low.

“Then suddenly the Cold War ends, and you have people able to admit to being nonreligious. In fact, by the time the New Atheists rise up in the mid-2000s, it’s no longer people with no religion who are the existential threat, but people with too much religion, especially extremist religion. The New Atheism is really interesting in how it positions itself as patriotic.”

A second factor is the sudden appearance of the internet, which made it possible for like-minded people to meet each other. “If you were brought up in small-town Kansas, you probably weren’t going to find other people who were having religious doubts. The internet opened up those spaces for people to play around with ideas, hang out with other people, and get really deep into various subcultures.”

The internet has been particularly important for people leaving conservative religions such as evangelical Protestantism or Mormonism. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is actually the first main example Bullivant uses in the book, which is surprising because it’s such a tiny percentage of the population, around 1.5%.

Bullivant chose it because it’s a “canary in the coal mine” story — if even the Mormons are starting to bleed members, “that shows what a big issue this is for everyone else.” The erosion of Mormon attachment, he said, indicates “the breakdown of religious subcultures,” which has been especially profound in places such as Utah and southern Idaho where, in decades past, a person’s entire social and religious life could be spent around members of the LDS church.

The internet chips away at that enclave. “This was important for many of the Mormons I interviewed, who were encountering new things about Mormon history online. But even more than this, they’re starting to hang out with non-Mormons and ex-Mormons, people who are very much in your boat, and that becomes this other world you can inhabit.”

The third factor sounds like circular logic: The nones are rising because the nones are rising. But human beings are herd creatures, Bullivant explains in the book; we tend to do what our neighbors are doing. With every headline (like the one above) that heralds the seismic shift the nation is experiencing, more people become comfortable being nonreligious.

Bullivant himself bucks the trend. The 38-year-old researcher came from a family with no religion — “I wasn’t baptized, and that’s normal in Britain” — but deviated from that path by slowly coming to Catholicism as a student. He was doing the first of his two doctoral degrees (one in theology, the other in sociology) when he became friends with some Dominicans who would regularly invite him for dinner.

“In order to come to this guest dinner with loads of wine on a Sunday evening, you had to have gone to the Mass beforehand,” he said.

So he began attending Mass. He was impressed by the people he met, who were bright and kind. It was obvious that they lived what they believed and had made great sacrifices in order to become priests. Eventually, one of those friends offered to baptize him. So after a three-week research trip to Rome for his dissertation, Bullivant officially joined the Catholic Church. His wife is now also a member, and they are raising their four children as Catholics.

“So it’s strange: I do a lot of work on people leaving Catholicism. For every person in Britain who is raised nonreligious who becomes Christian, there’s something like 26 people who go the other way.”

It’s a helpful reminder that while social science charts trends that are sweeping and very real, each individual story is complex.