How To Kill Christianity
Much has been made of the recent Pew poll that highlights Americas religious landscape. What has drawn the most attention is the apparent decline of Christianity in the U.S. The Christian share of the U.S. population is declining, began the piece.Manyliberals tookgleeful notice . The Institute on Religion and Democracys Mark Tooley noted , Secularists and their fellow travelers are ecstatic. The secular utopia about which John Lennon crooned is impending. Christianity is finally dying!
Of course, this is far from the case, as Tooley later reveals. Russell Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, points out that its not Christianity thats dying, but rather near Christianity that is teetering. Good riddance, Moore concludes.
The denominations that have lost the most near Christians are Catholic and Mainline Protestant. According to the Washington Times , for every person who joined the Roman Catholic Church, six others were departing. Additionally, in the last 50 years, the proportion of Americans belonging to one of the Seven Sisters of Mainline Protestantism has plummeted from one in sixto one in sixteen.
From the Anglicans at Jamestown, to the Pilgrims at Plymouth, and the Puritans at Massachusetts Bay, virtually all of the Mainline Protestant churches in the U.S. can trace their roots to those who literally founded America. The principles of American democracy were born in Mainline churches. The revivals during the Great Awakening were preached by men from Mainline churches. Many of the first colleges and universities in the U.S. were founded by Mainline churches. Whats more, eight of the first fourteen U.S. Presidents were Episcopalian. The spiritual and political roots of America are deeply embedded in Mainline Protestantism. What a tragic fall!
So this begs the question, why have the Catholic Church and Mainline Protestantism seen such a collapse? Moore reveals the answer when he notes that, what the Pew poll really reveals is that we have fewer incognito atheists in America. Those who dont believe can say so -- and still find spouses, get jobs, volunteer with the PTA, and even run for office. This is good news because the kind of Christianity that is a means to an end -- even if that end is traditional family values -- is what J. Gresham Machen rightly called liberalism, and it is an entirely different religion from the apostolic faith handed down by Jesus Christ.
Of course, it would be the denominations most infected with liberalism ( Is there anything liberalism cant corrupt? ) that have seen the most decline. As Tooley put it , Mainline Protestantism lost its way when it forgot how to balance being American and being Christian, choosing American individualism and self-made spirituality over classical Christianity. Nearly all mainline seminaries had embraced modernism by the 1920s, rejecting the supernatural in favor of metaphorized faith integrated with sociology and political revolution.
Such watered-down theology has produced ear-ticklers like John Shelby Spong, Marcus Borg, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Gene Robinson and the like, along with heretical nonsense such as the Jesus Seminar. For decades men (and women) like Spong and Borg made quite a name for themselves by rejecting the virgin birth, the divinity of Jesus, His atoning death and resurrection, every miracle recorded in the New Testament, and so on. In other words, in a tragic attempt to make themselves relevant, such men and women rejected virtually every tenet of the Christian faith, all the while still calling themselves Christians.
Unsurprisingly, its heretics such as these whove overseen such a precipitous decline in their denominations. After all, who wants to attend a church that rejects the supernatural and offers little more than worn-out platitudes and self-help advice? Who wants to attend a church that doesnt talk about the forgiveness of sin (much less the existence of sin) and the hope of eternal life? Instead of pointing people to eternal truths, these liberal congregations have concerned themselves with social activism.
To a significant extent, the same thing has happened to the Catholic Church in the U.S. Though the American Catholic Church, unlike most of her liberal Protestant counterparts, has (for the most part) opposed abortion, same-sex marriage, and the rest of the radical sexual agenda of the left, sadly many Catholics have been all too willing to use big government activism as a substitute for charity.
As Paul Rahe put it, many years ago the American Catholic Church fell prey to a conceit that had long before ensnared a great many mainstream Protestants in the United States the notion that public provision is somehow akin to charity and so they fostered state paternalism and undermined what they professed to teach: that charity is an individual responsibility and that it is appropriate that the laity join together under the leadership of the Church to alleviate the suffering of the poor.
Additionally, rabid anti-death penalty advocate Sister Helen Prejean, the inspiration of the Susan Sarandon movie Dead Man Walking , is doing little for the cause of individual responsibility. In an attempt to help Dzhokhar Tsarnaev escape the ultimate responsibility for his murderous crimes, Sister Prejean testified last week in the penalty phase of the infamous Boston Bomber.
In spite of the lack of any public expression of remorse, Prejean testified that she felt that Tsarnaev was genuinely sorry for his crimes. Like her Catholic compatriots who advocate for the likes of ObamaCare , Prejean mistakes state paternalism for true charity. (Nothing says state paternalism like clothing, housing, and feeding a mass murderer for decades.) Again, borrowing from Mark Tooley , Was she concerned more about his eternal soul, or his physical life, and her political cause?Lets pray the former, but the latter seems likelier. If indeed the latter, Sister Prejean is an archetype for the modern churchs indifference to eternity, and judgment, in favor of therapeutic protection and affirmation.
Sister Prejean is a great illustration of why the Catholic Church in the U.S. is in steep decline. Just as with its promotion of government healthcare, or a litany of other programs that push state paternalism over personal responsibility, for decades now the American Catholic Church has shown indifference toward eternity and judgement. Thus, anyone fervently seeking the truth on such matters is drawn elsewhere.
By and large, the churches that are growing in the U.S. are those that unapologetically present the truth.
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/05/how_to_kill_christianity.html#ixzz3agjUdnYz
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There's nothing proselytism about it. It's a critic of the old mainline denominations for being to political and too secular and showing how all of the decline in the numbers of Christians in America is coming at their expense. It is out of those groups that people mostly leave to become undeclared or even agnostic or out of the closet atheists who had been there previously for social reasons.I noticed previously it was ok for progressives to discuss the declining number of Christians and celebrate that news here.
Absolute insanity.
Lemme ask a question,
Why should I accept the words from a book that is claimed to be the word of god, when it is in fact the first government sanctioned, written and approved book of religion?
I mean we are talking about the "King James Version" here aren't we?
Personally, I believe that God created this country, the same as he created the world. But I don't think he used a government approved tome for his source.
The founders didn't that is for sure. But then they believed that a man's religion is solely between him and his god. and any government of men is not from god but the creation of men.
MEN must rule over government, otherwise tyranny takes over eventually in all circumstances. History has proved this to be true.
This has never been a religious nation, and when it becomes one, it will no longer be the republic we are supposed to love.
I give you the opening to the King James Version of the bible.........
++##---------------------------------------------------------------------------------##++
Published as approved by the King.
So in essence, your saying that the King is the creator of this country. If this country is created through his book.
That is not the basis the founders used to create this country...
Fact, leads to truth.
Not said to create a firestorm. but it will be a point the religionists will deny.
Nuff said.
I think we could call this particular article "proselytism lite", but that's fine. I don't have any problem with it. It shows the fanaticism of the "evangelist" Christian who is willing to throw other Christian denominations , Mainstream Protestant and Catholic, under the bus in order to preach it's vindictive , antiquated, and illogical version of "what God wants".
I'm not too worried about this brand of preaching being successful here.
I couldn't agree more and I love that name "proselytism lite". I think this is the type of article that most rational people here would not want banned, for me for it's a daily chuckle value to have articles like this around.
The ones I would vote against as being proselytism and should be banned from the front page would be the ones that preach "my religion or my version of god within the same overall religion, is better then yours and you need to believe the way that I do or you'll go to some form or another of a Hell." Believing in ones religion (or knowing there is no god anyway) is fine on the Front Page. Just not trying to preach other people into your camp is not. That's salesmanship. That's knocking on someone's front door and trying advertising a product to them.