Gradual decline by American Christians

When we see documentaries about the North American people we get a picture that they are 'very religious'.

Christianity, which was once shared by a majority of Americans, has seen a gradual decline as fewer people hold to the core tenets of the faith.

The latest research by the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University continues the survey series American Worldview Inventory 2021 in examining biblical and competing worldviews of American adults.

According to the most recent release from the study, there has been a sharp decline in the status of Christianity across the nation in the past several decades. In 1980, more than 90 percent of Americans claimed to be Christian. That percentage dropped to 80 percent by 1990, in which the proportion lasted until after the turn of the millennium. By 2010, only three in four adults claimed to be Christians, with a further decline today as just under two out of three make the same claim.

In the previous century confidence in religion was still important.
About two-thirds of American adults had high confidence in religion in the 1970s. By the 1980s, however, that confidence was waning, and Christianity’s influence was declining.
At the start of the millennium, 56 percent of adults had confidence in religion. That number continued to decline, and now, barely four in ten adults hold a high degree of confidence in religion.

No wonder, you could say, when we look at how ministers used their institutions to gain money and trick people into their 'business'. Small personal family churches were taken over by mega churches where one got lost in the group and where there was not a special bond between teh believers.

A great problem is also that the majority of those churches are Trinitarian churches, where they worship Jesus as their god. Though people came to see the weakness of that person and the contradictions they can find in Scriptures, having a Jesus who can not do a lot of things and does not know a lot of things, whilst the Bible tells us God can do everything and knows everything.

The Bible is also increasingly rejected as a trustworthy and relevant document of life principles. Not many people want to know about the values and ethics presented in the Holy Scriptures.

In 1991, 86 percent of people believed in the existence of God as the all-knowing, all-powerful creator of the universe who still rules the world today. Today, that percentage has dropped to 46 percent.

In a lot of the American churches there was not much time spend on the Word of God. Ministers only took some verses, often out of context, to bring a long sermon, often with a lot of shouting and crying about damnation and danger to burn into hell. Often people could not find a relation between the words of the pastor and the words written in the Bible. That undermined the relevance of the Holy Scriptures in the daily life.

Regarding the belief that the Bible is the accurate and reliable Word of God, the decline shifted from 70 percent in 1991 to 41 percent in 2021. On the topic of salvation, 36 percent of adults believed in salvation through confession of sin and accepting Jesus as Saviour in 1991. Today, that amount is 30 percent. The survey also noted that this measured as high as 45 percent and was 39 percent in 2011.

The percentage of Americans possessing a biblical worldview also significantly decline (12 percent in 1995; 6 percent in 2021).

Megachurches out of america now have a higher average attendance

Despite American roots that reach back to the 19th century, megachurches abroad now have a higher average attendance, even though the vast majority of megachurches are still in the United States. While there are 230 to 500 such churches elsewhere in the world, the Hartford Institute estimates that there are about three times more megachurches in the United States. In the United States, the median weekly attendance is about 2750, while the median weekly attendance in world megachurches is nearly 6000.

— Washington Post, 7/24/2015 

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Problems attracting and maintaining worshippers

 The urgency to reach people with the Gospel can,
if the church is not faithful and watchful,
tempt us to subvert the Gospel by redefining its terms.

 We are not honest if we do not admit that the current cultural context
raises the cost of declaring the Gospel on its own terms.

 

Jim Hinch writes:

The exteriors of Crystal Cathedral. Garden Grove, CA, USA. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Just 10 years ago, evangelical Christianity appeared to be America’s dominant religious movement. Evangelicals, more theologically diverse and open to the secular world than their fundamentalist brethren, with whom they’re often confused, were on the march toward political power and cultural prominence. They had the largest churches, the most money, influential government lobbyists, and in the person of President George W. Bush, leadership of the free world itself. Indeed, even today most people continue to regard the United States as the great spiritual exception among developed nations: a country where advances in science and technology coexist with stubborn, and stubbornly conservative, religiosity. But the reality, largely unnoticed outside church circles, is that evangelicalism is not only in gradual decline but today stands poised at the edge of a demographic and cultural cliff.

The most recent Pew Research Center survey of the nation’s religious attitudes, taken in 2012, found that just 19 percent of Americans identified themselves as white evangelical Protestants—five years earlier, 21 percent of Americans did so. Slightly more (19.6 percent) self-identified as unaffiliated with any religion at all, the first time that group has surpassed evangelicals. (It should be noted that surveying Americans’ faith lives is notoriously difficult, since answers vary according to how questions are phrased, and respondents often exaggerate their level of religious commitment. Pew is a nonpartisan research organization with a track record of producing reliable, in-depth studies of religion. Other equally respected surveys—Gallup, the General Social Survey—have reached conclusions about Christianity’s status in present-day America that agree with Pew’s in some respects and diverge in others.)

Secularization alone is not to blame for this change in American religiosity. Even half of those Americans who claim no religious affiliation profess belief in God or claim some sort of spiritual orientation. Other faiths, like Islam, perhaps the country’s fastest-growing religion, have had no problem attracting and maintaining worshippers. No, evangelicalism’s dilemma stems more from a change in American Christianity itself, a sense of creeping exhaustion with the popularizing, simplifying impulse evangelical luminaries such as Schuller once rode to success.

California's Crystal Cathedral, now Christ Cathedral (Photo by Wikipedia user Nepenthes)

Continue reading: Where Are the People? -
Evangelical Christianity in America is losing its power—what happened to Orange County’s Crystal Cathedral shows why

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Related articles

• David Cameron says Christians should be 'more evangelical' (telegraph.co.uk)
  
  In his strongest intervention on religion to date, Mr Cameron said that in an increasingly "secular age" Christians need to be even "more confident" and "ambitious".
  He said that he has personally felt the "healing power" of the Church of England's pastoral care and highlighted its role in "improving our society and the education of our children".
• Cameron does God, but does Britain want him to? (newstatesman.com)
  At an Easter reception at Downing Street, he declared: "Jesus invented the Big Society 2,000 years ago" and spoke of him as "our saviour". He followed this up with a video message in which he said: "Easter is not just a time for Christians across our country to reflect, but a time for our whole country to reflect on what Christianity brings to Britain."
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  But while Cameron is now unequivocally "doing God" (almost certainly with an eye to those Conservatives alienated by his support for equal marriage), does Britain want him to? With apt timing, a new global study has found that little more than a third of people in Britain believe that religion has a positive role to play in our lives, compared to a global average of 59 per cent, while a quarter believe it has a negative impact.
  +
  As the 2013 British Social Attitudes Survey showed, this is, increasingly, a secular country, not a Christian one. Forty eight per cent of respondents stated that they did not belong to a religion, up from 32 per cent in 1983, and just 20 per cent described themselves as belonging to the Church of England, down from 40 per cent in 1983.
  This ambiguity points to the need for a clear separation between church and state. Religious believers who oppose such a move should look to the US, where faith has flourished despite the country's secular constitution (spoken of by Jefferson as "a wall of separation) .
  
• Left Behind? (dish.andrewsullivan.com)
  Even half of those Americans who claim no religious affiliation profess belief in God or claim some sort of spiritual orientation. Other faiths, like Islam, perhaps the country’s fastest-growing religion, have had no problem attracting and maintaining worshippers. No, evangelicalism’s dilemma stems more from a change in American Christianity itself, a sense of creeping exhaustion with the popularizing, simplifying impulse evangelical luminaries such as [televangelist Robert] Schuller once rode to success.
• Victim of the US's 'evangelical recession', California's Crystal Cathedral is now under Catholic control (freethinker.co.uk)
  The Crystal Cathedral – one of America’s largest and most celebrated ecclesiastical buildings – was replete with all the bells and whistles evangelicals in the US craved: livestock, silly costumes, lights, cameras, below-stage elevators, theatre-style seating, an indoor reflecting pool … and one mother of an organ, with 10,000 pipes.
  
  

  The cathedral’s enormous organ, pictured at a Yuletide past.
  But things have drastically changed. According to this fascinating American Scholar report by Jim Hinch, American evangelicals are outnumbered by people of no professed faith ­ –  and in June this year, Schuller’s evangelical Christian ministry, founded almost 60 years ago amid the suburbs of postwar Southern California, conducted its last worship service and filmed its last Hour of Power in the Crystal Cathedral.
  
  

  Robert H Schuller (Photo: Reuters).
  Hounded by creditors, the ministry declared bankruptcy in 2010. Last year Schuller resigned from the cathedral’s board, and the building was flogged for $58 million to Orange County’s Catholic diocese, which intends ripping out all the Disneyesque equipment and replacing it with the sort of crap Catholics regard as more palatable: a consecrated altar, bishop’s cathedra, baptismal font, and votive chapels dedicated to the Virgin of Guadalupe and other saints prominent in immigrant Catholics’ devotional lives. (There is a frightening number of immigrant Catlickers in the vicinity).
  The building is scheduled to reopen for Catholic worship in 2016.
  
• Whither the Prosperity Gospel? by Russell D. Moore (thewordonthewordoffaithinfoblog.com)
  A few months ago, the American Scholar published a cover story on the collapse of Robert Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral. The article, by Jim Hinch, used the Cathedral as a parable for evangelicalism itself.
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  the question remains, where are all the people who once thronged the Crystal Cathedral. The Charlottesville correspondent explains to the American scholars: “They are at home, having their self-esteem puffed up by a new breed of prosperity-Gospel preacher, including Joel Osteen, Joyce Meyer, and T.D. Jakes.” This is exactly right. The prosperity gospel isn’t just another brand of evangelicalism. It isn’t “evangelical” at all because it’s rooted in a different gospel from the one preached and embodied by Jesus Christ. The prosperity gospel is far more akin to the ancient Canaanite fertility religions than it is to anything announced by Jesus, the prophets before him, or the apostles after him.
  
• From Crystal to Christ: A Once and Future Cathedral (firstthings.com)
  Garden Grove Community Church began in 1955 when Schuller rented for $10 per week the Orange Drive-In Theater, a well-chosen site near the just-opened Disneyland. Drive-in theaters were the rave across the country then. “Come as you are in the family car” was an early Schuller slogan. Schuller preached from the tarpaper rooftop of the snack bar while his wife Arvella played a portable organ. And come they did, not only to what was billed as the nation’s first walk-in/drive-in church, but also to Schuller’s expansive television ministry called “The Hour of Power.” In his prime on “The Hour of Power,” Robert Schuller was spectacular. He appeared each Sunday in flowing robes, with a booming resonant voice and sweeping gestures, while surrounded by fountains that splashed at a button’s push and a thousand-voice choir that sang some of the best religious music on television. At its height, “The Hour of Power” was the most watched religious television program in the world, seen by an estimated 30 million people on hundreds of stations around the globe.
  
• Is The United States Religiously Diverse? (themoderatevoice.com)
  I think grouping all so called Christian religions in the United States is a false equivalency.  An evangelical Christian church and a main stream Christian church are not the same religion.  A Pentecostal church and the Lutheran church are not the same religion.  It also does not take into account social issues.  It has been my observation that many in the United States attend attend church for social rather than religious reasons.  It is part of being part of society.  As an atheist I have been guilty of this at times of emotional stress.  As someone who has lived in Europe I know that 63% of the French may be socially Christian but not religiously Christian. Grouping all so called Christian religions together is not unlike grouping all Abrahamic  (Jewish, Christian an Muslim) religions together.  Some religious scholars think we are all actually Zoroastrians, the first monotheistic religion.
  
• World Vision and Evangelicalism: An Interview with David King (pietistschoolman.com)
  Last week the U.S. chapter of the international Christian humanitarian organization World Vision made headlines: first when president Rich Stearns confirmed to Christianity Today last Monday that the organization would employ Christians in same-sex marriages, only to reverse the decision two days later, in the wake of torrents of criticism from conservatives, some of whom threatened to withdraw their financial support from World Vision and its well-known child sponsorship program. Yesterday a Google executive resigned from the board of World Vision U.S. in protest, and Rachel Held Evans likely spoke for many progressive evangelicals when she wrote, “The response to World Vision revealed some major fault lines in the Church, and many of us who grew up evangelical interpreted all the gleeful ‘farewelling’ from evangelical leaders as our final kick out the door.”

Is the Megachurch the New Liberalism?

Black Christian new writes:

The emergence of the megachurch as a model of metropolitan ministry is one of the defining marks of evangelical Christianity in the United States. Megachurches -- huge congregations that attract thousands of worshipers -- arrived on the scene in the 1970s and quickly became engines of ministry development and energy.

Over the last 40 years, the megachurch has made its presence known, often dominating the Christian landscape within the nation's metropolitan regions. The megachurch came into dominance at the same time that massive shopping malls became the landmarks of suburban consumer life. Sociologists can easily trace the rise of megachurches within the context of America's suburban explosion and the development of the technologies and transportation systems that made both the mall and the megachurch possible.

 

 Continue reading: Is the Megachurch the New Liberalism?

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  The patterns of a megachurch look much like those of its niche in the world; fragmented nodes of participation connected by the automobile and facilities much like shopping malls. The home and family have become the center of life and other institutions (work, community, politics and culture) are marginalized around the private center of each nuclear family's life.
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  Evangelical megachurches have become expert at providing many different modes of worship, each appealing to a specific subculture. They are dispersed, multi-modal networks that only appear to be mass organizations. They best fit the endless suburban-like social context of California which is replicated to some extent around all major metropolitan areas in North America.
• Is the Megachurch the New Liberalism? (standupforthetruth.com)
  On the international scene, huge congregations can be found in many African nations and in nations such as Brazil, South Korea, and Australia. In London, where the megachurch can trace its roots back in the 19th century to massive urban congregations such as Charles Spurgeon’s Metropolitan Tabernacle, a few modern megachurches can be found. For the most part, however, the suburban evangelical megachurch is an American phenomenon.
  

  Theologically, most megachurches are conservative in orientation, at least in a general sense. In America, a large number of megachurches are associated with the charismatic movement and denominations such as the Assemblies of God. Many are independent, though often loosely associated with other churches. The largest number of megachurches within one denomination is found within the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest non-Catholic denomination.
  +
  A shot now reverberating around the evangelical world was fired by Atlanta megachurch pastor Andy Stanley in recent days. Preaching at North Point Community Church, in a sermon series known as “Christian,” Stanley preached a message titled “When Gracie Met Truthy” on April 15, 2012. With reference to John 1:14, Stanley described the challenge of affirming grace and truth in full measure. He spoke of grace and truth as a tension, warning that “if you resolve it, you give up something important.”

• The Big Business of the MegaChurch (jenx67.com)
  
• Has the Megachurch Idea Peaked? (msahlin.typepad.com)
  Two items in the news this weekend tell me that the megachurch concept has peaked in American culture. From here on out it will decline, but probably never disappear.
  First, the Crystal Cathedral, arguably the original megachurch, has passed to the ownership of the Roman Catholic diocese in Orange County (California) and has been renamed as a Catholic cathedral. The megachurch started by Robert Schuller is at an end after about a half century.
  Second, Pastor Creflo Dollar was arrested on Friday night for beating his 15-year-old daughter. He has been a primary example of the "prosperity gospel" and African American megachurches. He will inevitably go downhill from this event despite his denial and defiance on the events in question.
  This is probably as clear a marker as we will have on this trend in our culture. The idea of the megachurch will become less attractive and slowly enter into decline. But, it is unlikely to ever disappear alltogther. There will always be a strand of Christianity anchored in the culture of the affluent, suburban consumer even once the Baby Boom has passed from the world.
  
• God as a drug: The rise of American megachurches (esciencenews.com)
  American megachurches use stagecraft, sensory pageantry, charismatic leadership and an upbeat, unchallenging vision of Christianity to provide their congregants with a powerful emotional religious experience, according to research from the University of Washington. "Membership in megachurches is one of the leading ways American Christians worship these days, so, therefore, these churches should be understood," said James Wellman, associate professor of American religion at the University of Washington. "Our study shows that -- contrary to public opinion that tends to pass off the megachurch movement as consumerist religion -- megachurches are doing a pretty effective job for their members. In fact, megachurch members speak eloquently of their spiritual growth."
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  The researchers also found that the large size of megachurch congregations is a benefit rather than a drawback, as it results in resources for state-of-the-art technology -- amplifying the emotional intensity of services -- and the ability to hire more qualified church leadership.
• What in the world??? (nomads2.wordpress.com)
  The emergence of the megachurch was noted by sociologists and church researchers attempting to understand the massive shifts that were taking place in the last decades of the 20th century. Researchers such as Dean M. Kelley of the National Council of Churches traced the decline of the liberal denominations that once constituted the old Protestant “mainline.” This decline was contrasted with remarkable growth among more conservative denominations and churches — a pattern traced in Kelley’s 1973 landmark book, Why Conservative Churches Are Growing. Kelley argued that conservative churches were growing precisely because of their strict doctrine and moral teachings. The early megachurches were the leading edge of the growth among conservative churches, especially in metropolitan and suburban settings.
  The megachurches were not without their critics. Theologian David Wells leveled a massive critique of the doctrinal minimalism, methodological pragmatism, and managerial culture of many megachurches. Os Guiness accused the megachurch movement of “flirting with modernity” to a degree that put the Christian identity of the massive congregations at risk.
  
• Has the Megachurch Lost Its Luster? (juicyecumenism.com)
  Churches with multi-site campuses, parking garages, jumbo-trons, award-winning praise bands, laser shows, tremendous charities, political endorsements, and even in-house coffee shops sprang up across the nation. Thousands of people—unchurched, disenchanted, or pushed out of liberalizing Mainline congregations (or stringent fundamentalist ones)—flocked to these new watering holes. The droves started having offspring as smaller congregations dwindled away. A new way of “doing church” was in town, and it seemed to be primed for being the ideal model for pastors to emulate if they wanted their congregations to survive the coming millennium. However, critics of this ecclesiology came to the forefront. They complained of shallow theology, entertainment over discipleship, emotionalism, cults of ego, lack of accountability, giganticism (in terms of architecture, size, and theology), consumerism, the prosperity gospel, lack of reverence, therapeutic spirituality, and a host of other spiritual maladies. Most devastatingly, many of the megachurch’s harshest critics came from its own children. In addition, the majority of Americans that remained in smaller congregations also tended to sympathize with these critiques. Indeed, it is almost a truism now to hear a diatribe about the apparent evils of megachurch-style religion.
  
• Where Are the People? (theamericanscholar.org)
  The Crystal Cathedral in Orange County, California, is one of America’s largest and most celebrated ecclesiastical buildings. At 60,000 square feet and designed by architect Philip Johnson, it was until recently the sanctuary of Robert H. Schuller, once one of the country’s most prominent and influential Christian ministers. In September 1980, when he dedicated the cathedral at an opening ceremony (“To the glory of man for the greater glory of God”), Schuller was at the height of his influence, preaching to a congregation of thousands in Orange County and reaching millions more worldwide via the Hour of Power, a weekly televised ministry program. Among the show’s annual highlights were “The Glory of Easter” and its companion production, “The Glory of Christmas,” multimillion-dollar dramatic extravaganzas staged inside the cathedral with a cast of professional actors, Hollywood-grade costumes, and live animals. The setting for the spectacles was a striking, soaring, light-filled structure justly praised by architecture critics. But it was not a cathedral. It was never consecrated by a religious denomination. The building is not even made of crystal, but rather 10,000 rectangular panes of glass. Like the much beloved, much pilloried Disneyland three miles to the northwest, the Crystal Cathedral is a monument to Americans’ inveterate ability to transform dominant cultural impulses—in this case, Christianity itself—into moneymaking enterprises that conquer the world.
• Getting High on God (seattleweekly.com)
  
  Karl Marx famously said that religion is the opiate of the masses, and now a new study from sociologists at the University of Washington suggests that attending a Protestant megachurch actually does produce a high much like being on drugs.
  
  The study, titled " 'God Is Like a Drug . . . ': Explaining Interaction Ritual Chains in American Megachurches," is the work of UW professor James Wellman and grad students Katie E. Corcoran and Kate Stockly-Meyerdirk. The trio pored over 470 interviews with attendees of 12 megachurches from across the United States.