The End of the Great Awakening Part II

Several items were released this week on religion in America and God in your Brain. The Trinity College "American Religious Identity Survey" was released that showed the number of Americans claiming no religion now has increased to 15 percent. Northern New England has now taken over from the Pacific Northwest as the least religious section of the country. Vermont leads all states with 34% of the population claiming to have no religious preference.

The percentage of Christians in the United States has declined from 86.2 percent in the 1990s to 76 percent today. Mainstream protestant churches have experienced the largest declines to 12.9 percent from 18.7% in the 1990s. Evangelical churches however have increased to almost 11.8 percent of the population from 5% in the 1990s. Significantly, nearly 38.6 percent of mainline Protestant now also identify themselves as evangelical or born again.

Good news for evangelicals? Well, evangelical Michael Spencer writing in the new on-line Christian Science Monitor warns that within ten years there will be a major collapse of evangelical Christianity. He sees evangelicalism being deserted by half within a generation. He argues that the 21st century will be very secular and religiously antagonistic, triggering an intolerance of Christianity that many thought impossible in their lifetimes and that public policy will see evangelical Christianity as an opponent of the common good.

He envisions that thousands of ministries will end; Christian media reduced, if not eliminated, and millions of evangelicals will quit. He says "the end of evangelicalism as we know it is close."

How did this happen so fast? Spencer cites a number of factors.
1. Evangelicals made a costly mistake by identifying their movement with the culture war and with political conservatism. "Being against gay marruage and being rhetorcally pro-life will not make up for the fact that massive majorities of Evangelicals can't articulate the Gospel with any coherence"
2. Evangelicals have failed to pass on to young people an orthodox form of faith that can take root and survive. Despite billions spent on youth ministries, coming generations of Christians are going to be monumentally ignorant and unprepared for cultural pressures.
3. Consumer-driven megachurches are one of the dominant forms of the evangelical movement and they will shrink, even vanish.
4. Christian education has not produced a product that can withstand the rising tide of secularism. It had used its educational system primarily to staff its own needs and talk to itself.
5. He believes that cultural secularism will put pressure on evangelicals to "do good" so that actual religious work will not get done.
6. Even in the "bible belt" Evangelicals will not find a great reception.
7. And the money will dry up.

In viewing what will be left, Michael Spencer sees much of Evangelicalism needs a funeral, escpecially the prosperity Gospel. He thinks that the Catholic and Orthodox churches will be two of the beneficiaries of evangelicals' collapse. He expects that the remainder of the evangelical churches will have a fragmented response to the so-called "culture wars" and will still flirt with political conservatives.

An excellent read on h0w the evangelicals got into their present state is Frank Schaeffer's very rich memoir Crazy for God, (2007, De Capo Press, $16.00). Frank appeared on television this week, looking like Mitt Romney's brother,and called the Republican Party "the drunk at the end of the subway car trying to get everyone's attention". Frank and his father created the religious right in America in response to Roe v. Wade. While he credits his father, a well-known reformed Presbyterian preacher with this, it was actually Frank as a young man, who dragged his father into politics from his faith-based community in Switzerland.

Crazy for God is not a Marjoe type story. His parents, while fundamentalist in terms of biblical theology, were actually quite liberal, tolerant,not homophobic and relatively enlightened about sex. The most amusing parts of the memoir are the meetings between his father and people like Pat Robertson and Rev. Dobson. Schaeffer has since converted to the Greek Orthodox faith and has been blogging for the last year or so on Huffingtonpost.com.

The backlash against the fundamentalists will likely be accelerated by studies to be released this year that indicate fundamentalists tend to have extraordinarily high incidences of spousal abuse, sex abuse, alcoholism, out of wed pregnancies and epidemic levels of drug use. In other words, the family values crowd will be shown to suffer a plague of problems and become viewed more as constituting a social problem themselves.

But the good news for everyone is that the US National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Strokes in Bethesda , Maryland has completed a study that demonstrates " specific components of religious belief are mediated by well-known brain networks, and they support contemporary psychological theories and ground religious belief within evolutionary-adaptive cognitive functions."

In short, Jesus was right, the Kingdom of God is literally inside you. Congratulations.