Indeed. Any church that is continuing to have high attendance during a pandemic is showing its irrelevance and destructive influence regarding the current needs of society. An empty church is one that is getting things right.
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And you are certain that the samples used in the surveys are representative? Oh, I am sure that they purport to be representative, using all the usual reasoning. But number-crunchers have been known to err, and err badly. Do you remember the little episode called the election of Donald Trump, where the number-crunchers, with all their sophisticated tools for surveying Americans, made the wrong prediction?
There is no way I could convince of that in a setting such as this. But Iâm not limited to my local area, as I have conversed virtually daily, and for over a decade now, with evangelical and non-evangelical Christians from all over the place, and know a lot about what is going on in the churches far from my home, from the people who live there.
I didnât rely only on my personal experience but on the experience of literally hundreds of well-placed contacts.
Part of the problem is that you and many others here are using the term âevangelicalâ very loosely and imprecisely, to cover a whole range of things. There are fundamentalists, for example, who are not âevangelicalâ â who do not focus on outreach and donât try to make their church services relevant to the needs and questions of modern young people, as evangelicals typically do. It would not surprise me at all if some fundamentalist churches, with their inward-looking attitude and their desire to fossilize the past, are experiencing drops in membership.
Anyhow, if you read my posts carefully, you will see that I have not denied that even evangelical congregations as I understand them are facing membership challenges. That doesnât negate my description of the typical differences between liberal mainline churches and evangelical churches. It is well-known to those on the inside of Protestant Christianity that the mainline churchesâ typical approach has been: (a) to keep offering the same old formalized pattern of church life that worked in the 1950s, in the Eisenhower years, one which assumed lifelong commitment of churchgoers no matter how dull and bland church services and church life were; or (b) to liberalize the theology and ethics drastically, and throw some left-wing politics into sermons, in hopes of hanging on to modern people who find traditional Christian theology and ethics too restrictive and traditional Protestant Christians too politically and socially conventional. Neither approach has worked. The numbers in the big denominations continue to bleed at alarming rates.
Someone like yourself, who by his own admission does not attend church services anywhere on a regular basis, and apparently does not chum much with Christians, could learn something from my analysis of the dynamics within Protestant Christianity in North America today. You may have noticed that my characterization of the dynamics is getting some âLikesâ here from posters who appear to be actively involved in church life here. People on the ground recognize the phenomena and attitudes I am describing. Someone who lives across the ocean, in a much less Christian society (having an established Church does not make a society more Christian), and who doesnât know first-hand what goes on in the small sector of his society that is Christian, isnât likely to understand with any level of subtlety what is going on in Christian life elsewhere. Statistics reveal something, but they are too blunt a tool.
I couldnât care less whether you trust it or not. I couldnât care less whether you or Tim Horton or Rumraket or Art Hunt of Faizal or most of the atheist posters here agree with me or not. When I write about church-related subjects, Iâm addressing people here who care about the inner life of the Church. The opinions of a bunch of atheists who rely entirely on surveys and anti-Christian blogs etc. to form their opinions of Christianity and of contemporary Christian attitudes and practices are of no interest to me at all, especially since all of them have demonstrated by repeated behavior over the past months and years that they have a chip on their shoulder where Christianity is concerned.
Where two completely independent professional surveying firms yield consilient results (as is the case here)? Then yes, itâd be unreasonable not to.
But Iâm not limited to my local area, as I have conversed virtually daily, and for over a decade now, with evangelical and non-evangelical Christians from all over the place, and know a lot about what is going on in the churches far from my home, from the people who live there.Have you asked them the median Evangelical age in their area? Are they qualified to rigorously survey this? As I would expect the answers to these questions is no, it would be unreasonable to accept this as trumping professionally conducted surveys.
I didnât rely only on my personal experience but on the experience of literally hundreds of well-placed contacts.See above.
Part of the problem is that you and many others here are using the term âevangelicalâ very loosely and imprecisely, to cover a whole range of things.I've been through this argument before (on a previous thread).
No Edward, I am NOT defining âevangelicalâ AT ALL! I am taking the definition of âevangelicalâ as given in the survey for the pragmatic reason that this is the only data we currently have to inform our inquiries with.
If you wish to address a different definition of âevangelicalsâ AND can produce survey data based upon this definition to support such a discussion, I would be happy to participate.
Otherwise, this discussion is about survey data about religious trends (based upon an OP that explicitly referenced another survey conducted by one of these âtwo completely independent professional surveying firmsâ I referenced earlier).
If you wish to contribute still further anecdotal claims, then I would request that you address them at somebody other than myself, because (as I have already made abundantly clear) I have no interest in them (for reasons I have also already laid out).
If the definition of âevangelicalâ employed by the survey is not adequate to the reality of evangelical Christianity, then it will be of limited reliability in interpreting evangelical church life.
In any case, I several times conceded that even evangelical churches as I would define them are experiencing loss of membership. But the bleeding is less in those churches than in the old, tired, mainstream churches. I gave some reasons why, based on insider experience that you do not have, and that Faizal, Rumraket, Roy, Art Hunt, etc. donât have. If you donât find my reasons credible, it is of very little moment to me. The âLikesâ coming from people who actually attend Christian churches indicates that there are Christians out there, doubtless some from outside of my local area, who find my analysis credible and possibly even correct. I expect they have noticed similar features of the various churches they have attended during their lifetimes.
One thing is for sure, conservative christian churches in the US canât hold a candle to conservative Islamic denominations when it comes to keeping their kids within the religion.
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I have no reason to doubt this. I wonder â is there anyone here of Islamic background (even if they do not currently hold to Muslim faith) who can explain to us the means why which Islamic congregations keep their young attached to the faith? Perhaps Faizal Ali was raised Muslim? If so, he might be able to explain how Muslims are successful in keeping the next generation faithful, even after they have outgrown childhood.
But speaking of Islam, has anyone noticed that outside of Christianity, the various religious traditions of the world do not seem to be represented among our commenters here? I donât recall seeing any postings from scientists who are Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, etc. This was also the case at BioLogos.
Actually, only about 6 semesters of university math, though that did include a second-year-level course on probability theory and statistics. But there is no math required to make the point here, which is that, even granting that evangelical churches are experiencing some decline in numbers, the decline hasnât been as great as in the mainstream, liberal churches, and among the reasons for this is that the evangelical churches very often give young people (teens and young adults) reasons for remaining active in church life, whereas the liberal mainstream churches have not been very successful in doing this.
The Christians here who have had a wide experience of both types of Protestant church will be familiar with what Iâm talking about. To the unbelievers here, who based on their comments seem to blur together âevangelicalâ, âfundamentalistâ, âBible thumpingâ and âhistorically orthodox Christian doctrineâ as if they were all the same, and who seem to have very little sense of what goes on (in terms of doctrinal teaching, liturgy, youth and adult education, etc.) in Christian churches, what Iâm talking about may make little sense. But Iâm not addressing them in these remarks; Iâm speaking to fellow Christians who are concerned about the future of Christendom.
No clue. Sorry.
âReasons.â That is not very informative or revealing.
It seems to me self-evident that people who belong to a religion that leans towards secularism will be more likely to have members who take the next step than those in a faith that is further from it. Just as someone might more likely to move from Catholicism to a form of Protestantism than to Islam, Judaism, Rastafarianism, or some other non-Christian faith. Itâs just easier to move short distance than a long distance.
To be clear, this is just my guess. I donât know if this is true.
Thatâs not what you said here.
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Oddly enough, the teen data showed that Catholics are far more likely to move to Unaffiliated than either Evangelical Protestant or Mainline Protestant (far more attenuated than inter-Protestant movement).
But I would suspect that most of those moving to non-Christian religions stopped off at Unaffiliated first, or were raised Unaffiliated. I would however be really really interested to see data on this (or on inter-Christian/Unaffiliated movement beyond just teens).
In the passage you link to, I gave no specific number of the courses I took. Nor did I say anything that contradicted what I wrote above.
I gave more details in earlier posts in this discussion. I talked about specialized youth pastors, young peopleâs groups beyond the teens, etc. When you come into a discussion late, sometimes you miss things.
For the most part that is true, which is why, more and more, members of the mainstream liberal Protestant churches have drifted off into secular humanism. The form of Christian belief they were being taught from the pulpit differed little from secular humanism anyway, so it was not a big leap, and it had the advantage of allowing them to sleep in on Sunday mornings. But this point of yours does not contradict anything I said.
There are, of course, exceptions. Some members of the liberal mainline churches, for whatever reason, become appalled at how gutless is the version of faith they have been taught, and react by joining a much more conservative denomination. It doesnât happen often, but it happens.
There are also cases where the long distance is covered in one leap, rather than in baby steps. Some people raised in suffocatingly strict fundamentalism, in reaction, donât settle for leaving fundamentalism for a more moderate form of belief, but chuck Christianity altogether, often with a lot of anger, turning from sounding like Ken Ham to sounding like Richard Dawkins almost overnight. Iâve observed this many times personally, and reading convinces me that itâs a fairly widespread phenomenon.
What the data actually shows is that Evangelicals are older than the US median, and the same age as the Christian median. They are older than all Christian traditions except Mainline (2007 & 2014) and Jehovahâs Witnesses (2014), and have the same median age as Catholics in 2014. They are also older than all Unaffiliated subgroups and all non-Christian subgroups except Jewish. This ordering also roughly reflects the proportion of each groupâs memberships in the 18-29 âyoungâ age range.
One has to wonder as to whether theyâre getting value for money from their youth pastors (though I suppose it could be argued that their results would be even worse without them).
If so, he might be able to explain how Muslims are successful in keeping the next generation faithful, even after they have outgrown childhood.
For early Jews and Muslims, religion was law. Din means law in Hebrew and religion in Arabic. For early Jews, religion was also tribal; for early Muslims, it was universal[i].
Greetings! Not sure we have interacted before.
Yes, I understand this. But Iâm asking not about early Muslims, but Muslims today, in North America. And Iâm not asking about general theoretical principles such as you have stated, but about the practice of Muslim religious life in the context of North America, and in particular about means of religious education of young Muslims (children, teens, and young adults). Above it was claimed (presumably based on the statistics being discussed here) that Muslims are better at keeping their young in the faith than Christians are. I was asking if anyone here knew Islam from the inside and could comment on how Muslim youth today are taught the faith, so that we could compare the methods of inculcation in the two faiths, and try to come to some conclusions.
There seem to be few if any Muslims contributing here; Iâm not even sure if any Muslims are reading the discussions here. But if there are any readers out there, who would share with us what Muslim teen and young adult culture are like, and how religious education in Islam avoids or at least resists the trends in modern society that cause young people to drift away from religious life once they move away from home, those readers would be helping the discussion along.
I thought that there was a chance that Faizal here might have been raised in the Muslim faith and might be able to tell us how Islam connects with its own younger generation, but he has said he has no knowledge of this subject, so someone else will have to step up to the plate.
Looking in from the outside, strongly authoritarian theocracies seem to play a strong role if we are looking at the larger Muslim world. This would probably also apply within a family context to first and second generation Muslim households within the western world. I would say cultural dominance of a single religion was also a hallmark of periods in the past where people tended to stay within their parentâs religion, but this possibly suffers from a chicken-egg paradox.
Apologies if you have already covered this, but if these certain denominations are as vacuous as you claim then why do parents belong to them in the first place? Why are these denominations good enough for the parents but not good enough for the kids?
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By âthese denominationsâ I was referring neither to Islam nor to those Christian denominations that are heavily populated with members who are there by conscious, willed choice, but to the liberal, mainstream denominations, e.g., the Episcopalian, the UCC, the Presbyterian, the Methodist, etc. I thought that regarding such churches, it was universally understood â though perhaps it is not understood by a number of people here, who appear to have been raised churchless or in narrower, Bible-focused churches â that the mainstream churches have tended to survive on culturally inherited habit of churchgoing. For many generations, while more and more of the teachings of Christianity have been compromised or dropped in these churches, the outward habits â family habits, cultural habits (lingering attachment to rites of passage traditionally provided by churches, for example) â have persisted.
But as the numbers show, the force of habit is not enough. Just as a moving object, no matter how quickly it was moving originally, eventually slows down due to friction if no new motive force is applied, so social institutions whose members cease to have strong convictions eventually shrink. Grandparents with weakened convictions pass those on to the next generation, and the further weakened convictions are passed on to the next, and a pattern emerges of larger and larger numbers of the young, with each passing generation, no longer staying inside the fold as they reach adulthood, and hence no longer raising their own young within the church that was âtheirâ family church for generations or even centuries.
The reason this has happened with less speed in many fundamentalist, evangelical, and pentecostal denominations is that (a) in those denominations, the adult conviction being stronger, and this conviction showing in both theology and morals, there is not the tendency of the youth to regard the adults as hypocrites, attending church purely as a formal social requirement, but as people who really believe something; (b) in those denominations, teaching is generally more vigorous and more available, beyond a Sunday sermon once a week, and the teaching is often targeted at the intellectual and emotional needs of particular groups, e.g., teens, young adults, Christian singles, etc. It can take the form of regular Bible studies, Sunday evening services with a more intellectual focus, events where speakers come in to deal with particular issues (evolution, sexuality, other religions, etc.) The churches which have the strongest educational programs tend to be better (a) at hanging on to existing youth and (b) bringing in new members, whether those of no previous faith or those dissatisfied with the intellectually dead formalism of mainstream churches.
Observations like these are not original with me, and thousands of Christians have made them over the past few decades. Christians who have spent a good part of their lives investigating the various churches, denominations, and congregations in the areas where they live, and whose social friendships are most frequently with other Christians, tend to understand these intra-church dynamics better than those who only read about religious life as outsiders.
Yes, the acids which corrode mainstream churches are also corroding even the more conservative ones, but if one is a young person looking for a world view, an overall meaning of life, one is more likely to find that consistently taught and lived out in âevangelicalâ or âconservativeâ churches than in mainstream ones. And wherever you find a church with lots of teenagers and young people, actively involved in church life, you will almost always find the theology to be more âevangelicalâ or âconservative.â
Religion perverts the Word of God. I am purposefully staying out of this discussion, but want to assert that the opinions being expressed about âChristianityâ do not in any way resonate with me, though I follow Christ. I donât see any purpose to divide so distinctly, unless the goal is to destroy the church, which it may very well be.
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Of course, if you make such a blanket statement, you have to explain what you mean by âreligion.â
Could you tell us your denominational and/or theological orientation within Christianity?
Youâll have to be more specific what opinions you are talking about, or your statement is of little use to make anyone understand what you mean.
To divide what so distinctly? Be more explicit.
I have no idea whose goal you are talking about; itâs certainly not mine. Itâs hardly âdestroying the churchâ to point out that in some sectors of the church, Christian belief has almost entirely faded away, and that itâs precisely those sectors of the church that are dying on the vine.
No, never mind, I shouldnât have posted. Sorry for the sidetrack.