Evangelicals In Decline, Worried

There's no dancing around it, religion cuts through the center of our controversy here in Montgomery County. The "other guys" don't like to be called religious zealots but the fact is, the cases against teaching about sexual variation and safe sex are based on religious arguments.

Today we read in Agape Press, the evangelical Christian online publication, that the evangelicals are concerned about what young people believe. Sure, 86 per cent of them believe in God -- but is that enough? This article is a sort of "book report" -- it's not a book review really, just reports on the contents of a book that talks about a survey of religious attitudes that was done with American teenagers.

Some of the survey results are alarming ... if you're, uh, one of these guys.

... But if the religious lives of teens in the U.S. seem encouraging on the surface, there are troubling currents beneath the foamy whitecaps. As researchers probed deeper, what they found should shake churches to the core.

Barna, for example, after noting that 86 percent of teenagers claimed that they believed in God, asked, "But what is the nature of the God they embrace?"

A strange god indeed, as it turns out. In his book, Third Millennium Teens, Barna revealed this stunning fact: 63 percent of church-going, supposedly Christian teens said they believed "Muslims, Buddhists, Christians, Jews and all other people pray to the same God, even though they use different names for their god."

In other critical areas of Christian doctrine -- e.g., the divinity of Christ, the resurrection, the reality of absolute truth -- the majority of church-going teenagers simply do not hold to views that are orthodox. A Strange Faith -- Are Church-Going Kids Christian?

Now ... I don't know what to say here. It apparently goes without saying among these folks that the gods of the Muslims, Buddhists, Christians, and Jews are different gods. Or, possibly, there's only one God, and "we" know who He is.

But just a second. Are they saying the God of the Jews is a different God from the one that the Christians worship? When did they switch that? And the Moslems -- Islam is an Abrahamic religion closely related to Judaism and Christianity. I would be interested to see what Jewish and Moslem scholars say on this point -- my guess is that the question is not as simple as these guys imply. Never mind the Buddhists. Actually, I'll give them that one, I don't think you'll find much about the biblical God in the Buddhist texts.

And that "reality of absolute truth" thing, I'm not going to criticise that, if they want to believe it, then cool. I will complain though when they make decisions that affect me, based on an "absolute truth" that only they understand, especially when their truth runs against empirical evidence. Yes, I will resist that, even while I support their right to think that way.

To obtain a clearer picture of what youth actually believe, Barna used specific questions in his polling that were designed to allow a peek behind more generalized answers such as, "Yes, I believe in God." For example, in determining if a teenager is actually an evangelical Christian, Barna Research asked nine questions which focus on core evangelical beliefs, such as whether or not a person believes salvation is possible by grace alone.

Using this more probing method, Barna found that only 4 percent of U.S. teens can be considered evangelicals. More distressingly, that number is actually trending in the wrong direction. That 4 percent figure "is a far cry from the 10 percent measured in 1995," he said.

Mmm, OK, I would have used a different set of adjectives and adverbs there, but ...

It is very interesting to find that, once you look under the surface a little bit, only four per cent of teenagers turn out to be hard-core evangelical Christians. Down from 10 percent ten years ago. Didn't you have the feeling there were more of them than there used to be? Somehow, with all their success, taking over the federal government and everything else, their numbers are declining. They don't give you the number, but it sounds like somewhere between four and ten percent of Americans might qualify for inclusion in this religious category today. Note: that's not very many people. (The argument that gay people are "abnormal" because they comprise a small percentage of the population takes on a new significance.)

Whether we blame parents, church leaders, the kids themselves, the culture, or some combination, one thing seems clear: Apparently, many church-going teens are not being challenged by the preaching and teaching of the true Gospel. How else can one explain the overwhelming assumption among teens that they are Christian, when they clearly are not?

Now there's a problem for you. These evangelicals really don't feel like the more moderate Christians are actually Christians.

This is America, these guys are free to believe whatever they believe, and I am not going to make any statement judging their faith or the things that they hold to be true. That's their business, and I couldn't care less. But I will admit that their behavior -- not their belief, but their insistence on forcing their views on everyone around them -- has earned them the title you often see: America's Taliban. I think I am as surprised as they are to see that their numbers in the population are actually dropping, and I think it is surprising, maybe even amazing, that such a tiny group can have so much effect on daily life in a society like ours.