How to live in post-Christian America
The solution isn't secretive at all
If you pay attention to trends in the world of Christianity, you know that fewer people every year are identifying as Christian.
How religious are Americans? Not very, according to a Gallup survey from 2023. From the 1940s through the 1970s, more than 90 percent said they identified as Christian. In 2023, the number was 68 percent. And we are well within reason to question what percentage of the 68 percent are serious about their faith to the extent it affects the way they live.
For many years, the Church influenced American culture. Recently, culture has influenced the Church.
If you are serious or at least semi-serious about your Christian faith, you have noticed that much of Christianity in America is being looked at differently than it was when you were younger.
Much of society has looked at the Church with just a passing interest or no interest at all over the last several years. However, more and more of society is looking at pockets of the Church now with hostility. Sometimes it is because people within the Church are not representing Christ accurately. Other times, however, people are hostile to the Church because the Church simply says what Jesus or Paul said.
So, we live in a post-Christian society. There is no reason to believe this will change anytime soon unless there is a move of God’s grace. My only caveat to that statement is that Gen Z will likely produce few Christians, but the ones coming from Gen Z will probably be far more committed than a lot of Gen X or Millenial Christians.
Christians are having a hard time dealing with this change in attitudes in our country. Christians see unbridled hostility on a very public stage and it is a shock to their system.
If only Christians knew what to do.
Fortunately, we have a book known as the Holy Bible. Practically all of it was written during a time in which much of society was hostile to followers of God. We don’t need to look for a new blueprint. It has been right in front of us the whole time.
It may seem overly simplistic to point to the Bible and suggest simply responding the way followers of Christ responded when He walked the earth or when the Church was newly formed. But that’s exactly why God allowed the Bible to survive and thrive over time.
I could point to a hundred examples, but I’ll just simply encourage you to pick up the New Testament and read it as if it was written to a group of people set apart from society norms, because it was. We won’t be left guessing how to respond.
I tend to disagree with your conclusions. I would rather posit that older Christians taught the younger generation very well in what it means to follow Jesus and realized that we were being hypocrites about it.
They noticed that we had become one-issue voters and supported a misogynistic, lying adulterer and abuser for President and we tried to pawn it off as him being a “baby Christian.” They saw us do that and saw our hypocrisy when we wouldn’t extend the same grace to Bill Clinton, who did far less than Trump did.
They saw our hypocrisy and called it out for what it was, leaving that institution. We exchanged orthopraxy for orthodoxy, believing the right things but never doing the right things.
Unfortunately, you have spoken the truth, my friend.