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Because I am a sucker for marketing I allowed Newsweek's somewhat blaise cover to nab me. With a stark, black background and a Cross formed by the words "The Decline and Fall of Christian America" Newsweek managed to coax me into making a purchase I had not planned on making. It was not the author and his particularly secular, uninvolved heart (yes, he states he is a believer, but it seemed a horribly sterile, clinical belief), it was, rather, the whining, desperate mutterings of the interviewee, one R. Albert Mohler Jr, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Mohler goes over the numbers found by the American Religious Identification Survey.
I am not going to give you those numbers.
They matter not.
While Mohler is bemoaning the loss of those who affiliate themselves with Christianity or even any religion at all, I say that there is nothing new. Perhaps they should have done a survey asking respondents if they now felt it is now more acceptable to declare their lack of faith than it was fifteen years ago. The only thing I believe the numbers reflect is a rise in honesty. People are finally declaring that they have no religious affiliation and they are no longer stating, out of fear of being shunned or thought a bad person, that they are Christian when they are not.
Christian, this is good news.
For too long we have been fighting a wave of criticisms such as, "I know a lot of people who claim to be Christians and they don't act anything like Jesus. I don't need Christ in my life to act like him...." Those Christians in name only are no longer hiding their agnosticism. Now let those who truly believe in Christ and long to be obedient to Him rise above the misrepresentations previously caused by those who had no faith.
It makes me think of so many examples from the Bible. The first that comes to mind is when the Israelites are given the chance to leave captivity and return to Israel, but many choose to stay behind because they lack faith that God can bring them back to the Promised Land and besides, it would just be too hard. But those with true faith took the journey and made it back home. At that moment of decision, the Jews who choose to stay behind revealed their lack of faith. It was a sifting process. And that is all we as a nation have entered into: a sifting process
Now, let the remnant rise and let us do Christianity right for once. And don't get nostalgic on me. No, the 1950's were not a time we should go back to. America, even in the beginning (taxes on those who didn't go to church, ...Salem, ring a bell?) has never done Christianity properly.
As the secularists rise to a new era of honesty, let the Christians as well. Let us be transparent in our lives and in our faith and let us each do the good work we were created for. Let us not live to make a dollar or to have the happiest life we can, let us live and give fully of ourselves and our gifts to the work of His kingdom. As Christ rose from the grave, let us rise from the muck and mire of our history and become Christians after God's own heart.
Happy Easter all my brothers and sisters in Christ.
