Religion and modernity were never expected to go hand in hand, and for centuries they coexisted uncomfortably. But thanks to the entrepreneurial model of American evangelicals, God is back.
I read this article that peaked my interest. I read a lot of CFR (council on foreign relations) documents, it’s a good way to keep up with how the United States interacts with other countries, economically and politically.
They rarely if ever touch religion, so as soon as I read the tittle of the article “Born Again in the U.S.A.”, I was hooked.
what I took out of the article was this pattern in church growth throughout history. After the Revolution church attendance started to go down, mainly because the founding fathers had separated church and state so attendance was no longer mandatory.
They saw the danger’s and temptation of having a state lead church, and to avoid corruption they took the measure to free the church from political control.
Church attendance declined until evangelicals like Dwight Moody and Billy Graham reinvented God. They took the Christian religion that still greatly resembled the European version and modernized it, making it more American. It gave individuals more spiritual freedom and applied to a more mobile country.
This model has worked well for the past hundred years, but the last decade has again seen church attendance slipping. After eight years of George W. Bush in office, evangelicals have taken a hit. 15% of Americans now say they have no religion at all, almost double from 1990. Big hitter in the Evangelical team are even admitting their frustrations. When James Dobson head of Focus on the Family stepped down from leading the organization, he gave a decidedly downbeat farewell speech about issues such as same-sex marriage, abortion, and pornography.
“We are right now in the most discouraging period of that long conflict,” Dobson reflected. “Humanly speaking, we can say we have lost all those battles.”
But it’s too early to write God off as dead. American evangelicalism has spawned a “church growth” industry driven by a class of preachers, some of whom call themselves “pastorpreneurs”. They are highly skilled in
building mega churches that target the religiously disaffected with “seeker-friendly” services and family-friendly facilities, replete with on-site daycare, basketball courts, and fast-food restaurants.
Nearly half of all Americans that say they are christian, fall into the evangelical / nondenominational category. This category is fueled by being more modern then traditional groups like Baptist. The infusion of technology for high definition promo trailers for weekly services, and the bloated marketing budgets have certainly helped the evangelical growth.
The article ends by comparing foreign countries to the US. Most Islamic countries don’t have a separation of church and state and the authors argue that this hurts not only the state, but the religion as well.
let God be God by freeing him from both government regulation and government handouts;
While the article gives some interesting insights into the changes of Christianity in the last hundred years. I’m not so sure that all the changes have been for the better. It’s one thing to take the bible and help people find themselves inside the story. It’s a completely other thing to take the bible and make it fit into peoples ultra modern busy lives.
This is what in my opinion has lead to the “Pop-Sermon”. A hybrid of psychology and water down scripture, tied together with social norms. The argument whether mega churches are a good or bad trend in Christianity is a different subject, but I fear there are churches that tip-toe the line of social inclusion so closely that they often find themselves on both sides of the lines with out realizing it.
