Is Christianity really dwindling in numbers/being oppressed?

[Zinkovich]

According to some of them they are, flawed statistical methodologies be damned!

October 6, 2006 Evangelicals Fear the Loss of Their Teenagers By LAURIE GOODSTEIN Despite their packed megachurches, their political clout and their increasing visibility on the national stage, evangelical Christian leaders are warning one another that their teenagers are abandoning the faith in droves. At an unusual series of leadership meetings in 44 cities this fall, more than 6,000 pastors are hearing dire forecasts from some of the biggest names in the conservative evangelical movement. Their alarm has been stoked by a highly suspect claim that if current trends continue, only 4 percent of teenagers will be “Bible-believing Christians” as adults. That would be a sharp decline compared with 35 percent of the current generation of baby boomers, and before that, 65 percent of the World War II generation. While some critics say the statistics are greatly exaggerated (one evangelical magazine for youth ministers dubbed it “the 4 percent panic attack”), there is widespread consensus among evangelical leaders that they risk losing their teenagers. “I’m looking at the data,” said Ron Luce, who organized the meetings and founded Teen Mania, a 20-year-old youth ministry, “and we’ve become post-Christian America, like post-Christian Europe. We’ve been working as hard as we know how to work — everyone in youth ministry is working hard — but we’re losing.” The board of the National Association of Evangelicals, an umbrella group representing 60 denominations and dozens of ministries, passed a resolution this year deploring “the epidemic of young people leaving the evangelical church.” Among the leaders speaking at the meetings are Ted Haggard, president of the evangelical association; the Rev. Jerry Falwell; and nationally known preachers like Jack Hayford and Tommy Barnett. Genuine alarm can be heard from Christian teenagers and youth pastors, who say they cannot compete against a pervasive culture of cynicism about religion, and the casual “hooking up” approach to sex so pervasive on MTV, on Web sites for teenagers and in hip-hop, rap and rock music. Divorced parents and dysfunctional families also lead some teenagers to avoid church entirely or to drift away. Over and over in interviews, evangelical teenagers said they felt like a tiny, beleaguered minority in their schools and neighborhoods. They said they often felt alone in their struggles to live by their “Biblical values” by avoiding casual sex, risqué music and videos, Internet pornography, alcohol and drugs. When Eric Soto, 18, transferred from a small charter school to a large public high school in Chicago, he said he was disappointed to find that an extracurricular Bible study attracted only five to eight students. “When we brought food, we thought we could get a better turnout,” he said. They got 12. Chelsea Dunford, a 17-year old from Canton, Conn., said, “At school I don’t have a lot of friends who are Christians.” Ms. Dunford spoke late last month as she and her small church youth group were about to join more than 3,400 teenagers in a sports arena at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst for a Christian youth extravaganza and rock concert called Acquire the Fire. “A lot of my friends are self-proclaimed agnostics or atheists,” said Ms. Dunford, who wears a bracelet with a heart-shaped charm engraved with “tlw,” for “true love waits,” to remind herself of her pledge not to have premarital sex. She said her friends were more prone to use profanity and party than she was, and added: “It’s scary sometimes. You get made fun of.” To break the isolation and bolster the teenagers’ commitment to a conservative lifestyle, Mr. Luce has been organizing these stadium extravaganzas for 15 years. The event in Amherst was the first of 40 that Teen Mania is putting on between now and May, on a breakneck schedule that resembles a road trip for a major touring band. The “roadies” are 700 teenagers who have interned for a year at Teen Mania’s “Honor Academy” in Garden Valley, Tex. More than two million teenagers have attended in the last 15 years, said Mr. Luce, a 45-year-old, mop-headed father of three with a master’s degree from the Graduate School of Business Administration at Harvard and the star power of an aging rock guitarist. “That’s more than Paul McCartney has pulled in,” Mr. Luce asserted, before bounding onstage for the opening pyrotechnics and a prayer. For the next two days, the teenagers in the arena pogoed to Christian bands, pledged to lead their friends to Christ and sang an anthem with the chorus, “We won’t be silent.” Hundreds streamed down the aisles for the altar call and knelt in front of the stage, some weeping openly as they prayed to give their lives to God. The next morning, Mr. Luce led the crowd in an exercise in which they wrote on scraps of paper all the negative cultural influences, brand names, products and television shows that they planned to excise from their lives. Again they streamed down the aisles, this time to throw away the “cultural garbage.” Trash cans filled with folded pieces of paper on which the teenagers had scribbled things like Ryan Seacrest, Louis Vuitton, “Gilmore Girls,” “Days of Our Lives,” Iron Maiden, Harry Potter, “need for a boyfriend” and “my perfect teeth obsession.” One had written in tiny letters: “fornication.” Some teenagers threw away cigarette lighters, brand-name sweatshirts, Mardi Gras beads and CD’s — one titled “I’m a Hustla.” “Lord Jesus,” Mr. Luce prayed into the microphone as the teenagers dropped their notes into the trash, “I strip off the identity of the world, and this morning I clothe myself with Christ, with his lifestyle. That’s what I want to be known for.” Evangelical adults, like believers of every faith, fret about losing the next generation, said the Rev. David W. Key, director of Baptist Studies at the Candler School of Theology of Emory University, in Atlanta. “The uniqueness of the evangelical situation is the fact that during the 80’s and 90’s you had the Reagan revolution that was growing the evangelical churches,” Mr. Key said. Today, he said, the culture trivializes religion and normalizes secularism and liberal sexual mores. The phenomenon may not be that young evangelicals are abandoning their faith, but that they are abandoning the institutional church, said Lauren Sandler, author of “Righteous: Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Movement” (Viking, 2006). Ms. Sandler, who calls herself a secular liberal, said she found the movement frighteningly robust. <snip> Contradicting the sense of isolation expressed by some evangelical teenagers, Ms. Sandler said, “I met plenty of kids who told me over and over that if you’re not Christian in your high school, you’re not cool — kids with Mohawks, with indie rock bands who feel peer pressure to be Christian.” The reality is, when it comes to organizing youth, evangelical Christians are the envy of Roman Catholics, mainline Protestants and Jews, said Christian Smith, a professor of sociology at the University of Notre Dame, who specializes in the study of American evangelicals and surveyed teens for his book “Soul Searching: the Religious and Spiritual lives of American Teenagers” (Oxford, 2005). Mr. Smith said he was skeptical about the 4 percent statistic. He said the figure was from a footnote in a book and was inconsistent with research he had conducted and reviewed, which has found that evangelical teenagers are more likely to remain involved with their faith than are mainline Protestants, Catholics, Jews and teenagers of almost every other religion. “A lot of the goals I’m very supportive of,” Mr. Smith said of the new evangelical youth campaign, “but it just kills me that it’s framed in such apocalyptic terms that couldn’t possibly hold up under half a second of scrutiny. It’s just self-defeating.” The 4 percent is cited in the book “The Bridger Generation” by Thom S. Rainer, a Southern Baptist and a former professor of ministry. Mr. Rainer said in an interview that it came from a poll he had commissioned, and that while he thought the methodology was reliable, the poll was 10 years old. “I would have to, with integrity, say there has been no significant follow-up to see if the numbers are still valid,” Mr. Rainer said. Mr. Luce seems weary of criticism that his message is overly alarmist. He said that a current poll by the well-known evangelical pollster George Barna found that 5 percent of teenagers were Bible-believing Christians. Some criticize Mr. Barna’s methodology, however, for defining “Bible-believing” so narrowly that it excludes most people who consider themselves Christians. Mr. Luce responded: “If the 4 percent is true, or even the 5 percent, it’s an indictment of youth ministry. So certainly they’re going to want different data.” Outside the arena in Amherst, the teenagers at Mr. Luce’s Acquire the Fire extravaganza mobbed the tables hawking T-shirts and CD’s stamped: “Branded by God.” Mr. Luce’s strategy is to replace MTV’s wares with those of an alternative Christian culture, so teenagers will link their identity to Christ and not to the latest flesh-baring pop star. Apparently, the strategy can show results. In Chicago, Eric Soto said he returned from a stadium event in Detroit in the spring to find that other teenagers in the hallways were also wearing “Acquire the Fire” T-shirts. “You were there? You’re a Christian?” he said the young people would say to one another. “The fire doesn’t die once you leave the stadium. But it’s a challenge to keep it burning.”

Also, I found this on the meesage board where I originally saw this link, and thinks it illustrates my opinion quite well in a single image:

[melodicdeath]

That's a good read. I think as kids grow older, they start questioning what is and what isn't permissible a lot more. They'll start asking themselves "why can't I have sex at this age", "why can't I lie", "why can't I steal", or "why can't I kill". For the last two, the answer is easy- the law says so. Now, the law has the power to cause human discomfort if violated. Thus, murder and robbery aren't as widely commited by teenagers as oppose to premarital sex. My point is, teenagers just don't find 'it's not moral' a reason not to do things that aren't in violation with the law, anymore. So, they'll have a tendency to take the pleasure path over God or morality.

[The Architect]

I was raised Roman Catholic but i havnt gone to church since my confirmation, i consider my self agnostic. I think the reason so many teens are not going to church and beleiving in the bible is our culture, with more kids sitting inside and watching TV and surfing the internet, they dont need to go to church and they probably cant stand sitting there for forty minutes listing to the preachings of the priest. The other reason is that some of the parents just dont care about relgion and only about school, which is ok school is very important these days.
One thing that I do see is a great interest in theology, not worshiping god or belevieng in him/her but reading and understanding the texts of different relgions. One thing im interested in is the study of Buddhism b/c they dont beleives in a god they beleive in a philiosophy on how to live your life.

[G. Adams]

Quote by: melodicdeath That's a good read. I think as kids grow older, they start questioning what is and what isn't permissible a lot more. They'll start asking themselves "why can't I have sex at this age", "why can't I lie", "why can't I steal", or "why can't I kill". For the last two, the answer is easy- the law says so. Now, the law has the power to cause human discomfort if violated. Thus, murder and robbery aren't as widely commited by teenagers as oppose to premarital sex. My point is, teenagers just don't find 'it's not moral' a reason not to do things that aren't in violation with the law, anymore. So, they'll have a tendency to take the pleasure path over God or morality.

Pre-marital sex isn't immoral. That is what is being questioned, the false position that somehow enjoying your body with someone else is crime before God. Not having having sex, or forcing yourself not to at least, is unnatural. Surely your God is not so callous as to give everyone a ravanous sex drive only for him to proscribe it. It would be like the government giving heroin to all pregnant mothers and then criticise the children for being junkies.

This is why teenagers are leaving the church in droves. Many churches are giving them an outdated message, that teens know in their hearts is wrong. Why should they be lectured at by death worshippers, whose first concern is the donation box?

[CoffeeSaint]

Christianity's numbers may be dwindling, but I hardly think they are being oppressed. In my experience, the majority of teenagers in my classes have considered themselves Christian, though many of them do not go to church and so assuredly would not qualify as "bible-believing" Christians (or whatever awkward term they used to replace "fundamentalist"). But I doubt that is any different than teenagers of twenty, thirty, forty years ago: most call themselves Christians, few read the Bible or go to church/follow the Commandments. Some of the teens today will grow more rigidly religious as they age, some will grow less; many of them will stay vaguely denominational and attend church on Christmas and Easter. I doubt Christianity's overall numbers will change very much.

[Jack]

A few young people are failing to be convinced that a 2000 year old philosophy is no longer applicable to the 21st century. Yup, must be the end of the world as we know it. :rolleyes:

[belverron]

Don't forget the trend to go back to church after you've started a family.

[phoenix_fire]

I don't think that a whole lot of you read the article for comprehension. It's basically saying that some evangelicals are going all Chicken Little and saying that the future looks bleak for the Bible-believing population, given a lack of enthusiasm among youth. It is skeptical of this idea and insinuates that it may be a form of artificial persecution.

Anyway, having actually read the article, I wanted to make a few observations:

1.) All of the people in the article who are saying that Christianity is in trouble are themselves Christians.

2.) All of the people in the article who argue this and say that evangelical Christianity has enviable drawing power are non-Christians.

3.) The above to me most indicate that relative numbers aren't the real issue. What it really says to me is that culture is polarizing. The more strongly someone feels something (or opposes something!), the more someone who disagrees feels persecuted and ganged up on.

4.) The article makes a point that I very much agree with: a.)there is a difference between cultural Christians and conscious Christians (my distinctions for those who are "raised Christian" but don't put a lot of thought in it and those who make a conscious decision in view of evidence to become a Christian and live it) and b.) depending on whom you define to be a "true Christian", your numbers will be skewed. In short, there is no real objective way to measure the numbers of "true Christians", so surveys like the one mentioned are entirely useless.

5.) This is what I really see happening in re numbers. Granted, this is my opinion and observation, liable to the same problems I mentioned above.
a.) I think that the number of out and out athiests and anti-Christians is increasing and that they are becoming more vocal. The leaders take advantage of a feeling of persecution.
b.) I think that the number of conscious Christians is increasing and that they are becoming more vocal. Contrary to the beliefs of old white men, MOST of these are coming from the youth of today. The old white men (who are often skin deep Christians) try to take advantage of this and perpetuate a feeling of persecution.

6.) Persecution is not bad. It tends to weed out the wishy washy and strengthen the committed.

7.) Fake persecution is bad. As soon as the illusion disappears, people become more apathetic than before.

8.) With both sides pushing a persecution idea, it may not matter if it started out as fake or not because as people polarize more and more, and believe themselves persecuted, real persecution may be just around the corner.

9.) Megachurches mean nothing. They do more to hurt real Christianity than help it.

10.) Political clout means nothing. It does more to hurt real Christianity than help it.

11.) While throwing out cultural trash is the excision of a symptom, they are missing the real cause. Acting all high and mighty won't get anyone anywhere, and they're not addressing the heart issues that lead to true Christlike living at all.

12.) Being a Christian is not a matter of getting rid of the world's merchendise and buying cross swag. I find this a crass marketing scheme.

13.) A good many conscious Christians will maintain their faith throughout their lives. In this cultural climate, however, cultural Christians will begin not to.

14.) The US is being secularized, just as Europe has been for a long time. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. I would prefer that it be more difficult to be a cultural Christian. They give the rest of us a bad rap.

[underbear1]

Mega churches are preaching Christianity-Lite. Their whole focus is on worldly power and treasures gained on Earth, if you'll just buy their tapes, tithe unfailing, and hate the folks they tell you to, and vote only for the people they tell you to, and give your children to creepy deranged folks like in Jesus Camp.
Real Christian faith isn't that easy.

[phoenix_fire]

For once we agree on something. *shock* Is it a full moon? *checks calendar*

[underbear1]

<===checks astrology chart and tarot deck

[Jack]

Mega churches are preaching Christianity-Lite. Their whole focus is on worldly power and treasures gained on Earth, if you'll just buy their tapes, tithe unfailing, and hate the folks they tell you to, and vote only for the people they tell you to

To be fair, the churches aren't behaving any differently than anyone else when it comes to their wooing those with money in hope of attracting some of that cash their way.
No one makes anything that difficult for the wealthy. They glide through life on wheels lubricated with mucho moola.
You don't want to make them uncomfortable, they don't appreciate squirming in their seats. Since wealthy usually enables power, the churches have even more reason to win their allegiance, just like every other business and person on the planet.

[Fonceai]

Something I just found out this weekend about the Catholic church...

A lot of priests are resisting the changes from "Vatican Two". The changes were meant to usher the Catholic Church through the 20th century and into the 21st. The frustration of the priest I spoke to was that there are too many old school priests scaring away the younger generation, and you aren't getting as many young priests to run Catholic churches the way the Vatican Two decided.

As far as I know, no other denomination of Christianity has such a depth of organization. That might also be contributing to the problem. Nothing turns people away more than two priests or deacons, etc., of the exact same religion having two different views on a topic.

[underbear1]

The Catholic Church can't even attract American men to become seminary students, of course the fact Ratzinger is such a homophobe, has gotten every Gay out of the seminary, that's got to be 50% from what I've heard.So all you Catholics will be preached to by Korean and African priests.