Monday, October 16th, 2017
Stephan: Here is a more granular look at the Evangelical community, and what is going on inside it. This is what is evolving after the Nashville Statement, SR published a while back. The report confirms much that is familiar, but it also holds some surprises and, I think, some good news concerning the Millennials.
To quote the report, "They grew up in a nominal Christian culture, where it’s no longer of a cultural or social benefit to identify as a Christian,” he says. “To add to that is, there’s often not only no social prestige to gain, there’s also social prestige to lose, if you say you are a Christian in our society.” That's a statement of astonishing candor.
I think this trend matters because it represents a kind of condensing process. Culture trends are boiling down the Theocratic Right to its true essence: white supremacy, male dominance, authoritarian, and breeching the wall between church and state to the benefit of a Christian cult. It is a diminishing and increasingly desperate demographic.”
Young Evangelicals
Credit: Melanie Stetson Freeman
NEW YORK—For Andrew Walker, the current “post-Christian” state of American culture has posed a serious challenge to the faithful.
For a variety of reasons, fewer and fewer Americans now have a grasp of the fundamentals of orthodox, biblical teachings, says Mr. Walker, director of policy studies for the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. Like many who keep attuned to the country’s religious landscape, he notes, too, the dramatic rise of the so-called “nones,” especially among the young, who may believe in God, but have begun to refuse to identify with a particular religious group.
“They grew up in a nominal Christian culture, where it’s no longer of a cultural or social benefit to identify as a Christian,” he says. “To add to that is, there’s often not only no social prestige to gain, there’s also social prestige to lose, if you say you are a Christian in our society.”
It’s one piece of a cultural shift that has begun to affect even the […]
