The Coming Christian Collapse
There was a minor nationalist panic during the Bush presidency, with conspiracies floating around that North American governments would create a common currency, the Amero, in imitation of the European Union. Pictures of the currency still float around the internet today. They came with the theory that America would stave off bankruptcy by uniting itself with Canada’s natural resources and Mexico’s underpaid labor. With that done, an enormous new transportation network would spread across the map like a squid, the NAFTA superhighway system. The rumors were fueled by quixotic lobbying dreams. But the opposition was real and fierce, and it eventually took down the very real Trans-Texas Corridor project with it.
.. Millennials, even those who identify as Christian, are shockingly illiterate, both in terms of what the Bible says and more generally regarding what Christianity teaches. I trust you don’t need me to repeat again Christian Smith’s findings showing that Moralistic Therapeutic Deism — a bland, undemanding, non-specific religion parasitic on Christianity — has taken over US religious institutions and has displaced authentic Christianity, especially among the young.
.. The book shows that the goal of the majority of emerging adults is to achieve material affluence; they are not critically aware of the problems of consumerism and materialism. Alcohol consumption and binge drinking are continuously increasing. Sexual liberation is greater than in previous generations, and many emerging adults are not aware of a world of hurt, regret and other negative emotions beneath the veneer of happiness.
.. For various reasons, churchgoing in America is primarily something that educated middle and upper class Americans do. Charles Murray, among others, has highlighted research showing that the working class has largely abandoned church. If Christianity is to survive in the US, it cannot afford to lose middle class Americans.
.. Ironically, the billions of dollars we’ve spent on youth ministers, Christian music, publishing, and media has produced a culture of young Christians who know next to nothing about their own faith except how they feel about it.
.. There are three kinds of evangelical churches today: consumer-driven megachurches, dying churches, and new churches whose future is fragile.
.. Spencer predicted that Catholicism and Orthodoxy would benefit from this collapse. Maybe so, but he must have had no idea how unprepared Catholicism and Orthodoxy are to react to these developments among Evangelicals. We can hardly keep our own young people, much less offer a safe, strong position for refugees from the Evangelical collapse to land. In theory, we have it. But we either don’t really believe what our own traditions teach about themselves, or we don’t care enough about it to teach it effectively to our own young.