04-13-2009, 10:52 AM
http://blog.seattlepi.com/davidhorsey/ar...166262.asp
Christian America shrinking and expanding at the same time
Huddled with a half dozen little kids, Ken Miller Rieman, the young pastor at Olympic View Community Church of the Brethren, sat cross-legged on the floor in the sanctuary on Easter morning. With the adults of the north Seattle congregation looking on, he was attempting to introduce the little ones to the message of Christianity's most holy day.
Rieman asked them what Easter was all about. Eggs and candy came the answer. He talked about new life. The children talked about rabbits. Ever patient, the pastor pressed on.
"What do the eggs represent?" Rieman asked.
An older boy finally connected. "New life," he said. At which point a younger boy chimed in, "Or you can just eat 'em."
Passing along religious traditions is no simple task, especially when the competition from an increasingly alluring secular world (candy and bunnies are just the beginning) is so overwhelming and when so many of us are finding it quite easy to live a perfectly decent life without any religion at all. Just this past week, questions were being raised about whether America's traditional Christian identity is slipping away. The debate was kicked off in a Newsweek story bannered by a stark red and black cover with this provocative headline: The Decline and Fall of Christian America. The article, written by Jon Meacham, was inspired by fresh statistics on the religious affiliations of Americans:
According to the American Religious Identification Survey... the percentage of self-identified Christians has fallen 10 percentage points since 1990, from 86 to 76 percent. The Jewish population is 1.2 percent; the Muslim, 0.6 percent. A separate Pew Forum poll echoed the ARIS finding, reporting that the percentage of people who say they are unaffiliated with any particular faith has doubled in recent years, to 16 percent; in terms of voting, this group grew from 5 percent in 1988 to 12 percent in 2008--roughly the same percentage of the electorate as African-Americans. (Seventy-five percent of unaffiliated voters chose Barack Obama, a Christian.) Meanwhile, the number of people willing to describe themselves as atheist or agnostic has increased about fourfold from 1990 to 2009, from 1 million to about 3.6 million. (That is about double the number of, say, Episcopalians in the United States.)
The stats show that the Pacific Northwest, long the most un-churched section of the country, must now share that distinction with the Northeast where, four centuries ago, the Puritans brought their rigorous religion to a New World. According to Meacham, all these numbers have caused some Christian conservatives to worry and wonder if America will soon be like Europe, a place where believers are a shrinking minority and churches are historic relics filled only by gawking tourists.
Christian America shrinking and expanding at the same time
Huddled with a half dozen little kids, Ken Miller Rieman, the young pastor at Olympic View Community Church of the Brethren, sat cross-legged on the floor in the sanctuary on Easter morning. With the adults of the north Seattle congregation looking on, he was attempting to introduce the little ones to the message of Christianity's most holy day.
Rieman asked them what Easter was all about. Eggs and candy came the answer. He talked about new life. The children talked about rabbits. Ever patient, the pastor pressed on.
"What do the eggs represent?" Rieman asked.
An older boy finally connected. "New life," he said. At which point a younger boy chimed in, "Or you can just eat 'em."
Passing along religious traditions is no simple task, especially when the competition from an increasingly alluring secular world (candy and bunnies are just the beginning) is so overwhelming and when so many of us are finding it quite easy to live a perfectly decent life without any religion at all. Just this past week, questions were being raised about whether America's traditional Christian identity is slipping away. The debate was kicked off in a Newsweek story bannered by a stark red and black cover with this provocative headline: The Decline and Fall of Christian America. The article, written by Jon Meacham, was inspired by fresh statistics on the religious affiliations of Americans:
According to the American Religious Identification Survey... the percentage of self-identified Christians has fallen 10 percentage points since 1990, from 86 to 76 percent. The Jewish population is 1.2 percent; the Muslim, 0.6 percent. A separate Pew Forum poll echoed the ARIS finding, reporting that the percentage of people who say they are unaffiliated with any particular faith has doubled in recent years, to 16 percent; in terms of voting, this group grew from 5 percent in 1988 to 12 percent in 2008--roughly the same percentage of the electorate as African-Americans. (Seventy-five percent of unaffiliated voters chose Barack Obama, a Christian.) Meanwhile, the number of people willing to describe themselves as atheist or agnostic has increased about fourfold from 1990 to 2009, from 1 million to about 3.6 million. (That is about double the number of, say, Episcopalians in the United States.)
The stats show that the Pacific Northwest, long the most un-churched section of the country, must now share that distinction with the Northeast where, four centuries ago, the Puritans brought their rigorous religion to a New World. According to Meacham, all these numbers have caused some Christian conservatives to worry and wonder if America will soon be like Europe, a place where believers are a shrinking minority and churches are historic relics filled only by gawking tourists.