Frankly, it has been a struggle for me to determine how much ink should be spilled on this topic. Unless you have been living under a rock, you already know that the magnitude and speed of change in our culture during these last 50 years has been pervasive and dramatic. Rather than write pages of details on the rapid decline of our culture, I will just touch the high points which overlay many other divisions and segments of depravity.
I was born in 1956 and grew up during the sexual revolution which began in the 1960s. With each successive decade, the moral decline in the area of sexuality has picked up steam. As many of you know, the current state of affairs includes things that would have never been imagined by those who lived in the 60s and 70s. Back then, we began with increased promiscuity manifested by so called “free love” bathed in various drug and psychotropic experiences. At the same time, feminism was on the rise, challenging the traditional role of women in the home and workplace. As it has been since the beginning of the sexual revolution, today’s feminism has morphed into other movements or campaigns.
Fast forward to 2023 where we find ourselves in a world where the Supreme Court of the United Sates has voted in favor of same sex marriage (2015); And now, just 7 years later, the state of the culture (as it pertains to sexuality) has changed at a faster pace than it was moving previous to that fateful decision. America no longer recognizes men and women as the men and women of their physical birth. Any person can demand to be recognized as the sex of their own choice (or no sex at all) and the subsequent effect on marriage, family, childbirth, the church, the workplace, and education, has been devastating.
The pace of Christianity’s decline in America correlates with the previously mentioned instances of sexual perversion and the decline in morality as a whole in our culture. You can easily trace the decline over 20 years of surveys and studies produced by well-known observers of culture and the church. Research being done by such observers as the Pew Research or Barna has illustrated a massive decline in those who profess to be Christians, those who do things (fruit) that give evidence to their identity as Christian, and those who have at least an average knowledge of what the Bible says about important fundamental truths (doctrine).
Survey Says
Here are a handful of bullet points from Pew Research Center (December 14, 2021):
- The secularizing shifts evident in American Society so far in the 21st century show no signs of slowing. The latest Pew Research Center survey of the religious composition of the United States finds the religiously unaffiliated share of the public is 6 percentage points higher than it was five years ago and 10 points higher than a decade ago.
- Christians continue to make up a majority of the US populace, but their share of the adult population is 12 points lower in 2021 than it was in 2011.
- Currently, about three in 10 U.S. adults are religious “nones” – people who describe themselves as atheists, agnostics or “nothing in particular” when asked about their religious identity.
- Today, 24% of U.S. adults describe themselves as born again or evangelical Protestants, down six percentage points since 2007.
And there’s more.
Mass Manipulation
We also have experienced COVID and all that it showed us about the hearts of people. During the time of COVID, we saw deceit and wicked manipulation from those in leadership and a massive percentage of our population that had little or no ability to discern the times because their love and trust for God was either small or nonexistent. Simply put- no love for God equals no discernment and no joy.
Economic Consequences
The refusal of man to obey the creation mandate to be fruitful and multiply is not a sin without consequences. Declining birthrates has lit a self-destructive fuse on an economy as it results in too few young people that will work, pay taxes, and support the aged.
Fear
An absence of the one true God in the lives of so many people has fueled the fire of various types of fear that had already been growing in powerful and destructive ways. Fear has manifested itself in producing the greatest levels of births out of marriage (fear of commitment), a lower birthrate among married couples (financial fears), and all-time highs in the percentage of people experiencing anxiety, depression, and committing suicide.
Looking for Help in the Wrong Places
And how are those fears dealt with in today’s culture? Sadly, they are not confronted and redirected by the truth. No, they are temporarily assuaged by drowning one’s mind using prescription meds, recreational drugs, various kinds of substance abuse, or entertainment. You will note that I listed entertainment in the category of drugs. This is because entertainment, like drugs, provides a temporary way to escape a person’s reality. As the great Os Guinness wrote years ago, we are a nation that is entertaining ourselves to death, and that entertainment is not only an escape for parents and children, but it is also a powerful teacher of worldview. This is not news as it has been warned against for several decades. But what is news is the level of depravity that is being poured into the minds of our youth as parents not only facilitate, but participate in the polluting process that attacks their own minds as well.
The Emergence of Critical Theory
With the country being shaken and sifted during COVID, it was the perfect time to crank up the beliefs that are associated with Critical Theory. New definitions for being inclusive, the rights of the people, racism, and reparations were drilled into the minds of the people, even Christians, and destruction and hate were stoked.
America’s Schools
And finally, there is education. About 90% of all American schoolchildren (including children from Christian families) attend a K-12 school every day for about 8 hours that trains them to become atheists. Following their K-12 education, they typically attend a college or university that is overwhelmingly secular in its training of young minds and in many cases, aggressively anti-Christian in their teaching of young adults.
America’s Colleges and Universities
According to an article by John Ellis in the Wall Street Journal (January 14, 2022), “both critical race theory and anti-police sentiment has been part of campus radical chic since the 1980s, and enthusiasm for socialism is also concentrated among recent college graduates.” The seeds for this kind of thinking has been planted by the growing number of leftist professors. Ellis writes, “on campus, radicalism grows stronger each day. The current left-right campus faculty ratio is probably about 15 to 1, but new appointments are being made at a rate of about 50 to 1. As we approach complete leftist saturation among professors, college campuses will become even more intolerant, irrational, and politically aggressive.”
Ellis continues, “More important still, academia’s influence on society will intensify as the number of people who have graduated from radicalized campuses increases and the number of those who graduated with a conventional college education declines. A generation – students from about 2000 to now – has graduated from one party campuses. Where will we be when two generations have done so and another generation has died off?”
Why?
There are many reasons that have been cited for these changes, but for the Christian, we must not look to the secular psychologists, the so-called brilliant ones in the world of academia, or those of great wealth and fame for answers. Christians know that the only source of absolute truth is the Bible, and to attempt to find answers apart from the wisdom of God is folly.
For the Christian, the answer to this moral decline in our culture is directly related to the spiritual condition of the hearts of the people and those hearts are increasingly alienated from God. Some of those hearts are not Christian and until they are given a new heart (regeneration/salvation), we cannot expect current trends to change. Others have a heart that belongs to the Lord, but their Christian lives are weak and stunted by worshipping other things that crowd their devotion to Christ. They are to be the salt to the world, but they have little saltiness and therefore, little effect. We know that as Christianity grows in a culture, there is an increase in both salt and light. The salt has a preserving or restraining influence, and the light brings truth that transforms minds and culture. Conversely, when salt and light (Christianity) is in decline, we can expect to see the opposite- less truth and less restraint of evil in society.
We have been witnessing the master plan of Satan and it really is quite brilliant. He has been using man’s pride, greed, and a myriad of idolatries to create lies and confusion around foundational truths about God’s creation. If he can disrupt the creation order (the family, marriage, sexuality, procreation, work, education, rest) and distract God’s people to prioritize the things of the world over their dedication and love to God, he will continue to have the kind of victories we have witnessed these last 50 years.
