Studies and Stories on the Decline in American Christianity

There has been a spate of studies and stories on the decline in American Christianity lately. Well, it is the season after all. Whenever a major Christian holiday approaches the press drags out all the supposed dirty laundry and inuendo it can find. Over at MereComments some perspective is given on the subject:

...We happen to be in one of the periods when there is not a lot of social prestige or other benefit to being in the church and thus nominal members are dropping out. They have no desire to meet even modest demands of the church when they see no compensatory benefit. The drop off in the number of nominal Christians also results from the ascendancy of conservative Christianity in the United States. The more intensely the church stands for something, the less likely it is that people with low commitment will associate themselves with the church. This has always been the church's dilemma....

...What has happened in the last fifty years is that the mainline churches which had seemed to prevail during the fundamentalist-modernist controversy actually lost by becoming increasingly liberal. They became so liberal that their membership had nothing to attach themselves too other than being against conservative Christianity. They can do that just as easily on their own as they can in a liberal church. They end up in the "other" or "none" category when religionists are counted. ...

Over at GetReligion we get another perspective:

...The Trinity College survey, which you can find analyzed and linked to to in this article by Washington Post writer Michelle Boorstein, has some very interesting results. But as Trinity College’s Mark Silk asserts, these survey results show that the evangelical ranks are growing. GetReligionistas have said again and again that there is confusion (including, if one can judge by these results, among evangelicals themselves) over what constitutes an evangelical. While the number of self-declared Christians has declined, the survey doesn’t forecast the impending death of conservative Christianity....

...Infighting among conservative Christians is a sexy topic — and it is probably going on. There is considerable infighting going on in many segments of America’s religious populations. But what both Meacham and Spillius appear to assume that a decline in political influence equals defeat for religious conservatives. In his response to Meacham’s essay last week, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President Albert Moehler argues instead that his main concern is evangelism, not cultural influence. ...(more)