It's Easter: Why So Many Don't Care

These days I come across rational analysis of Christianity's decline more often than in the past. A few years ago, there was never an article discussing the broad cultural forces moving away from Christianity and toward something unknown. 

It's hard for someone with gray hair to come to grips with the truth. The truth is he/she does not believe in sin, heaven, hell, the Resurrection, atonement and a God-written Bible because all this has been objectively arrived at. He/she believes this because it was in the culture they were born into. All such folks would agree a child in India believes in Hinduism because of where they were born. But they believe this false religion will disappear when its followers are exposed to Christianity. Coming to grips with the fact religions grow out of cultures, either Hindu or Christian, is a concept beyond the emotional reach of billions of people in the world. Yet, the truth is right before our faces.

The link rehashes a conventional wisdom that young people are not brought up with strong ties to the faith. This old saw morphs then into a conclusion that if the faith were hammered into the young they would be stronger Christians. This incorrect analysis leaves out a critical question: Who is going to hammer the faith into small children? The parents have moved away from the faith. A friend of a child statistically is more likely to be an atheist than a Christian. The link concludes correctly there is no rational reason to conclude young people will reverse and shift toward the faith. A rational prediction is the drift away will continue.   

It's tempting to keep looking for an explanation of the cultural drift away from Christianity in the U.S. I like to speculate about it myself. Probably we will never get our arms around all of it. Often overlooked is the automobile that took away the pressure of neighborhoods on people to conform. Rural or urban, people could avoid the values in their neighborhood by driving somewhere else. Then came all the new forms of communication. 

Perhaps more important than any search for the "why" is to recognize every religion has had a shelf life and every society that held those religious view eventually moved on. Common in Christianity is the view that because there is the written "document," the Bible, there will not be the same drift to other views about religion there has been since ancient times. Unfortunately for believers, the Bible has not held back the forces for change. It was folly to ever think it could.