A Christian's View of the Greatest Threat to Christianity


It's common these days to see articles by Christians explaining the decline in Christianity. Often appearing are articles telling of the danger caused by weaponizing the faith to use against political opponents. One has to admit it is also done by some on the left. Surely, we would all agree the big users are the political right. The numbers who voted Donald Trump into office exclusively because he promised an anti-abortion Supreme Court have been documented. That he did not receive the voting majority in 2020 indicates a problem for conservative Christianity. If its views do not represent the majority, how can it expect to turn around its declining numbers?

While I agree with the author that driving deep into politics does not help and probably hurts Christianity with young people, it is a Christian's view, not necessarily the view of those who have left the faith. The decline is more complicated than that. The bigger problem, in my view, is use of the Bible as the basis for the faith. The Bible was a useful marketing tool when people enjoyed reading fantasy tales of angels, dead people coming back to life and some world after death. Now people expect pictures and firsthand accounts. When there are none, they close the Bible.

It is curious to me Christians who are rightfully concerned about declining Christian numbers and influence do not dig deeper into the cause of the decline be investigating the reason thoroughly. Questionnaire research is a little helpful but does not get into the weeds. I've never seen, for example, professionally conducted focus groups. If a project had two focus groups, one made up of Christians discussing why others have left the church and another made up of those who have left and compared the two, my guess is the difference would be eye opening. I think we would see Christians saying more Bible thumping and sin condemning would save members while those who had left would say something much different. I've been at countless gatherings of non-believers and have never heard even once they would have stayed in the faith if there had been more Bible thumping. 

If Christians would study professionally the reasons for the exodus, they might discover something helpful. They prefer, instead, to attribute the losses to not enough pounding the faith into children (Barna) and the weaponizing the faith for politics and the link does. 

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