Religion in America

Christianity Under Fire: Why Fewer People Identify With The Faith

CrossWalk.com | Tony Beam | March 9, 2009

The news for people of faith is not good. Since 1990, the last time the survey was conducted, the number of people who claim no religion at all has risen from 8% to 15%. In contrast, all of the mainline denominations have seen a significant decline in the number of people who describe themselves as participants. According to the survey, the number of Baptist declined from 19.3% to 15.8%. Methodists dropped from 8% to 5% and there are now approximately 2.8 million people who identify themselves with some sort of “new religious movement,” including “Wiccan, pagan, or Spiritualist.” These numbers are all the more troubling when you consider the fact that the adult population of the United States increased by “nearly 50 million” during the same 18-year period. [Read more…]

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Orthodox Mission in the 21st Century

OrthodoxyToday.org | Bishop Hilarion Alfeyev | Feb. 21, 2009

According to a widespread view, the Orthodox Church is not a missionary church. Some Orthodox even claim that the Orthodox Church does not need any mission. “We are the holders of the Truth, and we testify to it by the very fact of our existence,” said proudly one Orthodox clergyman with whom I was speaking on this subject. One wonders, though, whether this approach can be justified by the church history. If the apostles after Christ’s Resurrection sat behind closed doors in Jerusalem, testifying to the truth by the simple fact of their existence, any further spread of Christianity would have been extremely unlikely. [Read more…]

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Responding to Neo-Atheism

American Thinker | Rick Richman | Sep. 21, 2008

Neo-atheism has had a very successful publishing run over the past several years, with best-selling books by Christopher Hitchens (“god is not great”), Sam Harris (“Letter to a Christian Nation”) and Richard Dawkins (“The God Delusion”), among others. But this year there has been an equally impressive counter-phenomenon. Three recent books, written from three widely divergent perspectives, have responded to the arguments of neo-atheism with both intellectual force and literary grace.

In April, David Berlinski, a secular Jew and well-known skeptic of Darwinism, who holds a Ph. D. in Philosophy from Princeton and has written widely on mathematics and science, published “The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions.” The book defends religion by attacking atheism’s attempt to enlist science in its cause. [Read more…]

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Are Liberals Just Giving Lip Service to “the Least of These”?

Townhall.com | Will Hall | Aug. 28, 2008

I have held my tongue for some time while folks like Jim Wallis (Sojourners), Mara Vanderslice (Matthew 25 Network) and Brian McLaren (emerging church movement) -– all religious and political liberals — have manipulated a compliant secular media and some of the religious press to shill talking points for them.

The message varies in slight ways from story to story but basically asserts “the left” cares more for the poor than does “the right.” A companion assertion stated as fact is that evangelicals are “fractured” and that there is an emerging progressive group of evangelicals “discovering” there are other issues “just as important” as protecting the unborn and defending the biblical definition of marriage. Then a tired liberal political agenda is reframed in the language of faith.

It’s not just political chicanery or religious wrangling, but simply fraud — a form of wishful thinking that if repeated enough times, de facto becomes the truth. [Read more…]

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Is God a Liberal Democrat?

FrontPageMag | Mark D. Tooley | July 14, 2008

Officials of the declining 4.9 million Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) have revealed what God’s priorities are in the U.S. presidential campaign. And remarkably, the divine priorities was very akin to the Democratic Party’s priorities, if not further to the left.

Presiding Bishop Mark Hanson, with three other ELCA officials generously wrote both presidential candidates a public letter with the divine guidance. Although famed Protestant Reformer Martin Luther championed the Bible as God’s exclusive revelation, modern ELCA activists have located more useful counsel in the secular welfare state and environmental agenda. [Read more…]

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The Messiah Channel

Touchestone | Russell D. Moore | July/August 2008

For months, Barack Obama’s pastor lit up the radio and television airwaves with his comments on conspiracy theories about American “state-sponsored terrorism,” his call on God to damn America, his belief that the September 11 terrorist attacks were simply America’s “chickens coming home to roost.”

Some of the talking heads discussed Jeremiah Wright as though his kind of rhetoric were essential to the African-American church, a claim that is patently untrue, and easily verifiable as such. Others seemed to assume that his style of ministry was unique. The truth is, Jeremiah Wright’s name is Legion, and you are just as likely to hear his kind of preaching in a white congregation as in a black one. [Read more…]

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James Dobson and Obama’s Theory of Abortion Relativity

American Thinker | Lee Cary | Jun 26, 2008

In his confrontation with James Dobson, Senator Obama faces a degree of absolutism that pales in belligerent intensity compared to what he could, as President, face from America’s most hostile adversaries. His response to Dobson is a clue to how he might deal with Ahmadinejad, Chavez, et al.

It’s no secret that the Obama Campaign is executing a plan to woo evangelical voters coordinated by Joshua DuBois, the National Director of Religious Affairs. DuBois, a member of a United Pentecostal Council Assemblies of God church in Cambridge, Mass., was a graduate student at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School when he was “enthralled” by Obama’s reference to faith issues in his 2004 Democratic Convention speech. He volunteered to help Obama get elected president. [Read more…]

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Red Diaper Christians

FrontPageMag | Mark D. Tooley | Jun. 9, 2008

Left-wing evangelist Tony Campolo, one of Bill Clinton’s post-Monica counselors, has declared that America’s ostensibly aggressive war policies against Muslims are inhibiting the spread of the Gospel. And he rather uncharitably lambasted American evangelicals who do not share his leftist perspective as “jingoistic” and motivated by oil “lust.” [Read more…]

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God and Hillary Clinton

FrontPageMagazine | Jamie Glazov | Nov. 7, 2007

So, un-belief works for liberal Democrats. Here’s a statistical fact: The greater the number of people who do not believe in God, the greater the number of votes for liberal Democrats. I suppose Al Gore might call that a triumph of reason.

The problem for most of these liberal politicians is that they run for office in America and not in France. They would do extremely well among the socialist, unbelieving populations of Europe. […]

[Read more…]

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On being a Muslim and a Christian…Not

Virtue Online | David Virtue | June 18, 2007

First came the irregular ordination of women to the priesthood, and then homosexual behavior was deemed acceptable including the ordination and consecration of an openly avowed homosexual to the episcopacy, concomitantly with same sex blessings for all. The elastic band of The Episcopal Church’s theology has been stretched to its limit with the announcement that the Rev. Dr. Ann Holmes Redding, an Episcopal priest and theologian in the Diocese of Olympia, has become a practicing Muslim.

[Read more…]

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