Is Christianity Failing in America?

On a casual evening eating out in 2000, my wife and I ran into a former student. The chance encounter occurred at a restaurant where she was working to support herself through college. She sat down, clearly stressed and upset, and explained that she was experiencing difficulty in her life and needed advice. She reported that she was pregnant out-of-wedlock and that the father wanted nothing to do with the child or her. Then she explained that she was leaning toward aborting the child due to the pressure from her family and her current life situation.

Here is a young lady who attended church regularly, whose Christian parents brought her to church, and who was active in a youth ministry program throughout her high school years. How could this happen? According to researchers, 70 to 88 percent of Christian teens are leaving the church by their second year in college.[1] These findings correlate with the experiences of the young lady in the story above. In fact, since graduation she had invested a year of her life in a sexual relationship with a non-Christian, abandoned the church, and demonstrated a worldview that was anything but biblical.[2]

Unfortunately, her story is not an isolated incident. The syncretism displayed by her abandonment of the biblical principle of the sanctity of human life is pervasive in modern Christianity. This blending of the biblical worldview with the secular worldview has reached epidemic proportions. Every year in America, 4.5 million other teenagers turn twenty years of age, just like this young lady.[3] Will their biblical worldview hold up under the pressure of a culture gone secular? Disappointingly, research says no.[4]

In their upbringing, most Christian students today face similar challenges. Modern Christian parents rear their children in homes where their faith is compartmentalized and relegated primarily to the church setting. In other words, the advancement of their faith is not central in the home where it should belong. Nothing less than a revival of home-based biblical worldview training is necessary to counter this overwhelming epidemic. My hope for the next generation of Christian youth is that a generation of Christian parents will realize their God-given responsibility to “bring [their children] up in the training and instruction of the Lord” (Eph 6:4b).

In order for that hope to become reality, parents need to inform themselves of the dangers and equip themselves to fulfill their responsibilities to their children. After becoming engaged with the issues, and convinced of the urgency of the fight, Christian parents will begin anew to take on the mantle of the responsibility for the spiritual training of their children. Resources are needed and are currently being created by myself and many others to equip parents for such an effort.

More to come on this subject soon!
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[1] Pinkney, in his Report to the Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee, reported that 70 percent of teenagers involved in church youth groups stop attending church within two years of their high school graduation. Additionally, see the 2002 Report of the Southern Baptist Council on Family Life, which reported that 88 percent of the children in evangelical homes leave church at the age of eighteen. T. C. Pinkney, Report to the Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee (Nashville: Southern Baptist Convention), September 18, 2001.

[2] Imagine a chart of circles within circles. The innermost circle is a person's worldview (beliefs). Next is their values or practices, next is their morality and behavior and the outermost circle represents culture or society. A visual such as this is helpful to demonstrate how one's worldview can effect culture as well as being helpful to demonstrate how good parenting can positively effect the life of a child through the teaching of right beliefs (Truth).

[3] Ron Luce, Battle Cry for a Generation: The Fight to Save America’s Youth (Colorado Springs: Cook Communications Ministries, 2005), 33.

[4] Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 36; and Douglas L. Flor and Nancy Flanagan Knapp, “Transmission and Transaction: Predicting Adolescents’ Internalization of Parental Religious Values,” Journal of Family Psychology 15, no. 4 (2001): 628.