America A Mission Field

The president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary says a recent article in Newsweek magazine about the decline of Christianity in America poses some challenges to believers. The cover story of the April 13, 2009, issue of Newsweek — titled “The End of Christian America” — points to studies that show the number of Americans who say they have no religious affiliation. For example, the American Religious Identification Survey found that the percentage of self-identified Christians has dropped by 10 percentage points since 1990.

Addressing the topic on his daily radio show, Dr. Albert Mohler, who was quoted in the Newsweek article, says Christians must take every opportunity to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ.

“It’s easier to have an honest conversation with someone about Christianity who knows that he or she is not a Christian, than [to have a conversation with] someone who thinks they are because of some vague, family tie or cultural kind of alliance or allegiance,” he says. “But we’re now looking at an America that knows itself to be increasingly secular.”

Albert Mohler, Jr.Another challenge, says Mohler, is how many people view Christianity. Many, he believes, see Christianity as merely a moral system.

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Newsweek: The End of Christian America

It was a small detail, a point of comparison buried in the fifth paragraph on the 17th page of a 24-page summary of the 2009 American Religious Identification Survey. But as R. Albert Mohler Jr.—president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, one of the largest on earth—read over the document after its release in March, he was struck by a single sentence. For a believer like Mohler—a starched, unflinchingly conservative Christian, steeped in the theology of his particular province of the faith, devoted to producing ministers who will preach the inerrancy of the Bible and the Gospel of Jesus Christ as the only means to eternal life—the central news of the survey was troubling enough: the number of Americans who claim no religious affiliation has nearly doubled since 1990, rising from 8 to 15 percent. Then came the point he could not get out of his mind: while the unaffiliated have historically been concentrated in the Pacific Northwest, the report said, “this pattern has now changed, and the Northeast emerged in 2008 as the new stronghold of the religiously unidentified.” As Mohler saw it, the historic foundation of America’s religious culture was cracking.

“That really hit me hard,” he told me last week. “The Northwest was never as religious, never as congregationalized, as the Northeast, which was the foundation, the home base, of American religion. To lose New England struck me as momentous.” Turning the report over in his mind, Mohler posted a despairing online column on the eve of Holy Week lamenting the decline—and, by implication, the imminent fall—of an America shaped and suffused by Christianity. “A remarkable culture-shift has taken place around us,” Mohler wrote. “The most basic contours of American culture have been radically altered. The so-called Judeo-Christian consensus of the last millennium has given way to a post-modern, post-Christian, post-Western cultural crisis which threatens the very heart of our culture.” When Mohler and I spoke in the days after he wrote this, he had grown even gloomier. “Clearly, there is a new narrative, a post-Christian narrative, that is animating large portions of this society,” he said from his office on campus in Louisville, Ky.

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