upstream / downstream
The more that I look around at the state of the church and the state of my nation, I’m coming to a few realizations that are all inter-related.
The first is that the United States is sliding further and further towards becoming a secular, post-Christian society. This statement, of course, is more true in the Northeast than the South, and is more true in urban, than suburban and rural areas.
Canada, our northern neighbor, gives me a pretty good idea of where the United States will find itself in 3 generations(give or take). In the census in Canada in the year 2000, what I found was that roughly only 8% of the population were evangelical Christians. To put it in plain speech, only 8% of the population believes that the Bible is true, hell is hot, and forever is a long time. In addition, the number of Catholics was down from the previous censuses, and Protestants were down from previous censuses. You can directly attribute much of this to the greater influence of Europe on Canadian society.
Interestingly, however, the number of people with no spiritual preference was up, paganism was up, witchcraft was up, and previously almost dead, the number of people practicing native Canadian Indian spirituality was also up.
