America is littered with thousands upon thousands of church
buildings that aren’t being used anymore.
As you will see below,
between 6,000 and 10,000 churches are dying in the United States every single
year, and that means that more than 100 will die this week alone. And of
course thousands of others are on life support. All over the country this
weekend, small handfuls of people will gather in huge buildings which once
boasted very large congregations. At one time, America was widely
considered to be “a Christian nation”, but that really isn’t true
anymore. As an excellent article in The Atlantic has noted, even though most Americans still
consider themselves to be “Christian”, the numbers are telling us a very
different story…
Many of our nation’s churches can
no longer afford to maintain their structures—6,000 to 10,000 churches die each year in
America—and that number will likely grow. Though more than 70 percent of our
citizens still claim to be Christian, congregational participation is less
central to many Americans’ faith than it once was. Most denominations are declining as
a share of the overall population, and donations to congregations have
been falling for
decades. Meanwhile, religiously unaffiliated Americans, nicknamed the “nones,”
are growing as
a share of the U.S. population.
In fact, the “nones” have
risen from just 6 percent of
the population in 1991 to 25 percent today.
That makes them the single largest “religious group” in the United States.
Today, less
than 20 percent of all Americans attend church on a regular
basis. As a result, churches are dying in very large numbers, and this is
a trend that appears to be accelerating. According to Thom
S. Rainer of Lifeway, when you break the numbers down it means that
“around 100-200 churches will close this week”…
Between 6,000 and 10,000 churches
in the U.S. are dying each year. That means around 100-200
churches will close this week. The pace will accelerate unless
our congregations make some dramatic changes.
Any institution needs
resources in order to survive, and churches are not any different.
As attendance has declined,
so has giving, and at this point the percentage of charity donations going to
religious institutions is
at an all-time low…
Religious institutions are still
the single biggest recipients of overall charity donations, according to the
2015 survey by the Giving USA Foundation.
About 32 percent — $119.3 billion — of a total of $373.25 billion Americans
gave to charities went to churches, synagogues, mosques and temples.
But that is down from about 50
percent since 1990, according to Rick Dunham, vice chairman of Giving USA, and the
percentage has been “in steady decline for some time.”
So when churches die, what
happens to their buildings?
Well, some are torn down,
some are renovated for residential or business purposes, and some are
being put to other uses…
A large number of abandoned
churches have become wineries or breweries or bars. Others
have been converted into hotels, bed-and-breakfasts, and
Airbnbs. A few have been transformed into entertainment venues, such as
an indoor playground for
children, a laser-tag
arena, or a skate
park.
A similar thing is happening
in Europe, only on a much greater scale. Over there, hundreds of churches
have been transformed into
Islamic mosques, and this has generated quite a bit of controversy.
As I discussed in
my article about demographic trends, we are witnessing societal
change happen at a pace that would have been absolutely unthinkable a couple of
generations ago.
This is especially true for
our young people. If you go back to 1986, just 10 percent of all young
adults were “religiously unaffiliated”, but now that number has jumped all the
way to 39 percent…
Today, nearly four in ten (39%)
young adults (ages 18-29) are religiously unaffiliated—three
times the unaffiliated rate (13%) among seniors (ages 65 and older). While
previous generations were also more likely to be religiously unaffiliated in
their twenties, young adults today are nearly four times as likely as young
adults a generation ago to identify as religiously unaffiliated. In 1986,
for example, only 10% of young adults claimed no religious affiliation.
That makes young adults the
single largest group of “nones” in the entire country. We are living at a
time when there is a mass exodus from the Christian faith in America, and it is
likely going to take something quite dramatic to
reverse that trend.
According to the Pew
Research Center, Millennials are about half as likely to attend religious services
on a weekly basis as the oldest Americans are.
Church attendance is simply
not as important to Americans as it once was. In the old days, churches
were central hubs where you got to know your neighbors and important events
were commemorated. But now churches sit idle and empty most of the time,
and attendance on Sunday mornings is depressingly low in most cases.
When I was growing up, my
parents made sure that we were in church on Sunday morning, Sunday evening and
sometimes even on Wednesday evening. But today, most churches don’t even
have Sunday evening or midweek services because nobody would show up.
Our entire society,
including our system of government, was birthed out of a culture of
Bible-believing Christians. The following comes from an excellent
piece by
Dr. Mark David Hall…
In 1776, every European American,
with the exception of about 2,500 Jews, identified himself or herself as a
Christian. Moreover, approximately 98 percent of the colonists were
Protestants, with the remaining 1.9 percent being Roman Catholics.
Not only did early Americans
identify themselves as Christians, but nearly all of them regularly attended
church.
Now our society is moving
very rapidly in the exact opposite direction, and many believe that this has
tremendous implications for the future of our nation.
WE’RE IN A FIGHT…
Mass
censorship of conservatives and libertarians is exploding. You’ve already seen
this with the demonetization and ultimate purge of Infowars and other
alternative media outlets by mega-corporations working in tangent to stifle
competition. But you are important in this fight. Your voice is important. Your
free thought is important. Make no mistake, you are just as important as anyone
in the Anti-American establishment.
