Tuesday, March 10, 2009

America becoming less Christian, survey finds

Survey finds percentage of of Americans identifying themselves as Christian has fallen over two decades.America is a less Christian nation than it was 20 years ago, and Christianity is not losing out to other religions, but primarily to a rejection of religion altogether, a survey published Monday found.

Seventy-five percent of Americans call themselves Christian, according to the American Religious Identification Survey from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. In 1990, the figure was 86 percent.

William Donohue, president of the Catholic League said he thinks a radical shift towards individualism over the last quarter-century has a lot to do it.

"The three most dreaded words are thou shalt not," he told Lou Dobbs. "Notice they are not atheists -- they are saying I don't want to be told what to do with my life."

At the same time there has been an increase in the number of people expressing no religious affiliation.

The survey also found that "born-again" or "evangelical" Christianity is on the rise, while the percentage who belong to "mainline" congregations such as the Episcopal or Lutheran churches has fallen.

One in three Americans consider themselves evangelical, and the number of people associated with mega-churches has skyrocketed from less than 200,000 in 1990 to more than 8 million in the latest survey.

via America becoming less Christian, survey finds - CNN.com.

If you graph it out, there is a date at which the last Christians walk the Earth.  Religions do sometimes die out: Witness the last Zoroastrians.  It could all be a plot by some devil ...
In one incident, congregants noticed a person dressed inappropriately for the weather and acting odd. The man was taken outside and questioned. Under his coat, he had two machetes strapped to his back.

"He said that he had been hearing the devil speaking to him, telling him to cut the pastor's head off," Hawkins said. "There was no struggle, and everything was calm. The man was removed."

Hawkins combined his professional security background with his experience working in a Christian ministry in founding Christian Security Network last year, not long after a gunman killed two people and wounded seven in a Knoxville, Tennessee, church. The shooter attacked children who were performing a musical in front of the congregation. - cnn

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