Taking a cue from Rush Limbaugh’s complaint that Republicans lose a lot because they don’t run as genuine-article conservatives, a Charisma magazine editor complains that the ‘nones’ are growing because Christians just aren’t, you know, Christian enough.
It’s painful for me to admit, but we can no longer rest carefree in our evangelical identity—because it is changing. No doubt you have seen the headlines declaring that evangelicalism is doomed because evangelical kids are leaving the faith. It is no secret that there is an expanding gulf between traditional Christian teachings and contemporary moral values. But the sad truth is that the ideological gulf between America’s evangelical grown-ups and their kids, aka the “millennials,” seems to be widening too.
Somehow the blame for this chasm is being heaped on traditional churches. They are accused of having too many rules as well as being homophobic and bigoted.
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Evangelicals and culture warriors in the U.S. do not have to look far to discover what happens when Christian denominations give up on their traditional convictions and teachings. All we have to do is look at the dwindling memberships of mainline Protestant denominations.
In order to safeguard the trajectory of young evangelicals, we must uphold the authoritative Word of God.
Just so’s you know, the mainline Protestant denominations — the Episcopalians, the Lutherans, the Presbyterians and the Methodists — are where the best educated hang-out; since the progress of science has established dispositively that Christianity is untrue, it was inevitable that they would experience the most rapid departure from orthodoxy and, eventually, membership decline.
Charisma is a Pentecostal publication, and their demographic is at the other end of the educational spectrum, somewhere leftward of Southern Baptists on the education bell curve.
But, Hey!, if they want to double-down on the very things that are driving decent, educated people away from church, I say: Good.