American Culture

The 10 Commandments in American Culture

/ Dennis Griffith / 1 Comment

While reading through The Art of Pastoring: Ministry Without All the Answers, by David Hansen, (a book recently recommended to me that I find myself wishing I had read years ago,) I came across this convicting assessment of American culture – an indictment that sadly is also widely applicable to a wide swath of American Evangelicalism:

“The majority of Americans will tell any pollster that they believe in the Ten Commandments. But only a small percentage of those people could even recite the Ten Commandment; and even a smaller percentage have any genuine interest in following them.”

Ouch!

Advancing Progressively Backwards

/ Dennis Griffith / Leave a comment

T.S. Eliot penned a penetrating poetic analysis of our cultural plight:

It seems that something has happened that  has never happened before:  though we know not when,  or why,  or how,  or where.

Men have left God not for other gods, they say,  but for no gods; and this has never happened before

that men both deny gods and worship gods,  professing first,  Reason, and then Money,  and Power, and what they call Life, or  Race, or  Dialectic.

The Church disowned,  the tower overthrown,  the bells upturned, and what have we to do

But stand with empty hands and palms turned upwards

In an age which advances progressively backwards?

~ Taken from T. S. Eliot‘s  Choruses From the Rock.  You might enjoy reading the whole poem. It has the feel of a 20th Centrury Book of Ecclesiastes.

5 Causes of the Decline of the American Church

/ Dennis Griffith / Leave a comment

Previewing Ross Douthat’s new book, Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics,  which hit bookstore shelves yesterday, Tim Keller draws five observations about the causes of decline in the American Church.

As Keller notes:

In his second chapter, Douthat attributes the change to five major social catalysts that have gained steam since the 1960s…

Here are the five factors:

  1. First, the political polarization that has occurred between the Left and Right drew many churches into it (mainline Protestants toward the Left, evangelicals toward the Right). This has greatly weakened the church’s credibility in the broader culture, with many viewing churches as mere appendages and pawns of political parties.
  2. Second, the sexual revolution means that the Biblical sex ethic now looks unreasonable and perverse to millions of people, making Christianity appear implausible, unhealthy, and regressive.
  3. Third, the era of decolonization and Third World empowerment, together with the dawn of globalization, has given the impression that Christianity was imperialistically “western” and supportive of European civilization’s record of racism, colonialism, and anti-Semitism.
  4. The fourth factor has been the enormous growth in the kind of material prosperity and consumerism that always works against faith and undermines Christian community.
  5. The fifth factor is  that all the other four factors had their greatest initial impact on the more educated and affluent classes – the gatekeepers of the main culture-shaping institutions such as the media, the academy, the arts, the main foundations, and much of the government and business world.

I find these observations significant. As God’s missional people, it is important that Christians recognize not only the reality of the decline of our influence within our culture, but the specific contributing factors.  Simply wishing things were the way they used to be won’t accomplish anything.  It is akin to sticking our heads in the sand.  But when we discern what is going on in the world around us, a number of signs direct us toward ways we may address the causes,  both directly and indirectly.

Read Keller’s entire article: Redeemer City to City