Headlines proclaiming the loss of the Protestant majority in the United States should not cause panic among evangelicals but should motivate them to articulate the gospel and live as followers of Christ, Southern Baptist leaders say.
The percentage of Americans who are not affiliated with any particular religion — dubbed the “nones” — rose to 20 percent in the latest analysis by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life, compared to 15 percent five years ago.
Moreover, one-third of Americans under age 30 are religiously unaffiliated, Pew said Oct. 9, and the percentage of Americans who self-identify as Protestants dropped from 53 percent to 48 percent.
Kevin Ezell, president of the North American Mission Board, said the report underscores the need for Southern Baptists to plant healthy churches.
“I believe that only a church planting movement will reverse this trend and that is why our Send North America strategy is an all-out effort to help Southern Baptists move in that direction,” Ezell said, referring to an emphasis on church planting in metropolitan areas.
Ed Stetzer, president of LifeWay Research, said the Pew report does not indicate a sky-is-falling moment. “I am one to quickly point out when there are struggles and challenges,” Stetzer told Baptist Press. “But this is the natural progression of a secularized society that has lost the value of identifying itself as Christian.
“We have about the same percentage of evangelicals as we did over the last few decades. Furthermore, that holds true among young adults as well,” he said.
The Church in America has become like a bear fed by tourists because of so-called “seekers” willing to return to church to recapture their childhood religious memories, Stetzer said.
“What happens when you feed the bear is eventually it can’t fend for itself,” Stetzer said. “I think the people of the Church have to learn to fend for themselves by going out and proclaiming the gospel, not counting on a really cool church to preach the gospel for them.”
Russell Moore, dean of the school of theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., said believers should be more concerned about the loss of a Christian majority in Protestant churches than the loss of a Protestant majority in the U.S.
“What we should pay attention to instead may be the fresh wind of orthodox Christianity whistling through the leaves — especially throughout the Third World, and in some unlikely places in North America as well,” Moore wrote Oct. 9 at russellmoore.com.
“Sometimes animists, Buddhists and body-pierced Starbucks employees are more fertile ground for the gospel than the confirmed Episcopalian at the helm of the Rotary Club.”
It’s not necessarily a bad thing that this generation of Christ-followers in the U.S. finds itself engaging a culture that is unfamiliar with the claims of Jesus rather than one that thinks it already knows what Christianity is about, he said. “The American Protestant majority is over,” Moore wrote. “Now let’s pray for something new — like a global Christian majority, on earth as it is in heaven.”
(BP)
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