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Evangelicals Hold Their Breaths as Baptism Numbers Drop
In our current issue Debra Dickerson writes approvingly of Christine Wicker's new book, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, which makes the case that evangelical Christians are not as multitudinous as they—or the media and the religious right—have made themselves out to be. In her number crunching, Wicker found that the Southern Baptists have been making some generous estimates of their flock: They've claimed to be 16 million strong, but she estimates the real number of devoted churchgoers is 4 million or fewer. Now, USA Today reports, there are new indications that the church is losing demographic ground:
"We have peaked," Southern Baptist statistician Ed Stetzer wrote in an online commentary on the latest statistics from 2007. "...For now, Southern Baptists are a denomination in decline."
What worries Southern Baptist leaders even more than the membership numbers is a steady decline in the conversion ritual that gave their denomination its name — baptisms.
Annual rates of baptisms have steadily declined not only in recent years, but also during the past 35 years. In 2007, Southern Baptist churches reported 345,941 baptisms. That's down 12% from 2002 and 22% from 1972.
The church is worried enough that it's launched a website, wearesouthernbaptists.org, to rebuild its brand.
The churches need to get out of political religious propaganda following political leaders, and get back to the Bible following God in the name of Jesus by the examples of Jesus, and the church will rebound.
Finally the nutball views of the evangelicals such as Hagee and Parsley is being covered by the media and shown to be the hypocritical rubbish that it is..
I'm always amazed at how a decline in religion, particularly those that fly in the face of scientific evidence, is seen or implied to be negative. As a science educator, I'd like to think that it only means we're making headway against myth and superstition. Where's all the remorse for the decline of the Druids or sun worship? The sooner we wake up to the fact that we are animals with behaviors resulting from selection the sooner we stand a chance of approaching modern problems with common sense and reason.
It's pretty much unstoppable. As we evolve, religion will disappear.
People leave the Southern Baptist to belong to unaffiliated churches that are not involved in church politics. This is the wave of the future. Americans like to be free of authority, only the authority of Christ Jesus, not the authority of men. I am a street preacher, along with my assistant Tyrone. We don't need any big expense church buildings.
"As we evolve, religion will disappear."
The evidence certainly supports all facets of this statement.
Austin & Andrew:
Religion as we know it will disappear and people who love and follow the Lord God via the Lord Jesus the Christ will live on in the love of God forever.
To Dan, Austin, & Andrew, I for one don't really think that some form of religious/supernatural sentiment will ever totally disappear. I may not believe in it and you may not believe in it but given that there will probably always be billions of people around for the foreseeable future there will probably always be millions if not billions of believers. It seems to me that belief in the unseen and unverifiable is a simple fact of human nature, we all get a chilled fear of 'the boogie man' or other things that go bump in the night when we're young and other fears and questions soon follow. It seems to me that our natural defensive wiring that is designed to keep us extra alert for hard to see nocturnal predators like lions makes us naturally afraid and curious about all kinds of things that aren't really there. All the questions and stories that are made up following this tangent line of thought only become truly troublesome when they are both taken to heart and used as a reason to kill, oppress etc. but as for the rest of the believers they can chose to believe what they want to so long as they don't go overboard.