I am a Christian American Conservative. I make no apologies for that fact.

Depending on which poll you read, Christians comprise 70-75% of America’s Population.

During the Obama Administration, there has been a concerted and very visible effort to limit the role which Christianity plays in the day-to-day lives of average Americans.

This was already done, decades ago, in Europe, and now, they are suffering the consequences of their actions.

The Christian Post reports that

The Church of England is reportedly considering plans to keep some historic village churches across the country opened only on holy days such as Christmas and Easter due to population shifts and the ever-growing decline in attendance and church membership.

A major 66-page report by the CofE’s Church Buildings Review Group noted that many churches are no longer sustainable, and that about one in four parishes have fewer than 10 regular worshipers.

The report proposes turning some parishes into “festival churches” in order to ease the financial burden, suggesting that they will only be used for key dates on the religious calendar, or occasions such as marriage and funerals.

Festival churches are only one of the widespread changes proposed by the review group, which says it is focused on “securing spiritual and numerical growth and serving the common good.”

“We believe that — apart from growing the church — there is no single solution to the challenges posed by our extensive responsibility for part of the nation’s historic heritage,” the group added.

The CofE has had to deal with sharp decline over the past 30 years, as reported in May by NatCen Social Research.

The group’s Social Attitudes survey found that 40 percent of the British population identified as Anglicans in 1983, but that number is down to only 17 percent in 2014. Presently only 8.5 million Britons identify as Anglicans, the survey said.

People of no religious faith now make up close to half of the population in Britain, or 49 percent, which is up from their 31 percent count in 1983.

With the steady rise of immigration, the rise of non-Christian faiths has also been well documented, with Islam making up close to 5 percent of all Britons in 2014, up from 0.5 percent in 1983.

Could this happen in America?

It is a fact that a significant number of Americans have left Organized Religion, frankly, because by embracing Popular Culture, instead of God’s Holy Word, the church they attended LEFT THEM.

For example…

The Episcopal Church continues to experience losses in both church attendance and membership, according to recently released numbers from the denomination’s Office of the General Convention.

From 2013 to 2014, active baptized members in domestic dioceses went from 1.866 million to 1.817 million, representing a loss of nearly 50,000 members. 

The statistics reveal that in 2014 that average Sunday attendance was a little over 600,000 in domestic dioceses, down from approximately 623,000 in 2013.

2014’s numbers are even more telling when compared with 2009, when the theologically liberal Episcopal Church had about 200,000 more members and over 80,000 more Sunday worship attendees.

Jeff Walton, Anglican program director at the theologically conservative Institute on Religion & Democracy, noted in a blog entry last week other aspects of decline for the Church.

“Other measures of Episcopal Church vitality also saw decline: the denomination reported the shuttering of 69 parishes and missions, down from 6,622 in 2013 to 6,553 in 2014,” wrote Walton.

“Children’s baptisms declined 4.8 percent from 25,822 to 24,594 and adult baptisms declined during the same time-frame from 3,675 to 3,530, a decline of nearly 4 percent.”

The losses experienced between 2013 and 2014 are nearly double the roughly 27,000 fewer members between 2012 and 2013.

Why do churches who allow the world’s “Popular Culture” to influence their worship of God, tend to have to eventually close their doors?

Perhaps, it is because, instead of concentrating on the “Divine Mystery” of the Triune God, Liberal Churches are “trying to quantify the unquantifiable”.

Stream.org has posted an article on-line, in which scientists claim that they can change someone’s opinion about the existence of God and illegal immigrants, through the use of magnets.

In Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience Sally Satel (psychiatrist) and Scott Lilienfeld (psychologist) say “the half-life of facts can be especially brief” in this field. New results disprove older ones continuously.After the zapping, all participants were re-asked the same questions. Turns out participants “reported an average of 32.8% less conviction in positive religious beliefs” than those who weren’t zapped. That’s 32.8% and not 32.7%, mind you. In science we demand precision! A wee p-value confirmed that this change was “statistically significant.” There isn’t space here to explain the horror of this statistical approach, but interested readers can learn more here.

This is where it gets interesting. There was, as we have just seen, a small change in the answers to pseudo-quantified questions about positive religious beliefs, but there weren’t any “significant” changes in the answers to pseudo-quantified questions about negative religious beliefs. The same sort of thing happened in the questions about immigrants: Some had wee p-values and some did not. And there were no changes in any of the other questions asked. Yet which “findings” got the headlines?

We still haven’t answered the big question: why. Why did the authors design a study about belief in God and attitudes about immigrants? From their conclusion, written in the impenetrable prose typical of such “studies”:

“History teaches that investment in cherished group and religious values can bring forth acts of both heroic valor and horrific injustice. Understanding the psychological and biological determinants of increases in ideological commitment may ultimately help us to identify the situational triggers of, and individuals most susceptible to, this phenomenon, and thereby gain some leverage over the zealous acts that follow. …The results provide evidence that relatively abstract personal and social attitudes are susceptible to targeted neuromodulation, opening the way for researchers to not only describe the biological mechanisms undergirding high-level attitudes and beliefs, but also to establish causality via experimental intervention.”

Did you catch that? These scientists hope that in the future belief in God, or in some other politically incorrect question that might — only might — lead to “zealous acts,” can be treated, maybe even cured, by magnet zappings. And there you have the real danger that follows from believing you can quantify the unquantifiable.

Popular Culture, under the guise of “making the individual feel better about themselves”, actually constrains individual achievement.

These “millennials”, by believing that they are “their own god”, are limiting themselves.

History has shown us, time and again, what happens to a society, when man starts worshiping himself.

As Proverbs 16:18 tells us

Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.

Right now, you’re probably saying to yourself,

Hold on, KJ, you just said that the individual CAN achieve.

Yes, I did.

Those who have gone before us, such as our Founding Fathers, our military leaders, our civic leaders, and our spiritual and familial leaders, all had one thing in common:

They all possessed a spirit of self-sacrifice.

Not sacrificing their will to achieve for the “good of the State”, but, rather, unselfishly sacrificing their time and talents for the betterment of those around them.

And, that is where the “Progressives” (i.e., Liberals), get it wrong.

It is not “the State”, nor the community-at-large, that drives, or allows, Individual Americans to succeed.

Anytime that man tries to limit God, he sets himself up for failure.

It is that “still, small voice” that resides within each one of us that has endowed us with our “certain inalienable rights” as Americans, of Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness”, that gives us the strength and discernment to succeed.

For without God, nothing is possible.

Until He Comes,

KJ