Twenty-six state convention presidents gathered March 19 in Duluth, Ga., to mull over the relative health of the Southern Baptist Convention. Many, and perhaps all, of them sensed or already knew what a survey released earlier that month revealed — that the number of professing Christians in the United States has dropped in the past decade.
Don KirklandThe new American Religious Identification Survey just out is adequate cause for concern and even outright alarm among Southern Baptists, regarded as the most evangelistic of the nation’s religious denominations.
The survey has drawn the attention of the media. It prompted an expansive article in a recent edition of Newsweek magazine. Its headline declared “The End of Christian America.”
It would be wise, however, to listen to the words of columnist Cal Thomas, quoted in the article, who said, “No country can be truly Christian. Only people can. God is above all nations.”
In the wake of the Newsweek piece, Religion News Service weighed in on the topic. Its article appeared under the headline “Survey shows U.S. growing less Christian.”
What the survey revealed is that between 1990 and 2008 the percentage of Americans who identified themselves as Christians dropped by 10 points — from 86 percent to 76 percent.
Meanwhile, atheists, agnostics and other secularists — classified by the researchers as “Nones” — has nearly doubled between 1990 and 2008, jumping from 8.2 percent to 15 percent.
Beyond the secular nature of the nation, the survey offered a dreary discovery about what might be called “brand loyalty.” It showed a surge in the number of people who consider themselves to be “nondenominational Christians.” That group, which numbered no more than 200,000 in 1990, expanded to more than 8 million by 2008.
Al Mohler is president of the denomination’s flagship seminary, Southern in Louisville. Both Newsweek and RNS interviewed him for their articles.
Newsweek’s Jon Meacham wrote that Mohler was “struck” by a single sentence in the survey showing a shift in patterns: The Northeast has replaced the Northwest as “the new stronghold of the unidentified.”
To Mohler, Meacham wrote, such a finding indicated that “the historic foundation of America’s religious culture was cracking.”
The Southern Seminary president told RNS, “As an evangelical Christian, I see this as further evidence of the fact that American Christians live in the midst of a vast mission field, and this should be a wake-up call — I would say yet another wake-up call — to the magnitude of our task in sharing the gospel in modern America.”
Bucky Kennedy, president of the Georgia Baptist Convention, was the organizer for the recent Duluth meeting. It was intended, he said, to be a forum for sorting out how the SBC could position itself for revival and for what he described as a “Great Commission resurgence” for the coming days.
Southern Baptists are familiar with the conservative resurgence of past years. It is credited by conservatives with securing a victory for the inerrancy of scripture during a prolonged “battle for the Bible.”
The idea of a Great Commission resurgence is getting an attentive hearing these days. And it is gaining traction among Southern Baptist leaders and others in the denomination. Danny Akin, president of Southeastern Seminary in Wake Forest, recently said in chapel that the natural outcome of a return to the authority and inerrancy of scripture in churches should be a renewed commitment to local and world evangelism that leads to partnership in ministry.
“The lordship of Christ and the centrality of the gospel must be the foundation of a Great Commission resurgence in the Southern Baptist Convention,” he told students.
Neglect by Southern Baptists of the mandate of our Lord found in Matthew 28:19-20 has contributed at least in part to the nation’s slippage away from Christian moorings.
The years of the conservative resurgence — the 1980s and 1990s — included some of the years of decline in Christian identification in the United States, according to the survey.
What we as Southern Baptists believe about the Bible must be accompanied by obedience to its teachings about God, Christ and our fellow human beings. Our words reflect a high view of scripture. Our actions, less so. The results of the recent survey offer troubling evidence that we have said better than we have done — and are doing.