Christianity
God Quietly Builds a Remnant
In our sobering world of falling stock prices, Euro Zone debt problems, high unemployment, revolution and change in the Middle East, and great uncertainty on the horizon, I’ve got some good news for you.
God is quietly building a remnant in The United States.
I say “quietly” because it seems to have happened quite unnoticed by the powers that be. Kind of like the fall of the Iron Curtain that changed the world in 1989–or the shift of global Christianity that has gone south and west during the past few decades as chronicled in my book The Fourth Wave.
Another movement has also come in under the radar.
America is becoming born-again. The largest single minority group in the United States is now evangelical Christians for the first time in its history.
It was my dad that first alerted me to this phenomenon by forwarding a very interesting interactive map called “The Topography of Faith.” It’s an extensive survey done by USA Today and the Pew Research group on religious affiliation in America.
What caught my eye was the growth of evangelicalism in the United States. This interests me because my own story is found in this narrative.
I grew up in that religious part of America that was previously the largest minority–the mainline churches. They include Lutheran, Methodist, Presbyterian, Congregational etc. But in my teenage years, my own church turned away from the teachings of the Bible and went liberal.
That’s when I became “born again”–repenting of my sins and putting my faith in Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior. This inner change of heart and mind and empowering of the Holy Spirit changed my life’s trajectory and produced a strong desire to share my faith with others.
That’s the basic definition of an evangelical: One who believes the Bible so much that he or she actively shares their faith. The word “evangel” means to herald or share Good News.
Evangelicals have been around for awhile. I currently serve on the board of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) which was started in 1942. We recently held our bi-annual meeting in Washington D.C. where we shared the privilege of meeting on the floor of the US House of Representatives (thank you Congressman Randy Forbes and staff) where we learned that the largest caucus in the United States government is now the prayer caucus with over one hundred members.
Later in the week, twelve of our number met for twenty-five minutes with President Obama at the White House. We dialoged with him on five different areas of concern for people of faith. This was our first official meeting with the POTUS in his three years in office.
Evangelicals have a long history in our nation–but we’ve never been the largest group.
In the beginning of the 21st century, we’ve quietly achieved that status.
Here’s the map that my father forwarded it to me. You can click on it in a moment and see for yourself–but first first allow me to share a few interesting findings.
THE BIG PICTURE
Bible-believing, faith-sharing Christians now make up 26% of the US population. That makes them the nation’s largest minority. Catholics come in second at 24% (and some of them are born-again) and mainline Protestant churches come in third at 18% nationally.
Unaffiliated or secular folks come in at 16%. This is a growing percentage, but no where near the faith-based portion of America. Two percent are Jewish, and one percent are either Muslims and Buddhists.
When you add up all the Christian folk who believe in Jesus, the total comes to 75%.
No wonder the US Congress today affirmed America’s true national motto: In God We Trust. Make sure you make that known when the ACLU comes knocking to tell you to take down your crosses or take the Christ out of Christmas.
Tell them they are free to express their opinion–but we believe in majority rule.
AMERICA’S ZION
Guess which state has the highest percentage of evangelicals? Can you say “Oklahoma is OK!”
Actually Oklahoma and Arkansas are tied at 53% evangelical–but the Sooner state has a total faith in Jesus of over 84%. That’s the largest in the land.
No wonder those Okie football players are always praying on the field and lifting their fingers to heaven. It’s a part of their faith and spiritual DNA.
MOST UNCHURCHED REGION?
We’ve been told for years that the Pacific Northwest is the least churched region of the nation. In fact they brand the west coast the “left coast” for its liberal political leanings.
But say it ain’t so! In my home state of Washington, evangelicals are the largest group at 25%. In Oregon it’s even higher at 30%.
Then there’s California which has 18% evangelicals, but a total Christian population of 63%. Catholics are the largest group in California due to the growth of the Hispanic population, clocking in at 30%. But Hispanic churches are the fastest growing ones in America, and like Latin America, many Catholics are becoming born again.
As I point out in my new book The Fourth Wave, Latin America was a sleepy Catholic continent for hundreds of years. If you’d asked people in 1900 if they knew Jesus personally and were born again by his Spirit, about 60,000 hands would have been raised.
But if you ask that same question in 2011, then sixty million hands would go up! Not bad multiplication in just one hundred years. I will be speaking in Puerto Rico in a few weeks and Colombia after that. Both were Catholic colonies for decades. Today, both nations are nearly forty percent evangelical.
But back to the point. The Pacific Northwest has a significant evangelical population. And California has the quickly multiplying Hispanic churches. (I spoke to thousands of Hispanic Christians recently at a church in Los Angeles. The four services were vibrant and packed.)
Maybe the Left Coast can become the Christ Coast of the USA. Something to definitely pray about.
THE SOUTH RISES–AMERICA’S REAL BIBLE BELT
You probably guessed that it’s the South that contains the largest percentages of evangelicals:
- We already mentioned OK and ARK at 53%. But there’s more:
- Tennessee at 51%.
- Alabama and Kentucky at 49%.
- South Carolina at 45%and North Carolina at 41%.
- Georgia at 38% and Texas at 34% (total Christians in the Lone Star State are 81%).
- Louisiana at 31%, and in Florida, Catholics and evangelicals make up 51%.
I have said and believed for years that the faith and principles of the South that have kept America on a godly course for much of the 20th and 21st centuries. The North won the war against slavery. But so far the South is winning the war of faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.
PRAY FOR THE NORTHEAST
The most barren evangelical region of the United States is not the Northwest or Southwest, but rather the place where America’s evangelical revivals took place over two hundred years ago–the Northeast corner of the nation. On the eastern seaboard, from Maryland to Maine, no state has an evangelical population higher than 15%–and generally the farther north you go, evangelical faith dies out (with the exception of Maine).
Pennsylvania has an 18% evangelical population–and 79% of its total population believe in Jesus. New York is a little lower at 11% evangelical and 71% Christian.
The Midwest is a mixed bag–but generally has more evangelicals than the Northwest.
We need to pray for the states of New England. May revival winds blow where they once fiercely swirled.
Despite this good news about the growth of evangelicals in America, there is still much to be done in these United States of America. But we are truly a Christian nation when it comes to our overall faith and our largest minority group–evangelicals.
In light of the dark clouds on the horizon, has God quietly been doing a work in our land that may be crucial for us to survive and thrive in the coming days? Is he building a remnant of people who can help the nation and world find its God in the 21st century?
Only God knows and he never tells.
But be encouraged.
The faith of our fathers is becoming evangelical.
(If you haven’t gone to the web-site yet, CLICK HERE and enjoy. Just move your cursor over the map and it will give you the statistics for each state. Look at your home state and pray for it and others as God leads you.)
Obama Nation’s Low View of Christianity
I don’t usually pass on an article like this under the Fresh Fire banner, but this is so important that I’m compelled to break precedent. We need to get “fired up” over the deliberate attempt by the current Administration to downplay or rid America of its founding faith. America without Christ is like Earth without oxygen–it will die. May this insightful article put a fire within you to pray, share your faith, and help rebuild our glorious foundations. RB
By Robert Knight, June 8, 2009 in townhall.com
Robert Knight, a senior writer for Coral Ridge Ministries and a Senior Fellow with the American Civil Rights Union
President Obama’s comment to French television on June 1 that the United States is “one of the largest Muslim countries in the world,” plus his Islam-praising speech in Cairo, Egypt on June 4, raise anew questions about his own faith and how he views America.
Questions can also be asked about his math. The CIA Factbook estimates America’s Muslim population at 0.6 percent, or about 1.8 million, which puts it in 58th place among nations’ total Muslim populations. Even if you take the Islamic Information Center’s high estimate of 8 million, that still puts the U.S. at 29th out of 60 nations.
In Cairo, Obama quoted from the Koran, used his middle name of Hussein, and indicated that the United States and Muslim nations have the same commitment to tolerance and freedom. To fathom the absurdity, think about the possibility of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution springing from the pens of Islamic scholars Thomas al-Jefferson and James al-Madison.
Over the past three years, Obama has made it his business to insist that “we are no longer a Christian nation.” He has said it in many places, here and abroad. In 2006, in Washington, D.C., he said, “Whatever we once were, we are no longer a Christian nation. At least, not just.” He posted the same sentiment on his campaign website.
At the Compassion Forum at Messiah College in Pennsylvania on April 13, 2008, he said, “We are not just a Christian nation. We are a Jewish nation; we are a Buddhist nation; we are a Muslim nation; Hindu nation; and we are a nation of atheists and nonbelievers.”
In Turkey, at a press conference on April 10, he said: “Although we have a large Christian population, we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation. We consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values. I think modern Turkey was founded with a similar set of values.”
During the presidential campaign, the media pounced on anyone who inquired into Obama’s Muslim upbringing in Indonesia, his two Muslim fathers or his later 20-year attendance at radical pastor Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. Now, his Muslim roots are touted as an asset.
No one can say for sure what Obama actually believes, since only God can know the human heart. So we are left examining his words and actions.
The media-enforced line for the past three years has been that he is a self-described mainstream Christian, end of story. Even when Obama badly distorted Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount into a clarion call to accept homosexuality, the press yawned. They yawned (or cheered) when he mocked the Bible’s relevance for politics in that 2006 Washington, D.C. speech:
“Which passages of Scripture should guide our public policy? Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests slavery is okay? Or we could go with Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith, or should we just stick with the Sermon on the Mount, a passage which is so radical that it’s doubtful that our own Defense Department would survive its application. Folks haven’t been reading the Bible.”
More cheers came when he spoke the language of unity while taking a shot at his political opponents during a speech at the United Church of Christ convention in 2007:
“Somehow, somewhere along the way, faith stopped being used to bring us together and started being used to drive us apart. It got hijacked. Part of it’s because of the so-called leaders of the Christian Right, who’ve been all too eager to exploit what divides us.
“We can recognize the truth that’s at the heart of the UCC: that the conversation is not over [God needs an editor]; that our roles are not defined [men in dresses, unite]; that through ancient texts and modern voices, God is still speaking [yes, we’re ripping out pages of the Bible daily to suit our appetites], challenging us to change not just our own lives, but the world around us …hate has no place in the hearts of believers.”
Is it not hateful to suggest that people who disagree with you are full of “hate?” Is it unifying to accuse opponents of inventing fights that they didn’t start?
More odd things have been happening since Obama’s election that should give pause to even the most cynical observers.
On the Saturday before Obama’s swearing-in, V. Gene Robinson, the openly homosexual Episcopal bishop of New Hampshire, gave an invocation at a pre-inaugural event at the Lincoln Memorial. The New York Times interviewed him beforehand:
“Bishop Robinson said he had been rereading inaugural prayers through history and was ‘horrified’ at how ‘specifically and aggressively Christian they were.’ Bishop Robinson said, ‘I am very clear that this will not be a Christian prayer, and I won’t be quoting Scripture or anything like that. The texts that I hold as sacred are not sacred texts for all Americans, and I want all people to feel that this is their prayer.’”
As one of his first judicial appointments, Obama named Indiana federal judge David Hamilton to the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Hamilton, who had ruled that a pastor could not invoke the name of Jesus in an opening prayer for the Indiana legislature, said that, on the other hand, invoking Allah at a public event is fine.
In April, it was reported that Obama appointed Harry Knox, a Catholic-bashing homosexual activist, to the Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. Knox, who directs the religion program at the largest gay pressure group, the Human Rights Campaign, described Pope Benedict and other Catholic clergy as “discredited leaders” because of their stand for traditional marriage, and called the Knights of Columbus “foot soldiers of a discredited army of oppression” because of their support of California’s Proposition 8 marriage amendment.
On April 14, 2009, the Obama team had Georgetown University cover up the Greek letters IHS, which stand for Jesus, so they would not show up when he spoke in front of them.
On May 7, Obama declined to hold any White House event to mark the National Day of Prayer, a decision hailed by Barry Lynn’s hard left Americans United for the Separation of Church and State.
In his eloquent commencement speech at Notre Dame on May 17, Obama sounded a conciliatory note, lamented, sort of, the abortions that he wants taxpayers to fund, and gave more clues that Christianity will move over and shrink before a universalist moral relativism:
“The size and scope of the challenges before us require that we remake [not “reform” or “restore,” but “remake”] our world to renew its promise; that we align our deepest values and commitments to the demands of a new age.
“Your generation must decide how to save God’s creation from a changing climate that threatens to destroy it….. And we must find a way to reconcile our ever-shrinking world with its ever-growing diversity — diversity of thought, diversity of culture, and diversity of belief.”
If diversity in and of itself is god, where does that leave Jesus Christ – the Lord of Lords and King of Kings, the Alpha and the Omega, the Way, the Truth and the Life, through Whom all things were created?
Well, the Obama Nation might just ask Him to change his name to … Allah.