Gay marriage debate causing religion to lose its luster?
”More than ever before, people are just making up their own stories of who they are. They say, ‘I’m everything. I’m nothing. I believe in myself…. It’s about gay marriage and abortion and stem cells and the family. If a personal God says, ‘Thou shalt not’ or ‘Thou shalt’ see these a certain way, you’d take it very seriously. Meanwhile, three in 10 people aren’t listening to that God.”
Barry Kosmin, a principle researcher for the American Religious Identification Survey. Which, out of 54,000 interviews, claims to have found that the number of people claiming ”No religion” nearly doubled from 8.2% in 1990 to 15% in 2008. Many specific religious traditions lost percentages in membership including Baptist, Jewish, and Mainline Protestant, while other Protestant denomination, Pentacostals, had some gains. Muslim and Eastern religions and other “new movement” religions had significant percentage gains, but remained a small minority of the American population at around 1% or less. Mormons remained the same small percentage since 1990 at 1.4%, and Catholics had a modest loss of 1%. (USA Today)
”The investment of evangelicals in the culture war will prove out to be one of the most costly mistakes in our history. The coming evangelical collapse will come about, largely, because our investment in moral, social and political issues has depleted our resources and exposed our weaknesses. We’re going to find out that being against gay marriage and rhetorically pro-life (yes, that’s what I said) will not make up for the fact that massive majorities of evangelicals can’t articulate the Gospel with any coherence and are believing in a cause more than a faith.”
Michael Spencer, a Christian writer from Kentucky, expressing his viewpoint that the Evangelical movement is about to collapse on a widely-read blog post and commentary posted by the Christian Science Monitor. (Christian Science Monitor)
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