Simon Cox Blog: America’s Age of Skepticism: How Christians Should Respond

Tuesday 18 September 2018

America’s Age of Skepticism: How Christians Should Respond

As Christians, how we choose to engage skepticism matters; we’re called to do so with thoughtfulness and conviction.

There’s no question, Americans are—and have been for quite some time—becoming less and less religious.

In a study conducted by Pew Research, we can see this shift happening over the course of even the past few years. In 2007, 78.4% of the U.S. population would have called themselves a Christian; just seven years later in 2014, that number dropped by almost eight percent. In other words, this decline represents a one percent decrease in the number of Americans identifying as Christian per year—a small, yet staggering, data trend.

Particularly, though, this trend can me seen most profoundly in young adults—Millennials as they are so infamously known. When asked, only about four in ten Millennials would say that religion is important in their lives. Furthermore, looking at data from the American Religious Identification Survey, about one third of all college students identify themselves as secular and generally irreligious.

So, what does this data mean for our nation?

The data doesn’t lie

It seems clear that we are living in an increasingly skeptical—and in some ways—a post-Christian culture. That’s not to say that America has completly relinquished its Christian roots and begun the process of closing churches and or religious institutions. Thankfully, Christians living in the U.S., aren’t being actively persecuted for their faith as our brothers and sisters overseas experience on a dailly basis.

Instead, what we’re seeing is the growth of an American populace that is largely disinterested in the faith of their forefathers. Many who maybe grew up in a church-on-Sundays kind of home and loosely practiced their faith are choosing to abandon their affiliation with the ...