In my humble opinion, the following are the ingredients to a successful nation:
1) A religious foundation.
2) Free markets and capitalism.
3) Constitutionally enshrined individual rights and liberties.
4) Democracy.
5) Both centralized and decentralized representative government.
6) Social welfare and fair taxation.
7) Sensible regulations.
8) An honest civil and criminal justice system with effective law enforcement.
The most important of these is the one I listed first: A religious foundation.
As a Christian, I’ve got many rational reasons to believe and a huge load of God-given faith. But I’m not making a preaching point at the moment. My point is that a functioning society, culture and government needs a citizenry that believes in a higher calling and ultimate accountability to their maker.
Such a sense of ultimate accountability serves as a huge check on selfish nihilism, material atheism and unchecked pursuit of individual interests to the detriment of society as a whole.
Mississippi provides a great example. We are full of Christian believers. This has proven to be a huge asset to racial reconciliation. Black and white, present and past, we are brothers and sisters in Christ, equal in the eyes of God, neither better nor worse than the other.
From a governmental perspective, the particular faith is not as significant as the existence of faith in general. But some faiths are better than others in this regard. Christianity, which is founded on loving your neighbor as yourself and turning the other cheek, is especially favorable toward a smooth functioning society.
We have a great church just a half mile from our house, Covenant Presbyterian Church. It’s a medium sized church. We probably have a turnout of a hundred plus on a typical Sunday. It’s small enough to eventually know most of the other members.
Our pastor, Josh Cole, is a wonderful preacher. He takes the most arcane Old Testament passages and makes them understandable and relevant to our lives. He has a positive, upbeat attitude that is true to Scripture.
We are also blessed with a great assistant pastor, Andrew Mills, who has just obtained his Doctor of Ministry from the Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando. His doctoral thesis was on declining church membership.
Mills has done two of three after-the-service seminars on his thesis. I was shocked and disturbed to hear his findings. Church going has dropped dramatically in the United States over the last two decades. A book titled “The Great Dechurching,” by Jim Davis defines this as people who used to go to church at least once a month and now go less than once per year.
This is based on attendance, not membership. For a while there have been people who come once or twice a year on Christmas and Easter, but the dechurched now come less often than that.
The book warns that the dechurched will give rise to the unchurched – those who never attended church to begin with.
In his talk at Covenant, Mills said, “According to their research, about 40 million adults in America today used to go to church but no longer do, which accounts for around 16 percent of our adult population. This is the largest and fastest religious shift in the history of our country.”
Mills then went through both the Old Testament and the New Testament to show that being part of a church and attending regularly is fundamental to being a Christian. Jesus considered the church to be his bride. How can you love and worship Jesus and ignore his bride?
Ironically, Mills pointed out, on a percentage basis there are more professed Christians today than at the founding of our country.
In 1776, the national religious adherence rate is estimated to have been 17% of the population with 3,228 congregations and an estimated 242,000 members. Today, religious adherence is 48.6% of the population with over 350,000 congregations and over 150 million adherents.
The problem is, they aren’t showing up in the sanctuary on Sunday morning.
Mills said, “Since the beginning of the country, and just prior to our independence, there have been roughly three periods of rapid growth in religious adherence in the United States: The First Great Awakening (1730s-1740s), the Second Great Awakening (1790-1840), and the four decades following the Civil War (1870-1906).
“You might recall that I stated that 40 million people have stopped attending church in the last twenty-five years. This means that more people have left the church in the last twenty-five years than all the new people who became Christians from the First Great Awakening, Second Great Awakening, and Billy Graham crusades combined.
“But the most surprising aspect of their research is that most people who no longer attend church remain largely orthodox in their theology. They believe in Jesus. They believe in the trinity. They believe in their need for redemption. But they don’t believe in the necessity of the church.”
This lecture struck a chord with me. I started thinking of all my Christian friends who don’t get up in the morning on Sunday and go to church. They aren’t atheists. They are believers. They just don’t believe church attendance is important. They think they can do it themselves.
This is bad thinking and it’s not Biblical. You can’t be a Christian holed up in the comforts of your own crib. It just doesn’t work that way. We are not islands. We are a church family.
From the beginning of man, our sin has been refusing to accept our position in the universe. We don’t want to be creations of God. We want to be God. We don’t want to do as he commands, we want to do what we want. And relaxing and chilling on Sunday morning takes so much less energy than getting up and driving to church and engaging with our fellow Christians one on one.
“A man’s home is his castle,” goes the saying. And we are the king of the castle, protected from outside influence. But in church, you are not the king. You are a servant to the Almighty. It’s not the same.
In church, you don’t simply see your reflection in your bathroom mirror. You see the world, all walks of life, young and old, healthy and frail, beautiful and plain, rich and poor, contented and struggling. In church, you see the breadth of God’s creation and you’re just one small part of it.
Sitting in church, I imagine the Holy Spirit energizing me with its force, giving me enough power to make it through another week. Without it, I would just wither and fade.
Go to church. It’s good for your soul. It’s good for your country.
