Is America really getting more secular, or does the media have it all wrong?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Colorad007
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
C

Colorad007

Guest
There has been a lot of talk in the media about a quickly secularizing America. Surveys have indicated that especially young people are abandoning organized religion, and now a good portion of the American public professes no specific religious faith. Same-sex marriage, and the attendance acceptibility of homosexuality itself, is on the march across America. Religious leaders and the secular media both seem to agree: as Fr. John McCloskey put it, “America is no longer a Christian country.”

catholicity.com/mccloskey/post-christian-america.html

Yet church attendance is still relatively constant. Our bishops have become strong leaders in the faith. Abortion rates have gone down, and, according to the New York Times so has marijuana use and fornication among teenagers.

well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/02/the-kids-are-more-than-all-right/

Christian college groups are incredibly strong, which I’m not sure was the case maybe 30 years ago.

Are we just becoming polarized, or are we really becoming secularized? What’s the truth? What is the future for Christian faith in this country?
 
Christian college groups are incredibly strong, which I’m not sure was the case maybe 30 years ago.
Click to expand...
This might be due to that fact that the U.S. is looking with more and more contempt upon religion. Back when being religious was normal, there was less urgency to be knowledgeable about our faith and religion. Now that the urgency is increasing, people are starting to band together for support.
 
I’d say our country is getting polarized. We have many who are becoming more and more secular, and then we have others who are getting more and more religious. “The rich will become richer, the poor will become poorer.” And I think the same can be applied to spiritual wealth.
 
I don’t know that we are actually more secular. What is certainly happening is that church is no longer a mandatory club people must belong to. My suspicion is that those who go to church because of some sort of genuine faith are more or less the same. Certainly these core people have not decreased in proportion to the overall decline.

In short we are now less dillsional about how many people actually have a real faith of some sort.
 
I think that perhaps for the first time in our history, we have a large segment of the population that actively despises religion and anyone who associates with it, and they put strong pressure on others to become anti-theist. This is one of the greatest calamities to ever fall mankind, in both Europe and America.

In the past, if one was not religious, that was one’s own business. Now it has to be everybody else’s too, and atheists are eager to convert. I can see this heading nowhere but to hell.

I am blessed enough to live in the Rome of the West, where parishes are packed on Sundays - the one I’m taking RCIA classes at serves 2900 families. I can only think of one nearby church that hasn’t had to expand in my immediate area. There are probably about as many Catholic schools as there are secular ones - except the Catholic schools are much more successful. There is, however, that undercurrent of complacency, in which the Church becomes a cultural relic one participates in for old times’ sake, rather than a living faith. I do pray for the piety of the people to grow.
 
I think we are starting to see who really believes and who doesn’t. I think there are fewer and fewer halfway religious people.
 
I’m not that far removed from college. It was my experience that those involve in the Catholic/Protestant religious groups were extremely devout in their faith. Those who were not, were generally not at all religious/only what you would call “spiritual”. I met very few halfway people.
 
I don’t have any data, but from what I can tell what used to not be acceptable on TV has become commonplace. Lust, violence, homosexuality, etc. have become part of most TV shows. Even what are considered wholesome show have sexual innuendos. This indicates to that the nation is more secular.

To combat this secular agenda, America Needs Fatima is holding a national Rosary Rally with a goal at reaching 8000 venues. They are currently at 6300. If you would like to take a public stand against these issues, become a Rosary Rally Captain or find a venue in your area.

Our Lady of Fatima told the peasant children to pray the rosary daily. It is a supernatural solution to our nation and the world’s move away from Catholicism. See ANF.org for more details. To find a rally in you area, see americaneedsfatima.org/Rosary-Rally-Central/find-a-rosary-rally-nearest-you.html

The rally is taking place nationally on Oct. 13th at noon.
 
As others have said, I think more nominally religious people are starting to abandon religion completely, and people who really care are starting to truly devote their lives to their faith. This could be good, because there won’t be so many “believers” who are out setting bad examples, spreading their own heresies as doctrine to others giving thier religion a bad name. Or it could drive a wedge between the religious and the secular, making us look like we’re unreachable to each other.
 
The laity and the clergy I believe are too comfortable. We need leaders who reject comfort and embrace the cross. Voluntary acts of penance with prayer would move this culture to it knees. If we were indentifed by the media as cross-bears then we would have more to say only when the time is right. The cross and resurrection vis-a-vis with prayer and penance is the motion to bring the hatred of the crowd to new life. “Crucify him, crucify him!” (Lk 23:21)

I would say the reason why the media considers religion now, is because they have put a small cross on us. We provide a message by our very nature, and the contradiction they provide is the cross of misunderstanding the nature of the Church as it communicates itself through a media that is not accurate to our content of presentation. The media has a lot to learn about doctrine, for that would help them to present us accurately. This might be a future breakthrough that will bring the marginalization of the Church back to the center of culture.
 
The Western world in general is becoming more and more secular as the likes of Dawkins are overzealous in converting people.
 
Colorad007 said:
There has been a lot of talk in the media about a quickly secularizing America. Surveys have indicated that especially young people are abandoning organized religion, and now a good portion of the American public professes no specific religious faith. Same-sex marriage, and the attendance acceptibility of homosexuality itself, is on the march across America. Religious leaders and the secular media both seem to agree: as Fr. John McCloskey put it, “America is no longer a Christian country.”

catholicity.com/mccloskey/post-christian-america.html

Yet church attendance is still relatively constant. Our bishops have become strong leaders in the faith. Abortion rates have gone down, and, according to the New York Times so has marijuana use and fornication among teenagers.

well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/02/the-kids-are-more-than-all-right/

Christian college groups are incredibly strong, which I’m not sure was the case maybe 30 years ago.

Are we just becoming polarized, or are we really becoming secularized? What’s the truth? What is the future for Christian faith in this country?
Click to expand...
If what I see on the internet is correct, more Catholics are becoming secular about Catholicism even though they claim their religion…
 
grannymh said:
If what I see on the internet is correct, more Catholics are becoming secular about Catholicism even though they claim their religion…
Click to expand...
I think it depends on who we count as “Catholic”. There are a number of baptized Catholics, but practicing? It never ceases to amaze me when I have a FB who I notice lists Catholic as his/her religion and I know they have never been to Mass in the whole time I’ve known them and post links to liberal garbage all the time.
 
WingsOfEagles said:
I think it depends on who we count as “Catholic”. There are a number of baptized Catholics, but practicing? It never ceases to amaze me when I have a FB who I notice lists Catholic as his/her religion and I know they have never been to Mass in the whole time I’ve known them and post links to liberal garbage all the time.
Click to expand...
Well, if we want to talk numbers… I was reading a Catholic source which said that while there are around 68-72 million people who identify themselves as Catholic in the U.S., they estimated that the number of faithful, practicing Catholics was between 10-15 million people.

That’s less than a quarter of Catholics. If you extrapolated that across denominations (most are in the same boat). You could easily say that not even one third of Americans are practicing Christians. Let’s say that guesstimate (again sorry I forgot where I read that) is off, and say there are 20 or 25 million practicing Catholics in the U.S. That’s out of 310 million people!

[IE: between 6%- 8% of Americans are practicing Catholics-- if you use 20 or 25 million] By at least this article I remember reading. It went in depth to the number of people attending Mass, etc.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top