I ran across a chart showing the decline in church membership since the 1940’s. I picked out my own lifetime upon that chart and discovered I live and have pastored during a time of growing decline. Reflections follow…
Same chart marked up: Millennials (I’m an old one) grew up in a somewhat level time of church going. I minister during a time of growing decline in church going.
I’ve thought on it of late that people today are afraid to be seen as “not being in the know.” In the terms of Erwin Lutzer1, who quoted Solzhenitsyn2, people are conditioned in today’s culture to clap, and to clap voraciously, even for lies. Part of this phenomenon births out from inherit ego. The father of clapping for lies is ego, the mother is the desire to belong. No one want’s be be left out. To be left out is an atrocity in the cultural psyche. So people clap – even at atrocities.
This leads to a failure to seek out what is truth. So long as one feels they belong, truth is irrelevant to them. In the pre-2000 era of church going as a common thing, belonging was more-often-than-now found in religious settings, or family and friend groups.
Today belonging is found often in dysfunctional family situations where the foundations of moral underpinnings have been shot out by poor decisions of parental figures. Friend groups provide some sense of belonging, but these friends too face the same family and societal breakdowns that inform their thinking and worldviews. So what’s left to train and inform people’s ways of thinking?
Today belonging and informing is caught from several directions, such as: Media and social media, friend & family group-think, education, work places, even off-the-rails-of-truth churches. Wanting to be in the know and fit in with the current fad leads people right along in the broad way to destruction. Longing to belong drives people to agree with the common thread of thought, whether the thoughts are reasonable or not. Since most of the populace is unchurched, no traditional-moral-church-truth informed thoughts stand in the way. There is no truth to hinder them from believing lies. All the world drains them into the gutters of unreasonable and untrue thought.
Many are the forms that push such group-think. These include: media, social media, education, work places, and churches who’ve unhitched from their Authority’s mornings. These are explored below.
Media and social media drives group-think, so that whatever is “accepted” is acceptable. This enables information power brokers to drive narratives of acceptable thought. This Brave New World model supplies the narrative in the form of news-media conglomerates utilizing the very same “acceptable” talking points (narrative pushing) in lockstep with one another in every news cycle. Social media also operate with group-think bias, and form their algorithms to work on a bias, so that only the “acceptable” is pushed in front of the people. And the people adopting the “acceptable” naturally tend to share and further propitiate the “acceptable” group-think narratives, even though they are based on lies and deceptions from reason and truth. The Devil promises “you can be like God,” modern man falls for similar lies.
Education is government education, so that the most powerful or most committed/most squeaky gets the proverbial grease of platforming their views by force of court, or law, upon the whole of the populace. The sad tragedy is that we unsuspectingly pay for this via our taxes, or we pay doubly at often gov-funded universities who are the seed bed and greenhouse of error-thought, and they teach these new-fad group-think ideals to young pliable minds who go out often as soldiers of the cause – rooting themselves into schoolrooms, and human resource departments, and into consultancies for this or that who’s primary goal is not to serve their fellow man, but rather to undermined his long held traditional-moral-ideologies, and change the impacts of truth/church/God’s authority from the internals out.
Work places drive societal acceptance of group-think through multiple avenues. HR departments hire and fire based upon agreement to the group-think informed “culture” and “vision” of their companies. Marketing departments drive companies to be viewed as acceptable to their customers, so companies drive “culturally appropriate” “politically correct” vision statements and values an in turn invite in group-think enforcing consultancies, and organizations, or form “equity” boards to drive adoption of the accepted cultural narratives.
Churches who’ve unhitched from their Authority become their own authority, and they think, and operate, and “love” the way the world thinks and loves, and not according to God. Usually churches first unhitch from the Bible as God’s inspired and authoritative book of guidance. They may claim to hold to the Scriptures, but when you dig, you find it’s only in part. The first chapters are often seen as myth, any words about God-formed gender rolls are discounted or explained away. It’s a short trip from these to make-it-up-as-you-go, you-are-your-own-god religion. This sort of religion inevitably sides with the culture’s shift away from reason and truth, and end up tearing down their corner of Christianity in their shiftings. Denial of the authority of God and of parts of his Book is no small earthquake.
Its it any wonder “Culture” begins with “Cult.” It seems we pastor and live as Christians in a very cultish world.
- Lutzer, Erwin. No Reason to Hide: Standing for Christ in a Collapsing Culture. Harvest House Publishers. 2022 [↩]
- Reports about a man being arrested (actually killed) for being the first to stop clapping during Soviet Union times. An interesting comment on this event is found here – https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7vhovy/in_the_gulag_archipelago_solzhenitsyn_describes/. accessed 9/22/2023 [↩]