(April 24, 2019 at 9:29 am)Mister Agenda Wrote: Other links have shown that disbelief in God is at a high, that would seem to corroborate that the trend isn't solely due to different ways of counting membership; though that is almost certainly a factor in the decline of church membership; we are also seeing lower attendance. IMHO, mega-churches aren't a sign of growth, they're a sign of smaller churches having more trouble paying their bills and being forced to consolidate.
I've seen some of those over the last several years myself, though I can't say that I'm the most familiar with this topic. The problem with the various surveys is that they are a bit amorphous when it comes to specifics. For examples, on survey results, you really don't want to trust the veracity of any survey unless your response rate is 85% or higher. Anything lower than that tends to reduce the accuracy fairly dramatically. And regarding religious affiliations, there has been an increasing tendency within the Church and in American society at large to avoid or be less inclined to identify with particular sects. This has the effect of sometimes, though it's not clear how much, seeing people declaring themselves as having no religious affiliations, by which they often mean that they are non-denominational rather than non-Christian. And the point that I'm making is that these results are often not as meaningful as first thought. Having said that, I don't necessarily disagree that the overall trend might be down. I think that is perfectly possible. I just don't have a very high level of confidence, given some of the things I've mentioned above.
“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” - C.S. Lewis, Is Theology Poetry? -
