Christianity, Cults and Culture

You may be an astute individual with a natural bent toward solving problems. Perhaps you can suggest some solutions to a very real problem.

Over the last fifty years, there has been a precipitous decline in Christian beliefs. For the last forty years, morality held up as the weight of culture kept the old values in place. However, things began to change rapidly without any moral or philosophical reason for morality. Currently, there is little consensus. We are gripped in a cultural tsunami where long standing values and virtues have been inverted and the most obvious truths distorted.

George Barna at the Cultural Research Center has identified several societal values that at one point seemed settled but for which there is now no longer any consensus. Remarkably, that list contains:

• Basis of truth
• Whether other people deserve to be respected
• Importance of the God of Israel as an authority source/guide for life
• Belief about the value of human life
• Acceptance of the existence of absolute moral truths
• Existence of Satan
• Means to happiness in life.
• Morality of intentionally deceiving other people
• Morality of consensual pre-marital sexual relations
• Personal commitment to discerning and doing God’s will.
• Appropriate relationship to/treatment of animals

Even more importantly, during a time when people are separated, lonely, and experiencing angst, there is a rejection of faith, the one thing that would address those great individual needs. No longer do people recognize their estrangement from God. Few are concerned about heaven or hell. The questions that generations of people had about meaning and mortality have largely evaporated. No more does that average person worry about sin.  

How do we, as believers in an age of unbelief, make a difference in the lives of individuals and our society? We are rapidly reaching the point where the failure of individual Christians to rise to the cause will result in the death of faith in our culture. How will we change this trajectory?