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| | Just how Christian are we?
Friday, Feb 20, 2004 By Jack Moseley I've just about had it with all the talk and letters to newspapers about this being a Christian nation, about us living in the Bible Belt and Arkansas supposedly being considered the buckle on that belt. Just hit your horn at one of those cars with a bumper sticker reading "Honk if You Love Jesus." You're apt to be the recipient of words or gestures not found in either the Old or New Testament. Really now, just how Christian are we as a state and nation? American ethics, morals and values are lower than I've ever seen them. Rush Limbaugh recently reported that there were more patients being treated for sex addictions than for drug abuse at the rehab center he briefly called home. And we all know how bad drug and alcohol problems are in our society. Do you think readers of Sports Illustrated are all that interested in swimsuits, or is it the shapely forms that fill them? Have you listened to some of the language on TV lately? I mean regular network programs, not the raunchier stuff on cable and satellite. Frankly, I don't know why anybody was surprised at the Janet Jackson display or the grinding gyrations that preceded it. The whole "show" simply was typical of our contemporary culture and a celebration of raw sex. But that's just my opinion. Let's look at a few facts. Gary Fulton is an ordained Southern Baptist preacher and a church planter/strategist for the northern half of Arkansas. A resident of West Fork just outside Fayetteville, he works with churches throughout the northern half of Arkansas and is a walking encyclopedia on Christians in Arkansas. Would you believe only 18-to-22 percent of all Protestants in this state are active, participating church members? Research conducted by Arkansas Baptists shows that many of those Christians attend church no more than once a month. It looks to me like the buckle on the Bible Belt might be getting a bit tarnished. With 2,673,400 people according to the 2000 census, Arkansas contains more than 1,153,000 men, women and children considered "unclaimed." That means individuals who have not publicly acknowledged and accepted Jesus as their Lord and Savior, according to Fulton. People claiming to be Christians in Arkansas are involved with more than 5,800 individual houses of worship. Those churches serve 348,000 Southern Baptists and tens of thousands of other evangelicals, plus 237,000 mainline Protestants in Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopal, Lutheran, etc., congregations. Fulton did not have numbers for Roman Catholics in the state. Many Arkansas churches are losing members faster than they are baptizing replacements. Southern Baptists in this state baptize about 13,000 people a year. When you consider the death rate, hundreds of churches in the state's largest denomination are, at best, treading water instead of growing. "About 70 percent of the 1,464 Southern Baptist churches in Arkansas have flat or no-growth membership," Fulton tells me. "We're still starting up new churches all the time, of course. We're putting considerable effort in establishing new churches to serve Hispanic, Vietnamese, Laotian and other groups across Arkansas." Just how can you call this a Christian state and nation when the most generous estimates and opinion polls say only 22 percent are active members of Christian churches? And speaking of polls, what would you do for $1 million? That was the question put to a cross section of Americans a few years back without regard to religious affiliation. According to USA Today, 25 percent of the people in this country would abandon their families to become millionaires; 25 percent would abandon their churches; 23 percent would prostitute themselves; 16 percent would surrender their citizenship. For the big money, 16 percent would leave their spouses, 10 percent would withhold testimony to let a murderer go free; 7 percent would kill a stranger; 6 percent would change their race, and 4 percent would change their sex. Is this a great country or what? Can you believe that many around the world believe we're materialistic? But Americans and Arkansans still say we're a Christian state in a Christian nation. It's just a real shame so many people don't act like it. Life, luck and -30-. ------- Jack Moseley writes for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jackmoseley33@hotmail.com. |
