Christianity in North America

The Google Persecution

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A few years ago, I sat in a job interview awaiting a response from a somber-looking man who had just gotten a first-class pitch from yours truly. He tugged off his glasses, looked me straight in the eye, and told me he thought I had all the skills to be a terrific employee. Then, settling in his seat, he added, “But I don’t need another Billy Graham on my hands.”

Why this remark? Why the curt answer? He’d noted that my résumé revealed my college major as “Christian Education.”

I once had a Christian career consultant warn me that unless I changed my major to simply read “Education,” I would find work hard to come by. When I told her that this would be lying, seeing that my college had an Education department distinct from the Christian Ed department, she said, “It’s okay. Everyone does it a little bit.

I write this post with some trepidation. Even pointing this out carries with it some risk. It may be silly to some, but I believe that Christians who have an Internet presence need to be aware that we are being watched. What we write online is being duly noted.

With “Google Me!” becoming a part of the millennium’s lexicon, it is easy for anyone out there to find considerable information on anyone. Couple this with the pressure of conformity to the world, and Christians who regularly write online, have a blog, or simply comment on life in a random website somewhere run the risk of having what they say used against them.

Not everyone is pleased by our discourse. The more we lift up Jesus or note the depravity of the world around us, the more open we make ourselves to winding up on the wrong end of a Googling. Could you lose your job because your blog notes that only those who profess Jesus will be saved? Could a bank turn you down for a loan because you stated online that porn use is deadly to the soul? Is the person you just interviewed with angered by your godly comment on some obscure website thanks to a simple name search on one of the many search engines out there? How would you ever know that the negative response you got from someone sitting on the other side of a mahogany desk was simply due to the fact he didn’t like what you said online about his special brand of deviancy?

While it is true that anyone with a strong opinion and an Internet presence is subject to this kind of spywork, Christians—as in so many other cases—are scrutinized with a higher powered loupe. We are a convenient target of the world’s ire, a worldy wrath that shows no sign of let-up.

Paranoia? Perhaps. But neither did I think that an employer might reject me because of a certain adjective—a life-giving one—that modifies “Education” in my résumé.

Should we stop speaking because the world will hate us even as they hated our Lord? By no means! However, we who talk about the things of Jesus in the forum of the Internet must also realize that we are largely treading cyberspace with few to back us up if the words we speak rile others. We need to find ways of supporting each other should we wind up persecuted by search engine.

A Flawed Love Letter?

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There’s an odd new move in some of today’s cutting-edge churches. It is a move to recover the love relationship we are intended to have with Jesus— an admirable and holy desire. However, this strange new company of Jesus lovers has a peculiar view of the one they love, a view so at odds with the truth that it calls into question the very nature of love itself.

There is no doubt that Jesus is the Lover of our souls. His is a boundless love, deeper than space itself. Into this love relationship He calls us like a young hero beckoning his future bride. His love for the Church is so unfathomable that it transcends the pleasure of our sexual unions, a pale copy of the joy that is to come when we who call Him our Lover are joined to Him for all time and sit down beside Him at our marriage supper.

What kind of love letter would such a lover write to his beloved? Would it misspeak his true intentions? Would it contain exaggerations of his accomplishments? Would it leave out the truth and leave in lies? What lover would speak to his beloved this way?

Certainly not Jesus.

And yet these same folks who are calling us to simply love Jesus more and let Him love us in return are saying that His love letters to us, The Holy Scriptures, are flawed, filled with errors, mistaken and incomplete. No inerrancy in Jesus’ love letters to us is possible. Only fools, not lovers, believe the Bible to be inerrant. To believe the words of Jesus are perfect is to love them more than Him.

Readers, you will hear more and more in days to come about returning to a pure love of Jesus, but with a cloaked caveat that the Scriptures cannot be wholly trusted. Wariness and wisdom are called for. As the wrong kind of yeast ruins what is intended to be a fine wine, so the introduction of doubt into the veracity of the Scriptures will sour many a soul.

No one should ever doubt the Lord; His love for us is transcendent. How then can we think of Him as speaking to us anything but the perfect and immutable words of His eternal, loving heart?

Psalm 119:7-11 ESV

The law of the LORD is perfect,
reviving the soul;
the testimony of the LORD is sure,
making wise the simple;

the precepts of the LORD are right,
rejoicing the heart;
the commandment of the LORD is pure,
enlightening the eyes;

the fear of the LORD is clean,
enduring forever;
the rules of the LORD are true,
and righteous altogether.

More to be desired are they than gold,
even much fine gold;
sweeter also than honey
and drippings of the honeycomb.

Moreover, by them is your servant warned;
in keeping them there is great reward.

Calvin Declines

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Excerpted from The Houston Chronicle – 7/21/04:

“As early as this year and certainly, if the projections hold, within the next two years, the majority of American adults will not be Protestants for the first time since the founding of colonial Jamestown,” said Tom W. Smith, director of the National Opinion Research Center’s General Social Survey.

“We were always at least a majority Protestant country, and that is about to change.”

The survey, which was released Tuesday, has studied various aspects of American life, including its religious dimension, for 32 years.

From 1972 to 1993, it found that Protestants constituted 63 percent of the national population. But the total declined to 52 percent in 2002.

The study mirrors results from a recent Harris County survey. Protestants decreased from 56 percent in 1994 to 34 percent in 2004, according to the Houston Area Survey directed by Stephen Klineberg, a Rice University sociology professor.

One reason for the national decline, Smith said, is a failure to keep youths and young adults within the Protestant fold.

From the ’70s through the early ’90s, Protestant churches retained 90 percent of young people, but that dropped to 83 percent after 1993, he said.

Another reason: Once-nominal Protestants are more open to stating that they are no longer affiliated with any denomination, he said. In the survey, the number of people saying they had no religion grew from 9 percent in 1993 to 14 percent in 2002.

And, some people who once identified themselves as Protestant now call themselves “Christian,” which would put them in the survey’s growing “other” category. Latter-day Saints, Muslims and Eastern religions are also in the “other” category, which grew from 3 percent in 1993 to 7 percent in 2002.

I guess you can say that the Reformation is essentially dead.

Folks are unpacking these numbers various ways. Non-Protestant immigrants are thinning the ranks as the United States struggles to maintain its borders. More Christians are failing to self-identify as “Protestant,” choosing a more generic title of “Christian” (a category that grew slightly.)

But with the rise of Islam in America, as well as the unabated hemorrhage of people who are weighing the Church in the scale and finding it wanting (the “no religion” crowd), there are serious problems the Church in America must face.

The first is obvious: We simply are not leading people to Christ. I believe that if every self-confessed “Protestant” led one person to Christ every five years, we would see those numbers dramatically shift. Just about a dozen people pointed to Jesus in a person’s lifetime. I have to wonder how hard that is to do. The numbers do not lie, though—every measure of Christian life out there shows declining or stagnant numbers. We simply are not leading people to Christ.

Nor are we reproducing. God’s people have been encourage by the Lord Himself to be fruitful, yet our birthrates in the Christian community are hovering in the low single digits, at best. We are barely replacing ourselves. Meanwhile, Muslim families are experiencing birthrates more than twice what ours are. Most futurists are speculating that Islam will overtake Christianity as the primary world religion sometime between 2025 and 2035. And much of that is simply through birth rates.

We have been asleep on our watch. We need to be telling people about Christ and raising Christian children. It is God’s desire that everyone be saved and that none perish. But we have to do something about it.

I understand the family issue is huge one and that not everyone can have a half dozen kids. But there is no reason why we cannot adopt or foster children, raising them in the fear of the Lord.

No reason at all exists, though, to justify why we are not out there bringing people to Christ.

Turn the TV off. Throw out the XBox. Unplug the iPod. Then let’s all get out there and work to bring in the harvest. The laborers already are few; let’s not let them become nonexistent.