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Strong Delusion!

FALLING AWAY
"Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first." 2TH.2:3a

Spiritual awakening Or Slump?
The Christian Science Monitor

Talk of a "spiritual awakening" is sweeping America. Book sales on the soul are rising off the charts. Suburban "megachurches" fill with thousands of seekers. Men meet in football stadiums to repent. TV shows touch on angels. Newspapers start religion beats. Polls say 90 percent of Americans believe in God, and 45 percent go to church every Sunday.

So churches must be brimming with members, right?

Not so. The number of people who participate in churches, keeping them alive through daily or weekly attendance, appears to be down--though a majority of Americans claim a religion either by birth or by being listed on a membership roster.

Mainline churches have lost one-fourth of their members in the past 30 years. Some 48 percent of Episcopalian children leave the church at age 18. Since 1965, the Methodist Church, to use the most dramatic example, has lost nearly 1,000 members a week, down to 8.5 million in the 1994 count (making it "the largest exodus in religious history," according to one scholar). Religious sociologist Robert Wuthnow of Princeton University estimates only 5 percent of the US population is actively engaged in prayer or devotional practice on a daily basis.

At a deeper level, society's faith in physical sciences is more entrenched than ever--as an explanation for everything from the origin of the universe to human behavior and health. Moreover, popular culture is often linked to a "post-modern" spirit of the age--one in which ideas of right and wrong and moral sense are simply choices individuals make.

"We had a reporter recently call to ask if genocide could be categorized as something 'wrong,'" says John Seel of the Postmodernism Project at the University of Virginia. "What you see these days is a total lack of any authority in intellectual life. Everything is just OK as long as you think it is."

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