Recent Threads

[James Manning]

Thanks very much to all for your comments. I read and save them all as part of my undergraduate studies, while completing my senior thesis on evangelical Christian participants in conservative politics.

I wanted to note that 7-14% having no religious affiliation, as reported at UC Berkely, and the 10.8% figure at Baylor is kind of cutting around the edges a much larger issue.

A recent study by the Barna   Research Group reports that "only nine percent of self   proclaiming born again Christians hold a Biblical worldview." While at the same time, evangelical leaders like David Wheaton, Josh McDowell, and Brannon Howse are reporting an attrition rate of anywhere from 50-70% of evangelical Christian youth after they leave their parents' households.

This touches on one of the premises of my research. Specifically, that there is the lack of competitiveness of ideas (that originate in rigorously literal exegesis of scripture) in the modern market of largely secular ideas. And that an attempt to overcome this competitive failure is one of the driving forces behind evangelical Christian political movements and legislation, that ultimately wind up as policy under discussion in forums like this Email list.

On a separate subject, I am finding that while Christian Reconstructionists are indeed a very small portion of conservative Christians, they are growing rapidly as intellectual leaders among evangelicals, through entities such as Wall Builders and the Discovery Institute.

Further, I am discovering that, while there is a wide and growing exegetical gulf between dominionist/reconstructionists like David Barton, D James Kennedy, and Hank Hanegraaff and those that assert Darbyite premillineal dispensationalism (Tim LaHaye, Pat Robertson, John Hagee, et al), evangelical conservatives have absolutely no problem showing up on the same side of the ballot box. That comes in spite of escatological doctrines that are otherwise diametrically opposed to each other.

As an undergraduate, I do not mind so much that discussion tends to stray at times. But I was surprised when the traffic on the list got so lively and elevated that nobody noted the passing of Rev. D. James Kennedy.

James Manning
Murray State University senior
Memphis, Tennessee

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excerpts from the thread follow below...

Douglas Laycock <laycockd at umich.edu> wrote

Michael Hout and Claude Fischer at Berkely report a number of studies with similar results, showing that people reporting no religious preference doubled from 7% to 14% in the 90s.  Why More Americans Have No Religious Preference: Politics and Generations, 67 Am. Soc. Rev. 165 (2002). 

Quoting Newsom Michael <mnewsom at law.howard.edu>:

I wonder if there is a "surge" of people reporting no religion. The Baylor study -- an extraordinary piece of social science work -- that came out a year ago shows that 89.2% of Americans have a religious affiliation, and of the remaining 10.8%, the study characterizes them as "persons without a religious preference, denomination, or place of worship." 

 Douglas Laycock <laycockd at umich.edu> wrote

It's not a reaction to the Christian Reconstructionists, who are numerically trivial.  But many of the folks having the reaction can't tell the difference between the conservative values voters and the Christian Reconstructionists.


       
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