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A famous 1978 Gallup poll f<\/span>ound tha<\/span>t 4<\/span>6\u00a0<\/span>percent of Americans drop out of active religious participation at some point in their lives –but the same poll also found that 80% of them return to organized religion later in life.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n The media is very fond of citing the first part of that sentence as evidence that Christianity is dying, but they very rarely even address the second part of that sentence.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Another, more recent poll (2008) conducted by the Pew Forum on Religious and Public Life found that 44% of Americans adults had switched denominations at some time.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n The Wall Street Journal<\/em> lamented this, saying, “There are reasons to find this statistic troubling. People who leave on<\/span>e denomination for another may be more concerned with fulfilling their boutique church-going desires than with meeting the moral obligations of a religious group or the demands of a doctrine.”<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n That’s a very dismal assessment of Christianity in America by a major newspaper, and the rest of the media was quick to parrot the increasing shallowness of spirituality in America. Even some pastors jumped on board bemoaning the lamentable state of faith in America.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n The only problem is, it’s flat-out wrong.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n In his book, “What Americans Really Believe<\/em>,” Randy Stark and researchers at Baylor University compared statistics on memberships within the various denominations from 1962 to 2000 and found that Americans were indeed leaving churches in great numbers, but they were leaving liberal Protestant denominations and moving to more conservative Protestant, Pentecostal, and non-denominational churches.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n In point of fact, the fastest-growing deno<\/span>mination in America is non-denominationalism.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Throughout his book, Stark cites s<\/span>tatistic after statistic that the American people are moving to more conservative, Bible-based churches and beliefs.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Even more interesting is that people who attend “megachurches” are not the inch-deep, mile-wide Christians they are accused of being. People in megachurches are more likely to believe that heaven absolutely exists, that they are assured of their salvation, that hell exists, and that the devil exists. They are also more likely to attend services weekly or more often, tithe, or attend a Bible-study group. They are also far more likely to share their faith friends or strangers.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n But what really caught my attenti<\/span>on was the chapter on atheism.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Now, we are not talking about people who say, “I’m not sure if there is a God or not” because that person would be an agnostic. True atheists are people who are certain there is no god (big G or small g) at all.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n The thing is, the Richard Dawkins’ of the world are a tiny, tiny minority and they are not<\/em> growing, despite all their very vocal proselytizing on the internet and television talk shows.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Back in the early 1700’s English “freethinker” Thomas Woolston prophesied that religion would be gone by 1900. Voltaire (1694 – 1778) thought that religion would be dead within 50 years<\/span>\u00a0and the distinguished Max M\u00fcller wrote in 1778, “Every day, every week, every month, every quarter, the most widely read journals seem just now to vie with each other in telling us that the time for religion is past, that faith is a hallucination of an infantile disease, that the gods have been found out and exploded.”<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n They were all wrong.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Polls and surveys by Gallup, American Piety, GSS, and Baylor from 1944 to 2007 have found the percentage of Americans who are certain there is no God have hovered between\u00a0 three and six percent. And the best current data indicates that only about 3.1% of Americans are avowed atheists.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n And, lest you believe that the rest of the<\/span>\u00a0world has decided there is no God and we are archaic and behind-the-times in comparison to “more enlightened” societies, the World Values Surveys of 2001-2002 show that almost every nation in the world has an atheism rate well below 10%. Most nations are in the 4-5% range, with only France (14%), Japan (12%), and China (14%) above ten percent.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n The data from China is absolutely astounding in that under the Communist regime, atheism was the official government religion. In a country where not publicly being an atheist could get you i<\/span>mprisoned or shot, only 14%\u00a0 (that’s one in seven) acknowledge atheism as their belief system.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Equally interesting is Russia, where only 4% of the population admits to being atheist after decades upon decades of government-enforced atheism. Clearly those government mandates did have some effect as, after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990’s, the number of Orthodox Christians rose from 31% to 72%.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n What all this means is that there are a lot of apostate atheists in the world.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n It’s also obvious that God is not dead in America or the world, brothers and sisters –far from it. Kinship Christian Radio exists precisely because He is alive and well and it is all to His glory.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n What this means from the standpoint of our evangelism and our witness is that we are not a small, fringe community of religious nut-cases. The vast, vast majority of the people we see on the street each day already know in their heart-of-hearts that God exists.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n What they may not know is the degree to which God loves them. Only 30% of our fellow Americans are sure they will get into heaven. About 27% do not believe that Jesus is the Son of God and about 25% do not believe that God is concerned with their personal well-being or the well-being of the world. About one-third of Americans do not know or believe the way to be saved is to confess their sins and accept Jesus as their Savior.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n That means there are two-thirds of us who can tell the other third the truth. We don’t need to club the atheists into submission because, just as the Bible says, “since the creation of the world God\u2019s invisible qualities\u2014his eternal power and divine nature\u2014have been clearly seen!” (Romans 1:20) Our gentle and respectful witness (1 Peter 3:15)\u00a0destroy arguments and\u00a0every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God (2 Corinthians 10:5) when we speak the truth in love. (Ephesians 4:15)<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n HALLELUJAH!<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Today’s Praise<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. Romans 10:9 (NIV)<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n Written by Dan Jones<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A famous 1978 Gallup poll found that 46\u00a0percent of Americans drop out of active religious participation at some point in their lives –but the same poll also found that…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":13838,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_price":"","_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_header":"","_tribe_default_ticket_provider":"","_tribe_ticket_capacity":"0","_ticket_start_date":"","_ticket_end_date":"","_tribe_ticket_show_description":"","_tribe_ticket_show_not_going":false,"_tribe_ticket_use_global_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_global_stock_level":"","_global_stock_mode":"","_global_stock_cap":"","_tribe_rsvp_for_event":"","_tribe_ticket_going_count":"","_tribe_ticket_not_going_count":"","_tribe_tickets_list":"[]","_tribe_ticket_has_attendee_info_fields":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-14 18:28:21","action":"delete","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kinshipradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13821"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kinshipradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kinshipradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kinshipradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kinshipradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13821"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kinshipradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13821\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kinshipradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13838"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kinshipradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13821"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kinshipradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13821"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kinshipradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13821"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}