The Portrait of the Lord Jesus Christ by Georgiana Houghton

I’ve heard people say they were spiritual but not religious. That usually meant they didn’t go to church. We separate our worlds into that of the spirit and of reality (the physical world that we can observe.) In my opinion, that is an arbitrary and false dichotomy. We can get sidetracked into debating about spiritualism, the unconscious, extra sensory perception, and mindfulness. I like to simplify the issue and say that religion is the history of our search for God. Christians believe that we access him/her via the Holy Spirit. We could argue for decades what that is. We have taken different paths and directions over the millennia and come to different conclusions about the nature of God.

Weekly church worship is declining

A lot has been written about the decline in “organized religion” and the mainstream Protestant denominations in the United States. This occurred even before WWII in Europe with their state religions. The growth here has been in “non-denominational” mega churches that are focused on the personality and showmanship of the pastor.

This genre for decades was the outgrowth of television preachers and their widespread reach and ability to generate lots of money. The recent revelations of the scandals involving some of these preachers dimmed the status of some of them who became famous before becoming infamous.

I recently wrote about the split between progressive and conservative Christians and their different interpretations of the Bible. The split has been between a world view that looks forward and another than looks backward. The invasion of politics into religion (or vice versa) also has added to the conflict.

"A house divided against itself cannot stand." - Abraham Lincoln

For 500 years, the primary dividing line in Christianity was between the Protestants and the Catholics. For a thousand years before that, the Catholic Church was split between the Roman and Orthodox dynasties. Today, in the United States, not only are Christians divided we are increasingly seeing that many people are not engaged in any form of organized religion. Some are most threatened by Islam, while the Hindu, Buddhism and eastern religions seem to receive more notice in this country.

In the late 18th & early 19th Century, Europe saw a growth of secularism, i.e., the study of the philosophies and science and a decline in the influence of the church. But in the United States, we saw a new wave of evangelism as many Protestant denominations experienced explosive growth.