Why American Christianity Is Fading: How a Lack of Commitment Created a Credibility Crisis
By Phil Cooke
We’ve all experienced it–the uneasy feeling that America has lost it’s moral compass and we’re drifting further and further away from basic Christian principles. Christianity in America is fading. While America was never actually a “Christian country,” it’s pretty obvious that for the last 200 years, Judeo-Christian principles have been the most popular religious tradition in our population.
But today, the idea of Christian ideals has become a joke. We see it when late-night comedians make fun of Christians, when the “Christian” character of a prime-time TV series is either the murderer, the pedophile, or simply crazy. We see it when high school principals threaten expulsion to students who mention the word “Jesus” in a school paper or graduation address.
Remember when prayer in schools was perfectly normal? (Especially during exams.) Abortion was wrong? Marriage was an unquestioned sacrament between man and a women? Simply put, however you look at it, Christian influence in today’s culture is rapidly disappearing.
Faith leaders call it the decline of American Christianity.
College professors call it post-Christian.
Secularist call it long overdue.
That was the conversation that started a new book project by marketing expert Jonathan Bock and I to explore what happened. Where did the world go wrong? We began by thinking it was a “marketing” problem. After all, we’re media producers and marketers, so we often think better marketing is the answer to every problem.
After all, your house is too small? Call it “cozy.” Too many job changes on your resume? Call your career “wide-ranging.” Can’t get enough customers at your restaurant? Call it “exclusive.” Surely the answer is the Church just isn’t telling its story well enough. We need better branding.
But it didn’t take long to realize that the problem is far deeper that marketing. After a year of research, we realized that Christians don’t have a marketing problem, we have a salesforce problem. We simply don’t believe in the product, or live our lives as if any of it mattered at all.
That revelation was the motivation that drove Jonathan and I to write our new book “The Way Back: How Christians Blew Our Credibility and How We Get It Back.”
