DR. CUMMINGS: Is Christianity dying in America?

Is Christianity dying in America? No, but it is declining, that’s for sure. In 1892, our Supreme Court declared: “This is a Christian nation.” In 2009, Barack Obama, said: “We don’t consider ourselves a Christian nation.” He could say that because 26.2 percent of Americans are atheist, agnostics, secularists, Muslim, Jewish or Hindu; the greatest decline of Christians (34 percent) is among those born after 1980, so the trend looks irreversible.

Example: for every one person who joins the Catholic Church, six leave. There are 3 million less Catholics in America since 2007, and 5 million less mainline Protestants.

All sorts of reasons are given. Pat Buchanan blames the Supreme Court for purging Christ from the public schools, and he condemns our media and movies for continuing the counter-culture of the ‘60s. Father Allan McDonald, the pastor of St. Joseph Catholic Church in Macon, wrote in his blog that he blames his parish decline on 500 funerals in 11 years, the white flight out of Bibb County and the lack of new industry.

Whatever the real reasons, more and more Christians find fishing on Sunday morning or just relaxing with the family more fulfilling than going to church. And that’s a fact. So, why go to church?

Well, both Catholics and Protestants have two fantastic things to brag about. One is “community” and the second is called “outreach.” It’s like going to Rotary every week with your friends and joining a committee to distribute food to the hungry. Churches are like clubs. They bring together people with the same backgrounds and interests and provide them a forum for charitable action. So how do we explain the fact that we still have so much segregation in our churches but not in our clubs? Blacks and whites can’t seem to get it together -- for God’s sake.

The mainline Protestant churches (Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran and Episcopal) have two more distinct things to offer. One is Sunday School. These are small vibrant groups who meet an hour before the church service and discuss biblical or current issues of interest without the help or hindrance of the pastor. The second is the emphasis on good preaching. Pastors can’t all be Joel Osteens or Billy Grahams, but if the pastor can’t preach, he or she is gone.

The Catholic Church has one distinctly different offering. It’s called the Eucharist. For Catholics, when Jesus said “This is my body,” he meant it literally. It was not a metaphor like “the lamb of God.” It was a magical miracle, and every priest performs this exact same miracle every Sunday morning. You can see how the 33 percent decline in American priests causes a terrible problem. Without the priest, there is no Eucharist. Without the Eucharist, there is no Catholic Church. Based on these statistics, Ireland could become non-Catholic in 20 years.

But there is one thing about going to the Catholic Church that Protestants don’t have to worry about. If Protestants go to church, it’s because they want to. If Catholics go to church, it’s because they have to. Really. If a Catholic rolls over when the alarm goes off and says, “the hell with it,” that’s exactly what he’s going to get. You see, deliberately missing Mass on Sunday is a mortal sin for a Catholic. That means if he dies before he confesses this sin to a priest, he goes straight to hell. That’s a pretty big incentive.

It was unreasonable incentives like this that created Protestantism in the first place. You remember the Rev. Father Martin Luther, a Catholic priest and monk, who, on Oct. 31, 1517 posted 95 “protests” on the door of his Catholic church in Wittenberg, Germany, and began the Protestant Reformation. Luther protested against church doctrines like indulgences, usury, confession, purgatory, papal arrogance and infallibility,

Maybe we need more Father Martins today, priests and pastors willing to question things like segregation, gay bashers, global warming, birth control, divorced Catholics and discrimination of all kinds. Maybe if our churches produced more questioners like Martin Luther and Pope Francis, instead of men who hide behind the infallible comfort of their black cassocks and robes, more people would go to church and be willing to stand up and say: “Now Sunday is worthwhile.”

Dr. Bill Cummings is the CEO of Cummings Consolidated Corporation and Cummings Management Consultants. His website is www.billcummings.org.

This story was originally published August 22, 2015 at 7:27 PM with the headline "DR. CUMMINGS: Is Christianity dying in America? ."