American Culture

“ ‘Pray for Damar Hamlin’ became a national exhortation. It was everywhere. The universal urge and call to prayer keenly revealed how embedded man’s spiritual nature is within him, despite what our culture says and does to try to remove the divine from our horizon.” - World

“…in our day everything is political and that all of society’s structures and institutions are being made subservient to political ends. …Second, it affirms that in our society self-definition is considered unassailable so that a person’s individual defining of a word must reign over a dictionary’s.” - Challies

“The United States is the lone country out of 19 surveyed where a plurality of adults say their country’s influence has been getting weaker recently.” - Pew

“The book is called Nonverts: The Making of Ex-Christian America, by a British sociologist named Stephen Bullivant. It’s not just an important book, it’s the best-written and most readable work of religious sociology that I’ve read in a very long time.” - David French

“…nons? They’re nondenominational Protestants whose local congregations are wholly self-governing and independent of traditional denominations” - GetReligion

“Bible use continues to lag behind levels seen before the COVID-19 pandemic, the American Bible Society said in recapping key findings from the 2022 State of the Bible.” - BPNews

“those with lower family incomes (53%) are more likely than those from middle- (38%) and high-income households (30%) to have experienced high psychological distress at least once since March 2020” - Pew

“The [Pew Research] study further divides the end-times believers into two groups: those who believe Jesus will return to Earth someday and the world situation will worsen until then (14% of Americans) and everyone else who believes these are the end times (25%).” - Lifeway

“Several million people did not randomly, suddenly have several million individual changes of heart in the space of 40-odd years. Kudos to Bullivant for his cultural history, summarized in six clear statements at the end of the chapter.” - CToday

“2022 saw a 1740% increase in lookups for gaslighting, with high interest throughout the year.” - Merriam-Webster