American Culture

“With so much of our lives revolving around media consumption, it behooves us to develop what Tony Reinke, in his new book Competing Spectacles: Treasuring Christ in the Media Age, calls ‘a theology of visual culture.’” - Christianity Today

“U.S. births are at their lowest point in 32 years and fertility is at a record low, statistics released May 15 show. Births and fertility rates both fell 2 percent in 2018 from the previous year, the National Center for Health Statistics in Hyattsville, Md., said.” - BRNow

“At the dawn of the attention industries, then, religion was still, in a very real sense, the incumbent operation, the only large-scale human endeavor designed to capture attention and use it.

“As part of the American Bible Society and Barna Research’s State of the Bible 2019, respondents were given five prominent biblical commands and asked which one was the most important.

“The liberal person is an autonomous self whose ultimate goal is liberation from every idea and restraint except for the idea that restraint is unacceptable. Mitchell writes that the first stage of liberalism still relied on the Christian, traditional society in which it lived.

“This article compares church membership data for the 1998-2000 and 2016-2018 periods, using combined data from multiple years to facilitate subgroup analysis. On average, 69% of U.S. adults were members of a church in 1998-2000, compared with 52% in 2016-2018.” - Gallup

“The incident in Fort Dodge, Iowa, when two protesters shouted ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’ toward Buttigieg, who is openly gay and identifies as Christian, prompted a bit of a rebuke from MSNBC analyst Zerlina Maxwell” - Faithwire

“[S]ecularization theory … posits that as societies become more economically prosperous and obtain higher levels of education, the inevitable result is a movement away from organized religion and toward secularization.” - CToday

“The analysis of the General Social Survey from Ryan Burge, a political scientist at Eastern Illinois University and a Baptist pastor, found that 23.1 percent of Americans claim no religious affiliation.” - Christian Headlines

“In the age of outrage, it’s not hard to be problematic. And a vaguely pro-life tweet must have been just what the strife-seeker was looking for.” - Washington Examiner