American Culture

“Theologians and ethicists, playwrights and lyricists, therapists and politicians, historians and pundits—like everyone else in society—all could have their say. But more and more, each would have to face up ultimately to the supposed precision of the scientist, who among them all seems to have a lock on reality, or at least on the tools for discovering reality.” - WORLD

“The Accelerating Acceptance report, conducted by The Harris Poll on behalf of the LGBT advocacy group GLAAD, showed that respondents age 18-34 were much less tolerant of LGBT people than in the prior two years’ surveys.” - BPNews

“Tolkien refrained from probing the depths of his evil characters by design—since the reality and, indeed, the banality of evil does not require elaborate fictionalization” - TGC

“For decades now our politics and culture have been dominated by a particular philosophy of freedom. It is a philosophy of liberation from family and tradition, of escape from God and community… a philosophy that has defined our age, though it is far from new.

“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.

Out of the options, American Bible users were most likely to choose ‘do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God,’ taken from Micah 6:8.” - Facts & Trends

“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