Coronavirus: Thread

[grarpamp]

The State's goal with its Plandemic, and Politician Media FUD,
was to alienate you from anything and everything that
competes with the State, including religion...


https://nypost.com/2022/07/03/us-religious-leaders-explain-why-faith-in-god-hit-lowest-level-ever-say-covid-made-it-worse/
https://www.justfacts.com/news_covid-19_anxiety_lockdowns_life_destroyed_saved

US religious leaders explain why faith in God hit lowest level ever,
say COVID made it worse
By
Andrew Mark Miller, Fox News	
July 3, 2022 5:48pm
Updated
The new poll showed that 81% of Americans believe in God, which is a
six-point drop from 2017.	The new poll showed that 81% of Americans
believe in God, which is a six-point drop from 2017. Getty Images
Originally Published by:
Fox News

    Lee Greenwood on 4th of July and America: 'Grateful to be in a free country'
    Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade after we marched, prayed, and
kept the faith
    As Supreme Court rules for coach and prayer, faith leaders weigh
in: 'We rejoice'

A new Gallup poll shows that Americans’ faith in God has hit an all-time low.

And four Christian faith leaders said that a variety of factors,
including young people filling their lives with things besides God and
anxiety from coronavirus lockdowns, have contributed to the decline.

The poll showed that 81% of Americans believe in God, which is a
six-point drop from 2017 and represents the lowest percentage Gallup
has ever recorded. The biggest drop in faith in terms of age groups
was a 10% decline in 18- to 29-year-olds who say they believe in God.

Bart Barber, pastor of First Baptist Church of Farmersville in rural
East Texas and president of the Southern Baptist Convention, told Fox
News Digital that more and more people in the United States have “not
only no connection to faith congregation but also really no time in
life to stop and contemplate anything spiritual.”

“Even some of the people who identify themselves as Christians and say
they believe in God and have accepted the gospel, for a lot of them,
church and contemplation and worship have been squeezed out by the
schedule in their lives,” Barber explained.

Rev. Lawrence R. Rast Jr., president of Concordia Theological Seminary
in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and a former Lutheran pastor, told Fox News
Digital, “People are continuing to search and continuing to think
about the larger questions, but the lack of dedicated spaces and time
set aside for that leads to the chaos that we see around us
presently.”

Young people are the demographic that Catholic Bishop Robert Barron,
bishop-designate of the Diocese of Winona-Rochester and founder of
Word on Fire, “worries about the most” because they have “inherited
the attenuation of religious practice” that is prevalent in society.
The poll reported the biggest drop in faith in terms of age groups was
a 10% decline in 18- to 29-year-olds who say they believe in God.The
poll reported the biggest drop in faith, in terms of age groups, was a
10% decline in 18- to 29-year-olds who say they believe in God.Getty
Images/iStockphoto

“When I was a kid, my parents took it for granted that we’d be brought
to mass, we’d be taught the ways of prayer, we learned about the
saints. They just immersed us in that world,” Barron recalled. “Well,
when you don’t immerse people in that world, you say things like, ‘Oh,
it’s up to you, you decide what you want to do when you’re 16.’ You
lose all that. And then we’re surprised that young people are adrift
and young people have lost their sense of purpose and meaning?”

Bishop Thomas J. Bickerton, president of the Council of Bishops of The
United Methodist Church, told Fox News Digital that, in some ways, the
poll is not surprising because churches have lost multiple generations
of parishioners by not “nurturing” young people in the faith.

“We’re missing two or three generations of people who aren’t steeped
in the rhythm or the liturgy of the church. They are not involved in
the relationships in the church. They are doing other things,”
Bickerton said. “For me, the practice of my faith is what steeps my
deepened belief in God, and if you get generations that aren’t in
church practicing the rhythm of worship or practicing their faith,
there’s no surprise they are now doubting whether or not God exists.”
Start your day with all you need to know

Morning Report delivers the latest news, videos, photos and more.

The lack of relationship building and practicing of church traditions
that has contributed to the decline in the belief in God was severely
exacerbated by the coronavirus lockdowns across the United States, the
faith leaders said.

“I’ve talked to a lot of young people who say, ‘You know, all through
this COVID thing, I’ve come to doubt whether God exists or what my
relationship with God is,” Bickerton said, adding that people
approaching him with questions about struggling to keep their faith is
an “everyday occurrence.”

“You cannot underestimate the power of relationships,” Bickerton
added. “So I think isolation has bred that sense of doubt.”

Barber recounted a situation during COVID lockdowns that “moved the
needle” for him when a grandmother in his congregation urged him to
reopen the sanctuary because her son was struggling with depression
after losing his father and was in a “bad place” mentally and
emotionally without access to worship.

“COVID, when you throw that in, people are even more isolated and
people are also removed from church,” Barber said. “COVID accelerated
these things that were already trends before that.”

A study conducted by conservative think tank Just Facts concluded that
stress and anxiety caused by coronavirus lockdowns will destroy seven
times more years of life than lockdowns saved, and several studies
have shown that alcoholism, drug use and suicides noticeably increased
during the pandemic.

“You see it on almost every level where if there is not the
opportunity for engagement with the community or if there’s a
purposeful rejection of engagement with the community. Whichever form
that might take, folks try and fill that void in some way or another,”
Rast said. “So higher instances of self-harm, higher instances of
suicide, real issues with mental well-being that people are facing,
and how do you address those? Well, oftentimes folks self-medicate,
and so we’ve seen a real increase in that regard as well.”
Christian church leaders said that a variety of factors, including
young people filling their lives with things besides God and anxiety,
is the reason behind the drop.Christian church leaders said that a
variety of factors, including young people filling their lives with
things besides God and anxiety, are reasons behind the drop.Getty
Images

Barron said that the pandemic “had a huge impact,” including a “very
negative impact on young people” that he has seen “close-up.”

“The religious practice, prayer, going to mass, going to a religious
service, as that fades away, the convictions are going to fade away,”
Barron said. “They have to be embodied, they have to be practiced.”

Multiple faith leaders who spoke with Fox News Digital placed some
blame for the declining belief in God in the United States on churches
themselves.

Barron told Fox News Digital that churches deserve some blame because
they have stopped “challenging” young people.

“We try to make religion too user-friendly,” Barron said. “We try to
make it too accommodating to the culture. No. We speak out of the
ancient tradition, which has been initiating people into the mystery
of life and path and meaning for millennia.

“And if we just adopt the hand-wringing stance and apologetics then
we’re just caving into the culture, and young people are going to say,
‘The heck with you,’ and they’re going to find it uncompelling and
uninteresting. Stop dumbing down the faith.”
While the Gallup poll is cause for concern among church leaders, some
of the faith leaders showed optimism for the future.While the Gallup
poll is cause for concern among church leaders, some of the faith
leaders showed optimism for the future.Getty Images/iStockphoto

Rast told Fox News Digital he believes various scandals in churches
around the country have contributed to people drifting away from their
faith.

“I think that has given any number of people a permission to
themselves to say, ‘If this is what the church is all about, if this
is what Christianity is all about, if this is what belief in God
results in, then who needs it?’”

Bickerton said young people in the church have become disillusioned by
not seeing what they hear in church on Sunday being practiced on
Monday.

“I think replacing God with other things is definite, but I also
believe the church is at fault at that point because the younger
generation is pretty vocal about saying they’ve grown weary of what
they hear on Sunday is not what they experience on Monday from the
people who sit in the pew,” Bickerton explained.

“The living out of our faith is not just a journey in a worship
service, it’s an encounter in the world. And the younger generation
wants to see how faith is lived out in the culture. And when it’s not,
when there’s inconsistency from the people in the church. It casts a
great deal of doubt within them about, ‘Does this faith really
matter?’”

While the Gallup poll is cause for concern among church leaders, some
of the faith leaders who spoke to Fox News Digital expressed optimism
for the future, including Rast. He pointed out that the percentage of
people who believe in God in the United States is still higher than
polling shows in European countries.

“When you take the longer view, the truly remarkable thing is that,
even with the recent Gallup poll indicating just over 80% of Americans
believe in God, that’s really quite a striking number comparatively
speaking to the rest of Western culture.”

Barber explained that his optimism for the future comes from his
studying of history and his belief that atheism does not provide the
answers that people who leave the faith are looking for.

“There have been a whole lot of times in the history of Western
civilization where societies have been disillusioned by the idea of
religion in general or Christianity in specific and have turned away
from the idea of God or from the practice of a faith saw in their
parents or grandparents by deciding to choose differently for
themselves,” Barber said.

“But I’m encouraged by the fact that, after times like that,
repeatedly, over and over again, in cycles of history, people have
been growing disillusioned with life without God because there are
profound questions in life for which atheism just doesn’t provide good
answers.

“So I remain optimistic,” Barber added. “I’m a long-term optimist and
a short-term realist about the situation with regard to people and
their faith in the United States right now.”
Filed under

    Coronavirus
    god
    polls
    religion
    7/3/22