Tag Archives: pewresearchcenter

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The Broadside | Christianity’s Slide Into Obscurity Has Bottomed Out—For Now

Some 62 percent of U.S. adults currently describe themselves as Christians.

The decline in the number of Americans who identify as Christian appears to be slowing down after years of losses, according to a Pew Research Center survey published Wednesday.

The expansive Religious Landscape Study (RLS) study found the number of people in the U.S. who identify as Christian has been stable since 2019. It also discovered that the number of those who are unaffiliated with a religion, after years of uptick, has plateaued.

Around 62 percent of Americans identified as Christians. Some 40 percent were Protestant, 19 percent were Catholic, and 3 percent identified with other Christian groups, according to the survey.

The share of Americans who identify as Christians has been hovering in the 60s from 2019 to 2024. In 2023, it was 63 percent, down from 78 percent in 2007.

That the slide has stopped is good news but is tempered by the fact that only 62 percent of Americans identify themselves as Christians. We were at 78 percent less than twenty years ago.

That’s a steep drop.

Nearly 3 in 10 Americans, 29 percent, were religiously unaffiliated. Among those, 5 percent were atheist, 6 percent were agnostic and the other 19 percent said they identify as “nothing in particular,” Pew found. 

Approximately 7 percent of the U.S. population is non-Christian but religious: 2 percent were Jewish, while Muslim, Hindu or Buddhist were each at 1 percent, according to the poll. 

What’s fascinating is that our liberal or “progressive” friends, who support all manner of sexual deviancy, have become increasingly irreligious.

Researchers also noted that 37 percent of self-described liberals identified with Christianity, a 25-point drop from 2007 when it was 62 percent. Just more than half of liberals, 51 percent, said they have no religion, a 24-point jump from 2007’s 27 percent.

The Epoch Times adds:

Young adults also presented as far less religious than those of older generations—a fact that the study’s researchers noted could portend an eventual decline.

“It is inevitable that older generations will decline in size as their members gradually die,” the researchers wrote in their report. “We also know that the younger cohorts succeeding them are much less religious.

“This means that, for lasting stability to take hold in the U.S. religious landscape, something would need to change.”

That change could be on the horizon.

In the weeks since President Donald Trump took office, he has taken several steps to put Christianity front and center, from creating a new White House Faith Office led by Pastor Paula White-Cain to establishing a Justice Department task force to root out anti-Christian bias.

He has also vowed to create a Presidential Commission on Religious Liberty.

At the National Prayer Breakfast on Feb. 6, Trump lamented the decline of faith in the United States and called on the nation to “bring God back” into its life.

“We have to bring religion back,” he told lawmakers on Capitol Hill. “We have to bring it back much stronger. It’s one of the biggest problems that we’ve had over the last fairly long period of time.”

I’m not sure if Trump understands that Christianity is not a “religion,” which is a secular way of describing it. A religion is marked by rules and regulations; Christianity is about a personal relationship with God. Yes, we engage in worship and acts of service and read our bibles and pray, but those are expressions of gratitude and obedience, not a list of activities that we check off to keep God happy or to stay in His good graces.

Trump’s instincts are right, even though his call to “bring religion back much stronger” isn’t quite what we need. What we need is to humble ourselves and repent of our corporate sin, then encourage the act of making disciples, which is the way the Church has grown of the centuries.

We were once considered a Christian nation, founded on Judeo-Christian principles. Trump can’t “make” America Christian again, but he can call attention to our need for God.

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Daily Broadside | Like Magic: Close the Border to Illegals and Presto! The Backlog Goes Away Too!

Daily Verse | Jeremiah 30:6
Ask and see: Can a man bear children?
Then why do I see every strong man with his hands on his stomach like a woman in labor, every face turned deathly pale?

It’s Tuesday my friends. Most people don’t know that my alter ego is a Scottish ax juggler who writes children’s books.

An article published on FoxNews.com makes a comparison between processing border jumpers in the southern U.S. versus the Afghan nationals who want to emirate to the U.S.

The Biden administration has moved to quickly process migrants streaming across the southern border but has not been able to speed up the processing times for Afghan interpreters and other allies who assisted in America’s 20-year war effort.

The White House announced last month that it will speed up asylum claim processing for migrants at the southern border, claiming in a release that they are seeking to “fair, orderly and humane” immigration system after the Trump administration policies “unjustly prevent individuals from obtaining asylum.”

The new policy grants asylum officers full authority to rule on asylum cases, allowing migrants to bypass the federal immigration courts that often are backlogged and have long wait times.

So we’re now streamlining the service to make faster decisions and cutting out the pesky federal immigration court system that are often “backlogged.” Hey, I have an idea! How about we REDUCE THE NUMBER OF PEOPLE ALLOWED IN THE COUNTRY FROM THESE THIRD-WORLD COUNTRIES? Wouldn’t that also “speed up processing times”?

If you go to the Department of Homeland Security’s website (dhs.gov), you can find the full text of the proposal: DHS and DOJ Publish Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to Make Asylum Process More Efficient and Ensure Fairness.

The title is a dead giveaway that this is a woke proposal with the words, “Ensure Fairness.” Fairness? “Fairness” to whom, exactly? The people who legally enter the country legitimately looking for asylum, or the invasion over the southern border of third-world foreigners who come from who-knows-where to the land of plenty to live on handouts and displace the native population?

Population displacement is the goal, friends. Democrats will accuse me and you of “racism” and “xenophobia” and “hate” if you oppose their reckless open borders policies, which is rich coming from the loons running the country formerly known as America. The current administration outright lies when they write in their Blueprint for a Fair, Orderly and Humane Immigration System that they are “reckoning with the prior Administration’s cruel and reckless immigration policies, which exacerbated long-standing challenges and failed to securely manage our border.”

Under Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, anyone wanting to be granted asylum in the U.S. had to wait in Mexico — not in the United States — for their claim to be adjudicated. That relieved the pressure of more people pouring into our country and disappearing into the interior, never to keep their court date.

But Resident Biden and his sidekick Kamala are letting anyone in and then transporting them around the country to be deposited, sometimes in the middle of the night, as I’ve written about previously.

So I’m not sure how they can claim to be doing a better job than Trump when the Pew Research Center reports that Migrant encounters at U.S.-Mexico border are at a 21-year high. I believe Trump was president for some portion of the last 21 years.

The U.S. Border Patrol reported nearly 200,000 encounters with migrants along the U.S.-Mexico border in July, the highest monthly total in more than two decades.

The number of monthly encounters had fallen to 16,182 in April 2020, shortly after the coronavirus outbreak forced the closure of the southwestern border and slowed migration across much of the world. But migrant encounters have climbed sharply since then, reaching 199,777 in July, according to the latest data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the federal agency that encompasses the Border Patrol.

The July figure is the highest monthly total since March 2000 and far surpasses the peak during the last major wave of migration at the U.S.-Mexico border, which occurred in May 2019.

Our so-called leaders talk as though every citizen of the world has a right to apply for asylum here. Sure, everyone has that action available to them, I suppose. But we also have the right to shut off the spigot when we have a backlog and long wait times.

There is no “law” that says we must always and forever hold our doors open to anyone who decides they’re coming here. We Americans have the right and the duty to protect our borders, our citizens, our economy, and our way of life. No one and no group of people have the right to just let themselves in and settle down.

That’s not the way it’s supposed to work, but that’s how the junior commies have decided it will work. They are invested in flooding our nation with future Democrat voters to keep themselves in power, and they don’t care if they have to turn our country into a third-world sh*thole to do it.

Really, they don’t.

It’s past time we begin to think about kicking the Democrat commies out and taking control of our borders for good.