Thursday, July 06, 2006

America's vanishing Protestant majority

Protestants will no longer be the majority group in the US before this decade is out, and they might be in the minority already (depending on who you count as Protestant) according to a major recent study.

This has always been a nation populated by men women and children of primarily Northern European extraction and Protestant cultural-religious background. Catholic and other non-Protestant immigration, secularization, and the undermining of the Protestant identity in the past decades have changed this, to the point where barely half the American population identifies as Protestant. It was at some time in the mid-late 1990s that the USA lost its white-Protestant majority for the first time ever. Having been in decline percentage-wise for decades, white-Protestants finally slipped down to 49.999999% on one otherwise uneventful day in the 90s. Now in mid-2000s it is no longer just white-Protestants but all Protestants who are in the minority, or soon will be.

The very character of this country is at risk. We are at risk of being subsumed and eventually obliterated. Here is part of an excellent article written by the Reverend Albert Mohler dealing with this dispossesion of Protestant America:
Writing in 1927, French observer Andre Siegfried described Protestantism as America's "only national religion." To miss this, Siegfried advised, is "to view the country from a false angle." Now, less than a century later, a major research report provides proof that Protestantism no longer represents a clear majority of Americans. Researchers Tom W. Smith and Seokho Kim of the National Opinion Research Center [NORC] at the University of Chicago have released "The Vanishing Protestant Majority," a report documenting the declining membership of Protestant churches in the nation. The decline of American Protestantism will come as a shock to many observers
....
According to the NORC study, Americans identifying themselves as "Protestant" fell from 63 percent to 52 percent between 1993 and 2002--a massive decline in less than one decade. According to the University of Chicago press release, the percentage of Americans identifying themselves as Protestant "has been falling and will likely fall below 50 percent by mid-decade and may be there already."
Article originally published on AlbertMohler.com

Link to the NORC study (pdf)
The cause of the decline of Protestantism? Immigration, Secularization, and an undermining of the Protestant identity, along with the ongoing entrenchement of a kind of radical leftism that has nothing to do with politics (what has been called "cultural marxism"), which is very insidious because it prevents people from mounting any serious viable opposition to their own dispossession and it morally disarms people from stopping the aforementioned. (note: The Catholics/Catholic Church in the USA are big partakers of the doctrine of cultural marxism against white-Protestants.)

The root cause of all of these factors, one or way another, directly or indirectly, has been the Roman Catholic Church. So if we cut out the "middle man", the cause of our problems is the Vatican and its thousands of divisions that are attacking America daily, many of which have inflitrated our borders and are attacking from the inside. (Stalin was wrong, the Pope does have divisions, though they dont carry guns, usually.)

Rev. Mohler reaches the same conclusions (they are obvious to anyone who has eyes to see). He points, rightly, to Catholic-backed immigration as the main driving force behind the decline of Protestantism. He points out that virtually none of the immigrants to America today are Protestants. The vast majority of immigration today is from Roman Catholic sources, with only a negligible amount (essentially zero) from white-Protestant sources. Secondly Mohler points to the "theological liberalism" of many of the ecumenical Protestant churches today, which "has eroded the entire system of Christian doctrine, leading to the evaporation of faith and the secularization of those churches. Once the churches have been thoroughly secularized, what value remains in church membership and denominational identification?". What's that you say? Surely this one can't be blamed on the Catholics, this is a fault of those more liberal Protestant churches? Wrong. The ecumenical "movement" is a Roman Catholic plot from beginning to end, a scheme by the Vatican to subvert the Protestant churches of this world and then reassert papal authority over these "heretics".

So in short, the reason for Protestantism's decline in America is The sinister influence of the Catholic Church, on many fronts, in many forms and fashions, sometimes subtle and hidden, other times overt and blatant, but always present, never abating, not till Rome conquers this country. That is Rome's goal, and that is the real issue here.

5 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

As this is not apparent in the evidence you cite from Rev. Mohler or Andre Siegfried, might I ask what is the importance of white-Protestantism as opposed to Protestantism?

July 09, 2006 6:46 PM  
Blogger Protestant said...

Anonymous, the importance of white-Protestantism is that this has always been a nation populated by folks of generally Northern European ancestry and who identify with the Protestant religion(s) culturally and religiously. This is the "American identity". (Some people nihilistically claim that there is no American identity, and that to say such a thing as I said above is hateful, bigoted, racist, on the par with Hitler, and other absurdities. These people claim that anyone and everyone under the sun can and should come to America and be American.)

To neglect or downplay the Protestant aspect of the aforementioned American identity, or to neglect or downplay the "generally Northern European" aspect of this identity, is a mistake. Both are important. You cannot take one without the other, be it the "white" aspect of the identity or the Protestant aspect of the identity. It would not be America if it was populated by Central American mestizo Protestants, and it would not be America if it was populated by white muslims.

I hope this answers your question.

July 17, 2006 8:54 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Those are good points. But, just as you say (approx.) that an America that is not northern European AND Protestant would not really be America, it would also seem reasonable to say, for example, that a France that is not white and Catholic would not really be France. So in theory (as Protestantism is a religion which hopes to encompass the world, I assume), you wish ill upon other national identities--no?

July 19, 2006 3:57 PM  
Blogger Protestant said...

I cant say that I would shed a tear if Catholicism were to fall in France! (the question is "fall to be supplanted by what", if it's non-european-origin moslems, which seems to be the road theyre heading down, well I sure dont want that.)

Another answer to your query is to pose another question: Were people who wanted to see communism fall in Russia "wishing ill upon the Russian identity"?

As an aside, if Protestantism has any historical claim to any country that is Catholic today, it's France. There was a solid and strong Protestant identity in France since the earliest days of the Reformation, and even far earlier in fact (the Waldensians). One in six French was a Huguenot during the 1500s-1600s, and they are said to have constituted up to 25% of the population at their peak. Had there been a weaker monarchy or no real central monarchy as in Germany, or a pro-Protestant monarchy as in England, Holland, & Scandinavia, you mightve seen a a largely Protestant France. But instead you had a bitterly anti-Protestant monarchy (except Henry IV, who, for having granted rights to Protestants was murdered by the Jesuits). The monarchy persecuted the protestants tremendously, ran them out of the country, even killed thousands of them outright. When Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes the bulk of the remainder left for Protestant nations. End result: the once solidly one-in-six Protestant France (approaching one-in-four at their peak), is today one-in-fifty Protestant (and those being largely German Lutherans in Alsace-Lorraine)

August 01, 2006 4:03 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thank God that France remained Catholic.

February 03, 2008 3:33 PM  

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