Christianity’s Imminent Downfall
As John Lennon once said, “Christianity will go. It will
vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue with that; I’m right, and I will be proved
right.” Shortly after John made this bold and unpopular declaration in the
1960s, society began to reveal the truth in his words. Since 1990, the
percentage of Christians comprising the
The Numbers
The
What factors could account
for the sudden drop in Christian percentages and the increased observance of
secular views? If anything, it seems that the percentage of Christians
would be rising in
There
are also millions of instances where individuals switch from one religion to
another. Polls have shown that the most common reason for such changes is the
wish of the partner in a relationship. In other words, people are switching religions to please
someone else, not God. Without a doubt, there are a large number of people
sitting in church every Sunday who couldn’t care less
about the preacher’s message, yet the church unknowingly counts them in their
Christian census. On the other hand, how often would Christians renounce their
faith if an atheist or agnostic partner made a similar request? Consequently, it’s far more likely that a person will switch into a religion to please someone than
the other way around. This point allows us to assume that the number of
non-religious individuals joining an organized belief artificially inflates the
percentage of Christians in America above its already dwindling share.
To
explain this recent positive phenomenon, I propose that an increase in
enlightened thinking about scientific discoveries contradicting the Bible and
an increasingly global culture have given people a more accurate view of the
world as it truly exists. The Internet, for example, has been instrumental in distributing
harsh critiques of the work undertaken by Christian authors. Regardless of the
cause, one fact is certain: children are no longer remaining with their
parents’ Christian religion, as they once were, just because cues in their
environment told them that the belief system is true. Some undetermined factor
has obviously begun working in America to free people from the bondage of this
blatantly false religion. Once a person finally sees the ancient religious myths from an
impartial perspective, they’re highly unlikely to
return to the previously sacred belief system.
Who Will Be Among The Millions This Year?
I believe that the decision to denounce
the faith and leave the comfortable confines of Christianity has a strong
correlation with a combination of two factors: high levels of intelligence and
low levels of exposure. From my anecdotal observations, I’ve
noticed that individuals who leave Christianity are either fairly intelligent
or received relatively less conditioning from their parents. Once I made this
discovery, I noticed that those who had both of the aforementioned qualities
left at an exceedingly early age, while those who had only one quality left the
religion in their late teens or early adulthood. Christians probably won’t deny that a strong influence persuades a person to
remain active in church. Likewise, it’s only logical
to conclude that a lack of the same influence increases the chances a person
will leave the faith. The intelligence element to my hypothesis, on the other
hand, is surely insulting and certainly difficult for Christians to swallow.
Even so, I strongly feel that a line exists where a certain level of
intelligence and a certain level of influence reach equilibrium.
As I just mentioned, an intelligent person
with a low level of Christian influence has the best chance of leaving the
religion at a young age, whereas an unintelligent person with a high level of
influence is almost certain to remain within the church for life. The
interesting scenario created with this hypothesis is that an intelligent person
with a high level of influence would have two competitive forces at work. One
would seemingly free the individual from bunk religious thought while the other
would presumably fight to keep the individual within the faith. Since there are
more people who stay within the church than those who leave, we can reasonably
assume that the influence is a stronger factor than the intelligence.
Similarly, an unintelligent person with a low level of influence has no competitive
internal forces at work. Consequently, this individual wouldn’t
develop groundbreaking theories on the existence of God or have external
influences pressuring them to believe one way or another.
Weeks after I thought I had written the
final draft of this book, I came upon a wealth of experiments collected by
Burnham Beckwith and published in the Spring 1986
issue of Free Inquiry that
effectively demonstrated parts of my hypothesis. Nearly three-fourths of all
studies since the 1920s that investigated a correlation between intelligence
and religious affiliation have found that the proportion of atheists, agnostic
individuals, and deists increases dramatically as you move up the scale in
school grades, exam scores, and IQ tests. The remaining fourth of the studies
show no correlation; zero reviews suggested that people in organized religions
are more intelligent than those with secular beliefs.
The apparent conclusion to draw from the data is that people who are more
intelligent tend to disbelieve religious superstitions.
Additional recent polls, such as the
Harris 2003, suggest that individuals who attend college, live in regions of
the country where standardized test scores are higher, or belong to the male
gender are less likely to believe in the Christian god. (A side note
explanation for those of you getting in a huff: Men comprise more than 50% of
the extremely intelligent and extremely unintelligent ends of the spectrum. In
other words, while the average man and woman are of
equal intelligence, men are more likely to be extremely
intelligent/unintelligent and less likely to have normal intelligence. Because
I suppose that only those near the highly intelligent extreme of the spectrum
have an increased chance of escaping the religion, this may explain why the
data are skewed toward men.)
We Will
Overcome
As we’ve recently witnessed millions of people becoming more
aware of their surroundings by breaking the restraints of the conditioning
commonly associated with religion, the percentage of those affiliating
themselves with Christianity is currently dropping at a tremendous rate within
the