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Today's top five

1.Ron Luce makes The New York Times front page
Just as Jesus Camp and Righteous are provoking fear nationwide that a bunch of freaky theocrat kids are being trained to take over the country, along comes a New York Times front page story covering Ron Luce and his claim that "Christianity in America won't survive another decade." (Actually, that quote doesn't appear in the Times, but it's the bold print in Luce's ads, which bear the National Association of Evangelicals' imprimatur. Haven't seen the ads? Subscribe to CT, you naughty freeloader.)

"I'm looking at the data," Luce tells the paper, "and we've become post-Christian America, like post-Christian Europe. We've been working as hard as we know how to work — everyone in youth ministry is working hard — but we're losing."

Luce's "data" is his much quoted claim that only 4 percent of teenagers will be "Bible-believing Christians" (or, in his ads, "evangelical believers") as adults. The Times rightly calls the claim, first promoted by Barna Research, "highly suspect" and notes that it has been questioned by Group magazine and others. Among them, Christian Smith, whose landmark book Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers won a Christianity Todaybook award this year.

"A lot of the goals [of the new evangelical youth campaign] I'm very supportive of," Smith said, "but it just kills me that it's framed in such apocalyptic terms that couldn't possibly hold up under half a second of scrutiny. It's just self-defeating."

We wish we could hear the reaction to the article at the National Youth Workers Convention in Austin this week. But some bloggers involved in youth ministry are criticizing Luce as a fearmonger. New Testament scholar Ben Witherington isn't so sure and has his own critiques of contemporary youth ministry.

One of the more interesting observations comes from Evan Derkacz at the liberal site Alternet. He remembered the 4 percent figure from another recent context: It's the percentage of Muslims James Dobson suggested want to kill "us." The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported that Dobson told the September 20 Stand for the Family rally:

"We are at war in this country with an enemy who wants to destroy us," he said. He stressed that only a small minority of Muslims believe that their faith justifies violence, "but let's say 4 percent of Muslims want to kill us. … That's 48 million people who want to bring us to our knees."

"To hear the Religious Right properly, then," Derkacz said, taking a bit of license, "we're headed for a battle in which 4 percent of 'Bible-believing' Christians do battle with 4 percent of murderous Muslims. Sounds like a fair fight."

Anyway, Christianity Today thinks Christianity in America will survive another decade. We remember hearing something about the gates of hell not prevailing something something. We're so confident, in fact, that we asked a bunch of people about the next 50 years of youth ministry. Interestingly enough, Luce was among those we talked to for that piece, and while he was in alarmist mode, he still figured that American youth ministry would be around in a half century.

2.Evangelicals still like GOP, but no longer like like GOP
Let's keep playing with that 4 percent number for a second. The Washington Post notes today that a poll from the left-leaning People for the American Way Foundation found that support for Democrats is up 4 percentage points among frequent churchgoers. That, the Post suggests, is not a very high number, especially when you consider that the same poll found support for Republicans down 14 percentage points. As Michael Cromartie told the paper, "Erosion for evangelicals doesn't necessarily lead to Democratic voting. It leads to nonvoting."

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October (Web-only) 2006, Vol. 50