Remember when the best-selling book Listening to Prozac came out almost 20 years ago?

Now Americans aren't just reading about Prozac. They are taking it and other antidepressants (Celexa, Effexor, Paxil, Zoloft, to name just a few) in astounding numbers.

According to a report released yesterday by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), the rate of antidepressant use in this country among teens and adults (people ages 12 and older) increased by almost 400% between 1988–1994 and 2005–2008.

The federal government's health statisticians figure that about one in every 10 Americans takes an antidepressant. And by their reckoning, antidepressants were the third most common prescription medication taken by Americans in 2005–2008, the latest period during which the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) collected data on prescription drug use.

In her September 27th Daily Beast column, Kirsten Powers drew attention to the woeful silence of the American church in the face of a global epidemic of Christian persecution. She offered a litany of examples of Christian persecution including the recent oppression of Syrian Christians who've suffered at the hands of rebel extremists and the two-thirds of Christians who have left Iraq in order to survive.

"Christians in the Middle East and Africa are being slaughtered, tortured, raped, kidnapped, beheaded, and forced to flee the birthplace of Christianity," she wrote. "One would think the horror might be consuming the pulpits and pews of American churches. Not so. The silence has been nearly deafening."

Powers deftly exposes the what—American Christians' failure to advocate for their brothers and sisters around the world—but her column begs the question of why. Namely, why aren't Western Jesus-followers more aware or engaged on this issue. As I see it, there are at least three reasons:

1) The Media

I am not one who believes there is a concerted, cryptic liberal bias in the media. Firstly, I nurture no illusions that there is such a thing as "unbiased news". (A person cannot be completely divorced from their experiences or worldview, so the goal in journalism is not to eliminate bias but rather to minimize it.) And secondly, I have come to know too many journalists, columnists and reporters at too many outlets who are genuine in their attempt to deliver an accurate picture of reality to their readers. "Bias" is often what we call a message that doesn't square with our imaginations of the way the world is or should be.

And yet, I do think Christian persecution is under-reported by the media in general. Paul Marshall of the Hudson Institute says that persecution, if you include discrimination, is affecting approximately 600 to 700 million Christians globally. According to a 2011 Pew Forum study, Christianity is the most persecuted religion in the world with followers of the faith being actively harassed in 130 countries.

To borrow and adapt a phrase from the late Mark Twain, reports of the Church's death have been greatly exaggerated.

Christianity Today recently ran an article by Pastor Ed Stetzer, the president of LifeWay Research, that drives home this point. In "The State of the Church In America: Hint: It's Not Dying," Stetzer corrects this false narrative that the Evangelical Church is on an irreversible downward trajectory.

In doing so, he makes an important distinction – and I'll quote Stetzer here: "Christianity is represented by people who live for Christ, not check 'Christian' on a survey form."

As he fleshes out this idea, Stetzer separates the 75 percent of Americans who identify with one of three categories – those who say they are Christian because of their family history or heritage; those who do nothing more than attend church every now and then; and, finally, those who acknowledge a personal relationship with Jesus and have experienced a real life-change.

That last group – the "Convictional Christians," as Stetzer names them – make up about a third of that 75 percent of self-identified Christians. That number has remained steady throughout the years – it's the other categories that are seeing a downward trend.