{"id":10142,"date":"2017-01-15T08:53:58","date_gmt":"2017-01-15T16:53:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hoshanarabbah.org\/blog\/?p=10142"},"modified":"2017-01-15T08:53:58","modified_gmt":"2017-01-15T16:53:58","slug":"christianity-in-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hoshanarabbah.org\/blog\/2017\/01\/15\/christianity-in-america\/","title":{"rendered":"How Christianity in America Changed During Obama’s Presidency"},"content":{"rendered":"
From\u00a0http:\/\/www.christianpost.com\/news\/how-christianity-in-america-changed-during-obamas-presidency-pew-report-172970\/<\/a><\/p>\n

How Christianity in America Changed During Obama’s Presidency: Pew Report<\/h1>\n
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BY\u00a0BRANDON SHOWALTER<\/a>\u00a0,\u00a0CP REPORTER<\/div>\n

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A new report released this week outlines the changes in American society during President Obama’s eight years in office; the number of Christians in the United States has dropped significantly, the statistics show, but others argue there’s more to the story.<\/p>\n
image: http:\/\/d.christianpost.com\/full\/102405\/590-436\/u-s-president-barack-obama.jpg<\/p>\n

(Photo: Reuters\/Jonathan Ernst)<\/span>U.S. President Barack Obama arrives to deliver his farewell address in Chicago, Illinois, January 10, 2017.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

“When it comes to the nation’s religious identity, the biggest trend during Obama’s presidency is the rise of those who claim no religion at all,” according to a\u00a0report\u00a0released on Wednesday titled “How America Changed During Barack Obama’s Presidency<\/a>” from the Pew Research Center. When Obama took office in 2008, approximately 16 percent of Americans identified as either atheist, agnostic, or “nothing in particular.” As Obama leaves office, that number has increased to a quarter of the population.<\/p>\n

“To me, the Pew data is very important but it’s not the only data,” said John S. Dickerson, author of the 2013 book\u00a0The Great Evangelical Recession<\/a><\/em>, in an interview with The Christian Post on Friday. “Because there is some conflation between ‘born again’ and ‘evangelical’ and the Pew data does not extricate between the two.”<\/p>\n

“But when it comes to the long-term trajectories [for evangelicals], I don’t see anything that has changed,” he added.<\/p>\n

Dickerson’s book contends that if you extricate born again and evangelical and actually count the number of devoted evangelicals, they amount to approximately 8 to 10 percent of the population.<\/p>\n

“In 2013, when I first released the national data about evangelical Christianity declining, and at that time some prominent leaders said the trends could not be true. But the data never lies, and the last five years have sadly demonstrated what the data suggested back in 2013 \u2014 that Millennials are embracing agnosticism and increasingly rejecting Biblical Christianity,” Dickerson noted.<\/p>\n

The Pew report states: “Christians, meanwhile, have fallen from 78 percent to 71 percent of the U.S. adult population, owing mainly to modest declines in the share of adults who identify with Mainline Protestantism and Catholicism. The share of Americans identifying with evangelical Protestantism, historically black Protestant denominations and other smaller Christian groups, by contrast, have remained fairly stable.”<\/p>\n

Simultaneously, however, Americans who identify with a particular faith are as devout as they have ever been and by some accounts even more so.<\/p>\n

Though the full “How America Changed” report was released this week, the findings on religious identification were harvested from Pew’s 2015\u00a0America’s Changing Religious Landscape Survey<\/a>. Media outlets skewed the numbers and created a false narrative at the time, according to notable\u00a0scholars<\/a>\u00a0from Baylor University. The Jan. 11 Pew report also addressed a range of cultural phenomena and political divisions, such as the widespread use of social media, distrust in government, and America’s place in the world.<\/p>\n

CP asked Dickerson to explain how Obama’s administration has affected American evangelical Christianity.<\/p>\n