Albert Mohler (0:04)

It's Thursday, March 27, 2025. I'm Albert Moeller, and this is the Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview. The Pew Research center is out with a big report on switching in religion. Now, it's a global report, at least inclusive of much of the world. But of course, we're most interested in what's happening here in the United States. The headline from the Pew center itself says this quote, around the world, many people are leaving their childhood religions. The next subhead surveys in 36 countries find that Christianity and Buddhism have the biggest losses from religious switching. All right, as we as Christians are considering this, we understand that this really isn't big news. But it is interesting. It is of material interest because we are looking at individuals understanding that every single one of those lives is important to us. We are looking at trends. And we understand that this trend is not something that just developed. It's not something that just arrived on the horizon, just showed up on the screen. This has been around for a long time. And thus, when you look at the category of religious switching here, it's defined as a change between the religious group in which a person says they were raised during their childhood and their religious identity now in adulthood. We shouldn't be at all surprised that a lot of switching is going on. And in particular, in a country like the United States and a society on both sides of the Atlantic, in the English speaking world, in the larger American and European worlds, we understand that the process of secularization is now quite advanced. It's been going on now for more than a couple of generations. It has been accelerating because this is how social trends work. But we're also looking at two interesting things. The Pew center comes back and tells us the two religions that are suffering the most from disaffiliation. That is, persons who said they were raised in, say, a Christian home and they were raised in a Christian identity, but now they have disaffiliated from Christianity. The fact that it's Christianity and Buddhism in respective places in terms of concentration around the globe, the fact that those two are singled out, that also tells us something, but it's not exactly the same thing. So let's think about what we're talking about here. Number one, we're most interested in Christianity. No apology for that. We are most interested in the headline in which we are told that Christianity is a standout in this report because of disaffiliation. Now, don't hit the panic button, but this is important. For one thing, we are told that most persons still maintain an affiliation with the religion of their childhood. So that's not really a surprise. That's not news. But it becomes very interesting in a culture in which you have this accelerated secularization going on. And thus where you find the secularization advancing fast, you're going to find the disaffiliation happening at the same time. And it's sort of just the biblical principle, as you reap, so shall you sow. And as this culture has been basically planting or seeding secularization, the fruit of that is now becoming more and more apparent. But before we look at any numbers here, let's just step back and ask ourselves as Christians, how we're supposed to look at this. Number one, we understand that this kind of survey can tell us something, but only so much. Or you can look at it another way. This isn't a comprehensive picture. It doesn't tell us everything, but it does tell us something we need to know. So we put it in its proper perspective and we come to understand this isn't new, it is just newly accelerating. Now this is where we need to bring in a couple of important categories in our thinking. One of them is, first of all the word we've been using, secularization, and we tend to use it so often, every once in a while we ought to define it. Secularization is basically the process whereby societies shift in terms of general worldview from a more religious to a less religious stance, a lesser religious worldview. And thus, when you're talking about the United States, you're talking about overwhelmingly Christian identity, overwhelmingly Christian worldview. So if secularization is going to take place place, it's going to be at the expense of Christianity, because just by the matter of math, it's going to have to turn out that way. And it is turning out that way. And thus, here's something we have been watching for decades now. When you look at the high water mark of church membership in Christian churches in the United States, you go back to the mid-1950s. It has been downhill from then. Now, again, just do the math. You're talking about a half century or more. Now you're talking about, Indeed more than 60 years of a rather constant decline. But even as it's been constant, it's been in fits and starts, which is to say there have been moments of acceleration. One of those accelerants was the 1960s. And you understand what was going on in the larger society. And I think it makes sense that when you look at the social liberalism that was becoming more apparent then, that could only happen after there had been some considerable secularization. By some measures, church attendance fell off by at least 10%, maybe as much as 15%, just in that period of the 1950s, most importantly, the late 1950s to the mid-1960s. And then, at least statistically, there was a slowing of the trend and even some recovery when it came to church attendance, especially in the 1970s and the 1980s, even going into the 1990s. You had sociologists of religion, people who look at these questions very carefully in terms of statistics. They were asking openly if the United States was the exceptional nation. Maybe other Western nations, other advanced industrial nations, were secularizing. Maybe the United States was the exception. You had someone with the stature of Peter Berger, the most influential sociologist, looking at these questions. Certainly in the second half of the 20th century, he actually wrote an article basically rescinding his theory of secularization. Not that it wasn't taking place, but he said it's not happening as had been predicted in the United States. But now, looking in retrospect from a generation later, it turns out that it wasn't so much that it wasn't happening, but just that it wasn't happening in the United States as fast as it was elsewhere. The process from the year 2000 to about 2020, well, that's been acceleration, as a matter of fact, in many different dimensions of life. The second category we need to think about is velocity. And you know what velocity means when you're throwing a rock. You know what velocity means when you can actually calculate the speed of a pitch. But when it comes to social velocity, it's the recognition that social processes don't change at a steady rate. They tend to happen in fits and starts. And once they start, they sometimes take some time to take hold, and then they take hold rather fast. And it looks like in secularization, that's about the pattern. It took a while for it really to start taking hold in the United States, but it really has advanced. Now, as Christians, we look at that and we say, well, okay, so when you have this secularization process, where does it show up? It's not something that shows up evenly. So, for example, it shows up in a more acute way, in a far more demonstrable way in the cultural elites than it does in terms of the mainstream. It shows up disproportionately, even in terms of geography. As I often say, the closer you get to a coast, the more secular you are likely to find the society, the more rapidly secularization has advanced. You look at the American Northeast, and you compare that with the American Midwest, you can see a lot of contrast between those two regions. But it at least is arguable that the secularization theorists weren't wrong. They were just wrong on the timetable when it came to the United States. As Christians, we look at this, we also recognize that when you look at even this report with disaffiliation, people leaving Christianity, the religion of their childhood, where are they switching? Well, they're not switching to Buddhism or Islam, by and large. They're switching to just unaffiliated, they're switching to no religious affiliation. Now, of course, this is really significant for Christians, and it's most significant theologically. And it is because these are not people who have all of a sudden been converted to some other religious worldview, some other set of religious commitments. They've basically been abandoning Christian commitments, but they're in a larger sense abandoning all religious, all theological commitments. Once again, that's not unexpected. I think the truest part, the most accurate part of the secularization theory is the fact that the first thing to evaporate would be formalized cultural Christianity. And that is exactly how this game is played out. And so when you look at the religious landscape, you're not looking at the most avidly Christian parts of the culture and of the church, all of a sudden secularizing, you're looking at the least explicitly Christian, the least doctrinal, the least theological, not the thickest Christianity, but the thinnest Christianity. And we do understand that the sociologists aren't lying. I mean, honestly, theologically, experientially, pastorally. We know it is true that an awful lot of people at certain points in American history have identified with Christianity because it was to their social advantage. I myself can remember a world in which if you wanted to move to a town and start, say, a real estate business, you wanted to be a real estate agent, you needed to be a member of a church. And it needed to be something that was recognizable. If not the First Baptist Church, or if you were a Catholic, a major Catholic parish, it needed to be something recognizable, brand name, because that was rather important to establishing one as an upright citizen in an age of the dominance of cultural Christianity. But we also know that there in many cases wasn't a lot of Gospel there, there wasn't a lot of Bible there, there wasn't a lot of Christianity there. That became most true in the most elite parts of American Christianity. In terms of the mainline Protestant denominations, they started going liberal early 20th century. That had pretty much run full course by the end of the 20th century, when, quite frankly, they didn't seem to hold any beliefs that would require anyone to remain a member. With anything of major theological significance at stake, it's hard to abandon something. It's much easier to walk away from nothing. Now, a little footnote here. Many more conservative Christians, and I'm thinking especially of evangelical Christians, thought, well, we're the exception, just like America is the exception when looked at in comparison with the other advanced nations. Evangelicalism is an exception because, yeah, the liberal denominations are really suffering. They're hemorrhaging members. They're having to sell their real estate. But evangelicals are the exception, and evangelicals are the exception, but not nearly so exceptional as we thought. And it's because I think it's also true that we will be honest and admit that an awful lot of people we knew at the time, or at least we recognized the pattern at the time, were really also a part of what could only be described as cultural Christianity. Well, here's the problem with cultural Christianity. Number one, it's not authentic Christianity. So the first problem is theological. The second problem, however, is that cultural Christianity only works when the culture and the church are walking together. When the church and the culture don't walk together, then cultural Christianity disappears. Now, the liberal option there is just to accommodate, go with the flow as much as possible. Keep the Christian name, keep the cross on the steeple, keep the religious architecture even, keep some kind of liturgy, but give up on the entire complex of biblical theology. But it turns out that that's not a winning strategy just from a simple pragmatic approach. And it is, because it turns out that in a secularizing society, people don't need membership in a prestigious mainline Protestant church in order to become. Become a partner in their law firm. That just disappears as a part of the social context. As a matter of fact, it really can become something of an embarrassment. Either way, it's just easier to be unaffiliated. But let's get back to the Pew study. It is interesting that religious switching, according to this study, is really increasing in number and in speed. It's disproportionate. And it's also interesting that the nation that has experienced the most religious switching is Spain. Now, here's what's also interesting. A lot of Americans wouldn't have any reason to think about this, but Spain has been remarkable over the course of the last several decades. In the speed of its secularization going back just a matter of a few decades, Spain was not only overwhelmingly a Catholic culture, but it was a pretty thick Catholicism. It was a pretty substantial Catholicism. That's historic, of course. All you have to do is think about the Spanish Inquisition. You understand that when you're talking about Spanish Catholicism, you are talking about a very thick, high demand Catholicism. It also appeared to be dominant in such a way that it couldn't be displaced. But experience has now demonstrated that that assumption wasn't true. It has evaporated very quickly. Just take a social issue, a moral issue like abortion. There was once a time when the legalization of abortion would have been unthinkable, not to mention, say, same sex marriage would have been unthinkable in Spain. They're quite legal now, just taken as a normal part of the moral landscape. Interesting note in the report, by the way. It looks not only at the United States and Spain, but many other nations as well. One of them is Sweden and Sweden's heritage in terms of the last several centuries, overwhelmingly Protestant, but also increasingly secular. So much so that Sweden is often held up as the example of the kind of quintessential classic secular culture. 29% of adults in Sweden, according to the Pew report, say they were raised Christian, but now describe themselves religiously as atheist, agnostics or nothing in particular. I just think that's worth note. They identify as atheist, agnostics or nothing in particular. I think there's an awful lot of nothing in particular and that shows up in the details of this report. So even as the prediction of so many at the midpoint, say of the 20th century and even earlier, when you think of someone like Karl Marx, the prediction was that religious conviction would disappear, that Christianity would disappear, nothing would be left but secular space. Persons would become atheists and agnostics. It turns out that of course they're more atheists than there were in the past. At least by self designation. They're more agnostics also by self designation. But those numbers are still really small. It is very significant. The vast growth we're talking about here, the vast increase in numbers is in those who refer to themselves religiously as nothing in particular. I think that's actually a very classic demonstration of how secularization works. You don't even have to declare yourself fully secular. All you have to say is, I'm nothing in particular. Christians, by the way, detect that as very secular. Well, enough about the main trend lines here. What about the interesting, say, aberrations. Interesting, interesting facets of this research? Well, for one thing, when you look at a country like Hungary, Hungary is in some ways, you could say, the reversal of Spain. It's the Mirror image of Spain. Spain, you have this shift from Catholicism to nothing in particular. Vast numbers. We're talking about millions of people now. And you can see the effect in the politics on the ground issues like abortion, same sex marriage and all the rest. But when you come to a country like Hungary, it actually is the exception because at least according to Pew, for every one person who disaffiliates from Christianity in Hungary towards nothing in particular, two, nothing in particulars are identifying as Christians or identifying with organized religion. Isn't that really interesting? So you're looking at countries who say, well, there's Spain, very liberal, increasingly liberal, increasingly secular. It looks like that's unchangeable. But when you look at Hungary, it's not the same thing at all. And of course, Hungary is an exception in other ways. It's an exception politically, and it's the exception that it was also a part of the Soviet orbit during the Cold War and the age of Soviet domination. And it is really interesting because moral conservatism is gaining in Hungary rather than losing ground. It is an exception in this case. That's why a lot of moral conservatives and Christian conservatives in the United States are very interested to look at Hungary as a counterexample. And part of this is national leadership. Another part of it is, of course, national culture. But the politics will align with the culture. And that's pretty much what has been happening in Hungary. By the way, big headlines in Hungary about the fact that under the leadership of Prime Minister Viktor Orban, you have a cancellation, at least of most of the public dimension, of pride celebrations there in Hungary. And of course, the international LGBTQ community is absolutely up in arms, by the way. Another little interesting footnote here. Watch the United States Department of State, in terms of this kind of question, I'm not sure you're going to hear anything, but that is the point. During the Biden administration and the Obama administration, but particularly during the Biden administration, the U.S. department of State put itself on the line, leveraging American power to try to coerce countries like Hungary to openly allow and to celebrate pride events and all the rest. So elections have consequences. And here's what is absolutely off the screen of many Americans. American elections have consequences elsewhere, and in this case, consequences in Hungary. And so you have the liberal press in the United States saying, look, Orban sees his opportunity with Trump in the White House. And, you know, they're probably exaggerating the case, but they're not wrong. All right, we'll be watching this further. This is one of those research reports. That's going to get a lot of headlines even in a secular age, because, for one thing, tells a secularizing culture pretty much what it wants to hear. But it is of interest to Christians, of material interest to Christians. We put it into context, and it just tells us that our job's getting harder. We knew that all along. Even our responsibility to raise our children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, to teach them, to catechize them, to confessionalize them, to confront them with the Gospel, to train them in the ways of the Lord, that takes on a new urgency. The very fact that so many are disaffiliating when they reach adulthood is a real warning. But I think if you could look beneath this report and look into what was going on in many of those families, you would see that at least some. At least some of this is predictable. All right, let's switch to something else. Very interesting hearings in the United States Senate, in particular the Senate Finance Committee, just over the course of the last couple of weeks. But going back to March 14, Dr. Mehmet Oz spoke at his confirmation hearing, and the committee voted to advance his nomination in recent days. But there's an interesting dimension to this. We need to know, first of all, who in the world is Mahmet Oz? Well, he's better known as Dr. Oz. And Dr. Oz really became known to most people because of his show, the Dr. Oz show that ran, by the way, from 2009 to 2022. It was a part of Harpo Productions. Some of you will recognize that is the company owned by Oprah Winfrey. So I think that's really interesting. If you understand Oprah, you pretty much understand Dr. Oz in the sense that both of them have the same kind of conversational ability. Both of them have the same kind of celebrity Persona, and both of them are very good talkers, and they turn that into television success. And yet they are different. I mean, Oprah Winfrey is very different from Mahmet Oz, who is indeed a medical doctor. He holds his undergraduate degree from Harvard University, his medical degree from another Ivy League institution, the University of Pennsylvania, and then he went to Columbia University in New York. And that's very, very elite when it comes to American higher education and medical education. He went to Columbia University, did a residency there, and eventually became a surgeon on the team there, a cardiothoracic surgeon at Columbia University. And at least according to many reports, including, by the way, recently from National Public Radio, he was very well regarded by his colleagues and much loved by his patients. But when he began to become famous and started the Dr. Oz show, it wasn't so much known for a rather stable, stayed conventional medical advice. He went into a lot of things that Americans found interesting. He helped to fuel the interest in alternative medicine and diet or weight loss products and programs and other things. It got him in hot water with some other more mainstream doctors who didn't like the fact that he was platforming some of these people and some of these ideas. Just to insert an immediate footnote here, it's not by accident we're talking about this because President Trump has nominated him to be the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, known as cms, part of the Department of Health and Human Services. And of course, the Secretary of Health and Human Services is Robert Kennedy, Jr. So again, very similar profile. The most interesting part of this to me is the fact that when you look at Dr. Oz and the Dr. Oz program, you see a couple of things that just go off as alarms for evangelical Christians and for conservatives. One of them is the fact that he has been basically for abortion rights and pretty much publicly. So I think even more glaringly, he has given support for the transgender movement and in particular to transgender transitions when it comes to children and teenagers, even platforming them on his show. Back in the year 2010, on the Dr. Oz show, he hosted Transgender Children 2 in particular in a segment that was entitled Transgender Kids and then asked the question too young to decide. Well, without going into detail, the way the show was conducted after that and the way these two children were presented after that would indicate that he did not believe it was too early or that they were too young to decide. One of the two young people featured in this segment was a 15 year old girl who had actually received so called top surgery. It is a double mastectomy as a teenager. So that's incredibly troubling. It is very troubling. It, however, is very parallel to some of the very troubling issues, morally speaking or at least on moral issues, with the secretary himself, Secretary Robert Kennedy, Jr. And so what are we looking at here? Well, I'm thankful for the fact that Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, openly asked these questions and pressed the doctor on these questions. Fox News reported just yesterday, quote, Senator Josh Hawley has lingering questions about President Donald Trump's Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services nominee Dr. Mehmet Oz and his past stances on transgender treatments for minors and abortion. And he says the nominee hasn't answered his inquiries. And FOX News goes on to say that in an interview, Senator Hawley said he, quote, remains concerned by Dr. Oz's past of, in the senator's words, promoting transgender surgeries for minors, promoting transgender hormone treatments and puberty blockers for minors. It's also very interesting that the senator said that having sent these questions to the nominee, he hadn't responded, quote, he hasn't, which I think is strange, end quote. I appreciate the fact that Senator Hawley put these issues on the line and did so in a public way. It is also interesting to know that the administration has responded by saying that all nominees will be in agreement with President Trump on these issues. On the transgender issue, the president has been clear, as I say, going all the way back to his inaugural address in January. And it does appear, and I say this to the president's great credit, it does appear that comprehensively and consistently, President Trump has been clarifying this issue throughout his administration, that there are two and only two genders, male and female. And the president and his administration have moved pretty clearly on these issues, translating it into actual policy, department by department, program by program. It is also interesting that several of the nominees, at least in terms of their past stances, have not been in sync with the president. But the point is, he is the president and he has made these nominations. And then the White House is saying, here's the one thing you need to know. These nominees, if confirmed, are going to uphold the president's policies. They're going to get their directives from the president. There's not going to be the slightest sunlight between these nominees and the president when it comes to an issue like this. We can only say, we sincerely hope so. We'll continue to track these issues with you. Thanks for listening to the briefing. For more information, go to my website@albertmuller.com youm can follow me on Twitter or X by going to twitter.com AlbertMohler for information on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu for information on Boyce College, just go to boycecollege.com I'll meet you again tomorrow for the briefing.