I don't expect you to read all of my blog today. I'm trying to sort through my thoughts and doing it through a stream of consciousness expressed in my writing. So my writing is my way of organizing my thoughts and should you decide you have nothing better to do, then I invite you to tune into my evaluation and share with me yours, as well as your thoughts on mine.

Why did yesterday happen? I've already touched on the obvious in my earlier blog, but now I want to do a bit of cultural analysis that helps explain for me what happened and is happening and will happen in the future unless trends are reversed. Our country has in the past decade and a half grown more liberal and cynical. From 1994 to 2007 the following trends are documented by surveys of Americans by Pew Research Center:
1. Government should care for the poor and needy(from 57% to 69%). Once upon a time such people were cared for by charitable organizations, churches, and neighborhoods. More and more people believe such care is a legitimate function of government. I certainly believe there are times when government needs to offer assistance, but in general this should not be the primary function of government. Furthermore Katrina proved that government is seldom the most efficient means of administering immediate help.

2. Traditional marriage and family values have declined from 84% to 76%. People still have a more or less traditional view, but the realities before them is that marriages and families are losing their traditional place in our culture.

3. In 1999 55% of Americans said that prayer was important to their daily life. By 2007 that number had decreased to 45%. Thus America is becoming a more secular country. This is also evidenced by the fact that in 1994, 72% of Americans said they had no doubt that God exists, while in 2007 that number had decreased to 61%. These stats evidence the fact that the influence of the Christian faith is not where it was a few years ago. This also evidences the influence of the recent flood of books promoting a more aggressive form of athiesm by such authors as Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins. All of these books became best sellers.

4. Democrats outnumber Republicans by 50 to 35%. The only annual stats that show Republicans outnumbering Democrats was 1991 and1995. This means that if Republicans are to win national elections they have to outwork and out argue the Democrats. That's why it is so hard for the Republicans to win against a charismatic personality like Obama. There is already a tendency for America to go democratic and if they have an impressive candidate its hard for them to lose.

One other stat I should have mentioned under 3 is that citizens identifying with athiesm, agnosticism or no religion has increased from 8% in 1987 to 9% in 1997 to 12% in 2007. You will note that the increase of nontheists and antitheists in America is increasing more rapidly today than it was in the 80's and 90's.

5. How many agree with this statement "Americans can find a way to solve whatever problems the country encounters"? From 2002 to 2007, the % believing the answer is yes declined 16%. This tells us that Americans are far less confident than we once were in our country's future and that we are more cynical concerning American creativity and ingenuity than in the past.

How did we get here? What's going on in society? Why do we have less faith in God and in America? The following factors weigh heavily in my explanation.

1. Control of the major idea shaping and values shaping media are in the control of those who have little faith in God or America. Higher education, news media and movie makers are all far more liberal and faithless than the average American, but their views bombard the public and slowly but surely America begins to echo the ideas and values of these culture creators.

2. The dissolution of the American family and the transitioning of mind shaping from family to hollywood and public schools are also trending young people in a much more liberal direction with growing disrespect for America and its founders, as well as God and the churches.

If time would allow and if I thought anyone would really care to read it, we could expound endlessly upon illustrations of the above, but I know I'm preaching to the choir.

What about the future and what can we do? We must stay informed and continue to recognize the importance of our freedom of speech. We must speak or forever remain silent. If we do not take advantage of our freedom by using it for good, we will eventually lose it. We need to be courageous in our witness for God and in our articulation of ideas consistent with God's word. The enemy would like to marginalize christianity as a realm belonging to ignorant and uninformed people. They tried to do that with Sarah Palin, accusing her of trying to censor books and being an advocate of creationism and dedicated to removing the theory of evolution from our education system. Movies like Religiouslous by Bill Mayer and the books by Hitchens, Harris and Dawkins take the most extreme religious views and try to paint with a broad brush all christians as of the same genre. I think its ridiculous for christians to wage war against children being exposed to the theory of evolution. Instead we should argue for open discussion and the opportunity for intelligent design and the possibility for credible theories other than naturalistic evolution. Such a view I'm sure is what Sarah Palin would defend, but she is caricatatured as an ignorant extremist.

Several years ago the church historian Mark Noll wrote a book entitled THE SCANDAL OF THE EVANGELICAL MIND which took to task conservative religious leaders for some of the mindless and thoughtless positions we have taken over the years that have hurt our credidility. With many christians Hollywood and higher education have simply been written off as belonging to the enemy. We cannot hope to compete in the mind shaping industry of our country if we narrowly confine our christian world to the church building and those areas that pose no threat to us. Our neighbors visit the theater far more frequently than they visit our churches. They will send their children to public schools and colleges before they will send or carry them to church. If we don't compete in the market place of ideas we will lose by default. We must not be content with simplistic answers that satisfy no one but ourselves and those who are like us.

We must read quality literature and encourage others to do the same. We must prepare to engage Athiests, agnostics and secularists in intelligent discussion and not bow out as soon as they challenge our faith. Read authors like Dinesh D'souza who has taken on the best known athiests in debate. We are not in a battle about instruments of music or the millenium we are in a battle for the existence of God and the reality of the historical Jesus. The days are long past when we could influence someone by simply saying the bible says. Today, people will answer "so what" to our assertion that "the bible says". Many times we talk to ourselves with arguments that might have worked in the 50's, but the discussion has moved far beyond those issues and sometimes we continue answering questions that are not being asked and so we look and sound irrelevant and out of touch. We must be informed and help our children and grandchildren to become informed as they grow and mature.

Churches need to challenge youth to enter the world of the arts and higher education as missionaries. We worry that they will be tempted and fall. Where is our faith? If we surrender all areas that contain temptation, we will have to exit this world. Temptation is as strong in the church as in the classroom.

Conservatives and Christians must outthink and outbehave those with whom we disagree and most of all we must outpray those who may be blinded by the father of lies.