News Alert

Adnkronos International 12/7/06: Pope Benedict XVI's moment of prayer at Istanbul's Blue Mosque has opened up a "new horizon in interreligious dialogue" according to a top Italian Roman Catholic cleric: "For the first time a Pope appealed to God in a Mosque. Not even Pope John Paul II did it in the Damascus Mosque."

ChristianWorldviewNetwork.com, 10/17/06, [Excerpts]: Ted Baehr writes: When the paganization of America is reported in the New York Times, one begins to wonder if one needs a new pair of reading glasses. On Oct. 6, 2006, Laurie Goodstein of the New York Times said that the number of Evangelical Christian teenagers could be declining rapidly from 35 percent among baby boomers to 4 percent among today's teenagers, "if current trends continue." The Times quoted many young Christians who had trouble keeping the faith in the midst of peer pressure, consumerism, cynicism, and lust inflamed by the mass media of entertainment.

According to the Barna Research Group, 9 percent of Americans are Bible-believing Evangelical Christians and 36 percent of Americans are Born-Again Christians. Barna also reports that 49 percent of Americans born between 1946 and 1964 attend church on a given Sunday, but only 43 percent of Americans born between 1965 and 1983 and 33 percent of Americans born between 1984 and 2002 do that.

This is a serious problem. If the United States becomes as Post-Christian as Britain and Europe, then the world will become a ripe plum ready to fall under the hands of Islam, a religion that heretofore has only advanced by the sword. People who don't believe in something will believe in anything.

The Good News is that there are still many Evangelical Christian leaders who are working with our nation's youths to bring about the kind of Revival necessary to stem the negative tide of death running rampant in our culture and in our education system....Regarding the mass media of entertainment degrading influence, MOVIEGUIDE® (www.movieguide.org) and the Christian Film & Television Commission^TM are part of that vital effort to stop the paganization of America.

[TBC: We agree that we have a serious problem among evangelical Christians today, especially evangelical youth. However, the recommended "vital effort to stop the paganization" process is unwittingly fostering it. We will explain in next month's feature article.]