What are the near-term and longer-term consequences to the decline of Christianity in America?
Near-term (5-15 years; 2015-2025):
Continuing moral decline, including:
* Government-mandated protection and respect for homosexual behavior and marriage.
* Decline in marriage and the traditional family unit.
* Increased acceptance of pornography and perverse sexual activities.
* Increase in out-of-wedlock relationships and child-rearing.
Continuing decline in the birthrate to below replacement levels, as in Europe.
More and more laws going unenforced.
Higher crime rates which will lead to decriminalizing or legalizing possession and distribution of the more popular illegal drugs.
Increase in drug use which will lead to reduced personal responsibility and productivity.
Increased demand for government assistance.
Increasing need for a combination of higher taxes and increased national indebtedness.
Less personal spending; lower standards of living.
Government gains additional socialist/communist characteristics.
Islam and Sharia become legally protected.
More government regulation and bureaucracy and fewer personal freedoms.
Growing possibility of economic collapse.
Devout Christians becoming a smaller, persecuted minority.
Longer term (beyond 15 years; beyond 2025):
Birthrate below replacement levels; average age of population significantly increases.
Less buying power; less demand for goods and services. collapsing economy.
Greater demand for immigrants to perform labor typically performed by younger age groups.
Marked change from a universal "American" culture to balkanized ghetto-centered cultural groups.
Marked loss of religious and personal freedoms; travel becomes more dangerous, expensive, and restricted.
Markedly higher crime rates and random violence, especially in dozens of urban "no-go zones" in medium and large-sized cities.
Reduced, corrupt, and disrespected police forces.
Widespread disrespect for authority and violence against authority and the general population; increase in anarchist groups, both left, right, and Islamic.
Probability of economic and governmental collapse turning to inevitability.
Probabliity of revolultion and splintering of the United States.
Beginnings of underground churches in America.
Here is a summary of a realistic diagnosis of our future via a preview of a new book by a well-respected author, Joel Rosenberg titled "Implosion."
http://www.wnd.com/2012/06/author-will-america-go-out-with-a-bang/
WND EXCLUSIVE
By Troy Anderson
At a time of skyrocketing federal debt, declining morality and growing spiritual apathy and apostasy, New York Times bestselling author Joel C. Rosenberg – known as a “modern-day Nostradamus” – says America may face cataclysmic collapse in the not-too distant future.
In his new book, Implosion: Can America Recover from its Economic & Spiritual Challenges in Time? (Tyndale House Publishers), Rosenberg explores the question a growing number of politicians, academics, authors and others are asking about the future of the United States.
“My concern is we are experiencing an epic failure of leadership at almost every level of American society right now,” Rosenberg told WND. “Something has gone terribly wrong with the American experiment. Our families are imploding, our national debt is exploding, experts on the left and right are warning us that we need to change our direction because we’re on an unsustainable trajectory economically, socially and culturally.
“Unfortunately, too many leaders in our country are stuck in business as usual mode and Americans are getting anxious that the ice is cracking under our feet.”
The book, released this week, comes as people at nearly 300 locations nationwide are set to listen to Rosenberg on Saturday morning discuss whether America is headed for implosion or revival during a live, three-hour “Implosion Simulcast” from First Baptist Church in Houston, Texas. Details have been posted at JoelRosenberg.com.
Rosenberg is a bestselling author with more than 2.5 million copies of his books in print. One of his books – “The Last Jihad’ – put readers in the cockpit of a hijacked jet on a kamikaze mission into an American city. It was written nine months before the Sept. 11, 2011 terrorist attacks. Afterwards, U.S. News & World Report described him as a “modern-day Nostradamus.” He also wrote about the U.S. at war in Iraq four months before the war began.
See for yourself exactly what could happen to the United States of America, in “Implosion: Can America Recover from its Economic and Spiritual Challenges in Time?”
The son of a Jewish father and a Gentile mother and an evangelical Christian, Rosenberg has served as a communications adviser for a number of U.S. and Israeli leaders, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Forbes magazine Publisher Steve Forbes.
A front-page Sunday New York Times profile called him a “force in the capital.” He has been profiled by the Washington Times and the Jerusalem Post, has been interviewed on ABC, CNN, FOX, MSNBC and the History Channel, and has addressed audiences all over the world, including the White House, the Pentagon, the U.S. Capitol and the European Union Parliament.
Earlier this week, Rosenberg received a note from Anne Graham Lotz, daughter of evangelist Billy Graham and author of “Expecting to See Jesus,” regarding his new book.
“Reinforced with Joel Rosenberg’s brilliant research, delivered with a prophet’s authority, and wrapped in hope, ‘Implosion’ will keep you riveted page after page. It is a clarion call to wake-up, America, before it’s too late!” Graham Lotz wrote.
In the book, Rosenberg explores whether the United States – long the wealthiest, most powerful nation in history – is an empire in decline or a nation poised for a historic renaissance. The book asks whether America’s religious past can be repeated today with a Third Great Awakening, or whether the rise of China, Russia and other nations, coupled with America’s internal struggles, will plunge the country into terminal decline.
The book comes as the nation faces soaring federal debt, severe economic turmoil, political uncertainty, declining morality, a weak church, growing spiritual apathy and apostasy, a spate of historic natural disasters and many other daunting challenges.
Read the story of the “Harbinger” and see the year’s best-selling faith video in the “Isaiah 9:10 Judgment.” Their revelations about what is happening will stun you!
Many Americans have come to believe that the U.S. has entered a period of severe and potentially irreversible decline and fear the nation is in serious risk of economic and social collapse, Rosenberg wrote.
In the book, he cites several startling polls. A 2008 NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found 73 percent of Americans believe the U.S. is in a state of decline. A 2010 Fox News Poll found nearly 80 percent of Americans believe the U.S. economy could collapse entirely. And a 2011 CNN poll found nearly half of all Americans fear the U.S. is heading for another Great Depression.
In “Implosion,” Rosenberg outlines the reasons why the U.S. faces a real and growing risk of collapse. Economically, the nation is more than $15 trillion in debt and is fast approaching $65 trillion worth of unfunded liabilities – promises the government has made regarding Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid that it can’t afford, Rosenberg says.
Further, America has lost 53 million children to abortion since 1973. “That’s horrific in its own right – murder in my view,” Rosenberg says. “But on top of that, as if that weren’t bad enough, it’s having an economic affect that liberals didn’t intend, which is if you build a social welfare system in which young people pay the bills of older people through taxes and then you kill 53 million younger workers you are going to have a crisis.”
Meanwhile, the nation’s ‘horrible pornography industry,” which exports its lurid materials worldwide, earns more money than NBC, ABC and CBS combined, Rosenberg says. Morally and spiritually, marriages and families are imploding as the foreclosure and economic crises exact unexpected consequences, Rosenberg says. A Federal Reserve report released earlier this week found the median wealth of families dropped 39 percent from $126,400 in 2007 to $77,300 in 2010.
“You can feel that, but the idea of an economic collapse is hard for people to grasp,” Rosenberg says. “They say, ‘Well, we’re not really Greece.’ But in terms of our families, we see that. We can see the family imploding. The question is this: Is there a point at which we hit a tipping point and all of this economic, cultural and moral trouble sends us into a death spiral we can’t get out of.
“The question, in a broader sense, is there a point at which God can no longer show us grace and mercy as a country, but will remove his hand of favor or actually set in motion judgment.”
In the book, Rosenberg chronicles a growing national discussion of whether American society could implode. In 2010 during an interview with former U.S. Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H. – onetime chairman of the Senate Budget Committee – Fox News host Greta Van Susteren raised the possibility that the economy could “implode.”
“That’s right,” Gregg told Van Susteren. “That’s exactly what’s going to happen.”
In the book, Rosenberg cites other examples of highly respected officials warning the nation is on a path of “implosion” unless dramatic, historic steps are taken to change course.
In a Nov. 17, 2010 Yahoo News story entitled “Rubin Warns of Bond Market ‘Implosion,’” Robert Rubin, U.S. treasury secretary during the Clinton administration and now co-chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, said the soaring deficit and the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing (the printing and pumping of money into the
economy) was putting the nation in “terribly dangerous territory.”
Not long after this, U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., chairman of the House Budget Committee, told members of Congress the nation is on an unsustainable path where its debt is expected to rise from 68 percent of Gross Domestic Product to 800 percent of GDP in the coming decades.
Last week, Ryan said witnesses at a Congressional Budget Office hearing testified the nation has two years “before we have a debt crisis like Europe is experiencing.”
Rosenberg also examines in the book what the Bible has to say about the future of America and whether the U.S. is ever mentioned directly or indirectly.
The short version, Rosenberg says, is America is not specifically mentioned in the Bible. While many Bible prophecy teachers have speculated America is Babylon – the “great harlot that sitteth upon many waters” that is destroyed in an hour, according to the Book of Revelation – Rosenberg says he believes that is actually a reference to the historical city of Babylon in modern-day Iraq, a city that is being rebuilt.
When he tells people that America is not mentioned in the Bible, Rosenberg says many are often stunned, asking how could the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the history of mankind not be a specifically defined-player in the “last days.”
“The answer to that is I don’t know,” Rosenberg says. “But by the absence of us not being clearly defined in the text means something has happened to us. The question is what. What will happen to us to neutralize our ability or desire to be an influential player in these last of the last days of history before the return of Jesus Christ.”
In “Implosion,” Rosenberg raises several possibilities. First, the U.S. could implode financially and economically. The nation could be devastated by a surprise military or terrorist attack or a series of attacks. The nation could be devastated by an unprecedented series of natural disasters. Or, the U.S. could suddenly lose tens of millions of people during the “Rapture,” a prophecy that says God takes the church out of the world instantaneously – triggering any number of cataclysmic events.
“Maybe it will be a combination of these,” Rosenberg says.
At the same time, Rosenberg is also concerned about the role the U.S. is playing in the nuclear showdown between Iran and Israel. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has threatened to destroy Israel. Many Western nations are concerned Iran is developing nuclear weapons. In response, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is mulling an attack – possibly this summer or fall – to destroy Iran’s nuclear capability.
At a conference in March at Biola University in Southern California – “Israel, the Church and the Middle East Crisis” – Rosenberg told the audience the showdown could set in motion the fulfillment of prophecies in Ezekiel 38 and 39 regarding the “war of Gog and Magog.” This biblical prediction, Rosenberg says, refers to an end-times attack on Israel by a coalition of nations, including Russia and Iran.
Concerned about the level of America’s support of Israel during this time of crisis, Rosenberg says Genesis 12:3 is clear that God will bless those who bless Israel and curse those who curse Israel.
“We already have enough moral and spiritual problems,” Rosenberg says. “The last thing we need to find ourselves is being cursed by God for turning our back on the nation of Israel. That is a very critical point and as we approach a possible major war between Israel and Iran, maybe this summer or fall, this is a time for Christians and all Americans to be standing with Israel in this fight against radical Islam and the threat that radical mullahs could get their hands on some nuclear weapons. We cannot let that happen.”
Finally, in the book, Rosenberg looks at historic lessons from the remarkable and sweeping Christian revivals known as the First Great Awakening of the early 1700s and the Second Great Awakening of the early 1800s and considers the possibility of a Third Great Awakening today.
Rosenberg says the U.S. has experienced two great spiritual revivals in the past and it could experience another. Rosenberg bases this belief on 2 Chronicles 7:14: “If my people who are called by my name humble themselves, pray, seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.” That’s what God told the ancient Hebrews, Rosenberg says. While it’s not a promise for the U.S. or other nations, Rosenberg says he believes it sets forth a biblical principle.
“The history of Israel in the Bible gives us an understanding of how God operates,” Rosenberg says. “Let me put it this way. God is not a vending machine where if you put in enough prayer quarters we get a Reese’s Pieces bag that pops out. If we pray, fast and humble ourselves, it doesn’t mean God is obligated to give us a massive spiritual revival to save America because maybe we’ve passed that point. But we can be sure if we don’t pray, fast, humble ourselves and changed our wicked ways, then we definitely can’t expect God to give us a massive revival.”
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Troy Anderson is an award-winning reporter and editorial writer at the Los Angeles Daily News, The Press-Enterprise (Riverside, Calif.) and other newspapers for 20 years. He also writes for Reuters, Charisma and many other magazines and online publications. He lives in Irvine, Calif.