It's Wednesday, August 10, 2022.

I'm Albert Moeller, and this is the briefing, a daily analysis of news and events

from a Christian worldview. Is America

rapidly becoming a more secular nation? Is secularization basically shifting

the entire landscape of the United States so that there are less religious people than the the believers, secularists of one sort or another? Well actually if you look at all the data, it's a pretty complicated picture.

You can come up with a lot of data indicating an increasingly secularized America.

Now, in order to understand that in the way I think that for Christians is most important,

we need to understand that if we're looking at a social reality, not just defining it theologically, we'll get to that.

Then as a social reality, religion appears to be less important, less formative, less authoritative

in the United States than it used to be.

Now there's some awkwardness for Christians in using the term religion, so we have to define

what we're talking about here.

We're talking about a sociological reality.

We're talking about different sets of beliefs. As we

understand believing Christians committed to the Gospel of Jesus Christ

understand that there will be many religious people in hell. That's not the

point. We do understand, however, that a secular society

grows increasingly distant from its theological roots, and here's the other side of that,

antagonistic towards those theological roots.

This turns out to be really important.

How else can you understand or explain?

Something like the reality of same-sex marriage,

...