As Marriage Declines, Church Attendance Falls

by Devon Williams, associate editor of CitizenLink Daily Update

A dramatic decline in marriage, particularly among young adults, has led to a decline in church attendance over the last three decades, according to a study by Robert Wuthnow, a sociology professor at Princeton University.

Men are 57 percent less likely to regularly attend church if they are not married. Single women are 41 percent less likely to attend church than their married counterparts.

“It exaggerates only a little to say that Americans in their 20s and early 30s divide into two groups of about equal size: those who are married, the majority of whom participate in religion; and those who are not married, the majority of whom do not participate,” Wuthnow said at a conference at The Heritage Foundation.

Brad Wilcox, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, said the biggest factor driving the decline in church attendance is delayed marriage.

“Marriage is a gateway into family life, and family life, in turn, is often a gateway into church attendance,” he said. “The longer people postpone marriage, the less likely they are to attend church at a given age, and also the less likely they are to attend church down the road.”

Wuthnow estimates in his book, After the Baby Boomers: How Twenty- and Thirty-Somethings are Shaping the Future of American Religion, that American churches would have 6.3 million more young adults today if young people started families at the same rate they did 30 years ago.

Wilcox said the Church needs to be more intentional about promoting marriage at an earlier age.

“One thing churches need to do is to really encourage their teenagers and their young adults not to buy into this culture of ‘hooking up’ and even the culture of dating or just hanging out,” he said. “(Churches need) to create a culture of courtship that puts them on a path to marriage, for those who are called to marriage.

“I think connecting young adults to families who have different priorities and different challenges and different joys would help them see the world a little bit differently, and hopefully grow in their faith at the same time.”

Canadian Pastor Prosecuted For Criticizing Homosexuality

The following is an excerpt of from an article published by LifeSite News on Spetember 2, 2005:

Currently Reverend Stephen Boissoin, a young Albertan pastor who spearheads a youth ministry that makes hundreds of weekly contacts with at-risk youth, is in the process of learning Arabic so he can better minister to the many Muslim youth who he says come to his centers. And with two children of his own, in addition to his full-time ministry, he repeatedly remarked during an interview with LifeSiteNews.com that he just doesn’t have a lot of time on his hands.

But increasingly these days the young pastor’s thoughts are set on preparing for his Alberta Human Rights Commission (AHRC) hearing that he says will likely be heard in October.

Without the money to pay for legal representation, Stephen has no other alternative but to prepare his own defense. “I know nothing about human rights case law,” he says. “I’m trying to learn. Understand this, I work every single day, have two kids…and right in the middle of that I’m trying to learn human rights law. So, I’ll be very happy when it’s over.” The only problem with that, he points out, is that when it’s all over he may very well be in prison.

Boissoin is being hauled before the Human Rights Commission to answer to a complaint filed by Darren Lund, an assistant professor at the University of Calgary. Lund made his complaint after Boissoin published a letter to the editor in the Red Deer Advocate, in which he denounced homosexuality as immoral and dangerous, and called into question new gay-rights curriculums permeating the province’s educational system.

In that letter to the editor, Boisson lamented that “Children as young as five and six years of age are being subjected to psychologically and physiologically damaging pro-homosexual literature and guidance in the public school system; all under the fraudulent guise of equal rights.”

Boissoin, who is himself no stranger to the dangers of homosexual and bi-sexual activity, since many of the youth he works with fall into that category, repeatedly expressed his concern that behaviour that is dangerous, and sometimes fatal, is being presented as normative and even healthy to the most impressionable. “I was just writing a letter to the editor, to the heterosexual population,” he says, “saying this is something to be very, very concerned about.”

For expressing that view, however, Boissoin has been called a “bigot” and a “hate-mongerer”, and worse. Darren Lund has likened the young pastor to Terry Long of Aryan Nation, a local white supremacist, and James Keegstra, a holocaust denier.

Should Boissoin lose the hearing with the Human Rights Tribunal, he will be forced to pay $7000 in fines. $5000 will go to Darren Lund personally, and another $2000 will go to the rabidly pro-gay-rights group EGALE Canada, which has received large sums of money in the past from the federal government for its court challenges. In addition, Lund has requested that Boissoin be forced to apologize to his readers in another letter to be published in the Red Deer Advocate. Boissoin, however, says that he will not pay those fines, nor will he apologize, even should that mean prison.

It should be evident that the political agenda of gays leads to totalitarianism. The cornerstone of freedom is religion. Freedom of religion is about knowing the truth. God is about truth and freedom to live morally. Truth requires free speech and a free press. Before radio, television, telephones, and the Internet, freedom of assembly was necessary to learn and discuss events, new studies, along a little entertainment. Without the freedom of speech and press, individual and collective despots can tyrannize masses of people. That is where the secular and sexual anarchical politics is leading. Colonial Americans had to fight the Revolutionary War to regain their freedom from a corrupt political regime. The question will it be required once again.

A few months ago in Boston, gay and supporters rioted against ex-gays and a supporting church for meeting where how God restored them to a natural and godly life. The gay agenda cannot tolerate such change and its countervailing message. It is not gays who are being discriminated against. Rather, it is moral, law-abiding citizens, children, parents, and business owners who are being discriminated against. Now is the time to stand and stop it.