According to a poll reported on today by ABC News, 83% of Americans self-identify as Christians:

Ask Americans their religion and you’ll get an earful — 50 individual answers in an ABCNEWS/Beliefnet poll, ranging from agnostics to Zen Buddhists. The vast majority, though, have something in common: Jesus Christ.

Eighty-three percent of Americans identify themselves as Christians. Most of the rest, 13 percent, have no religion. That leaves just 4 percent as adherents of all non-Christian religions combined — Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and a smattering of individual mentions.

That’s quite different from the world at large: Fifty-two percent of the world’s population is non-Christian, compared to 4 percent in the United States; and one-third is Christian, compared to 83 percent in the United States. (These are rough comparisons, because the world figures, reported by the Encyclopedia Britannica, are for the full population, while the U.S. figures are among adults only.)

This poll used an open-ended question to gauge religious affiliation: “What if anything is your religion?” Most of the 50 affiliations cited are Christian denominations, ranging from the Assembly of God to the United Church of Christ. Added up they show that 53 percent of Americans are Protestants, 22 percent Catholics and 8 percent other Christians, such as Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses.

If that is the case, then one has to ask how have we arrived at a cultural whistlestop where bastardy is commonplace, divorce is rampant, homosexuality idealized by cultural trendsetters and given pride of place by the courts, and babies are chopped up and sold for parts?

Stop and consider this. The Wild Goose Festival (sadly, not affiliated with the microbrew) is billed as:

Wild Goose is a community gathered at the intersection of spirituality, justice, music and the arts. Our main annual event is a four-day, outdoor festival hosted each summer in Hot Springs, North Carolina. We also present smaller, more specialized events in other parts of the country throughout the year.

“Wild Goose” is a Celtic spirituality metaphor that evokes unpredictability, beauty, and grace.

Essentially, it is a gathering of neo-pagan hippies. It is sponsored by the Episcopal Church, so you can draw further conclusions about it from that factoid.

Not to be outdone by the Episcopalians, the Chicago Theological Seminary, affiliated with the United Church of Christ, got into the act:

One recent example is the distribution of free condoms by Chicago Theological Seminary, an affiliate of the United Church of Christ (UCC).

At last week’s 2015 Wild Goose Festival attendees received condom packages designed with a colored image of a rainbow flame, an LGBT variation of the UCC’s logo.

Printed above the flame are instructions: “Chicago Theological Seminary, Take Two (For the second coming!)”. The text blatantly suggests Jesus Christ’s second coming relates to one needing two condoms for multiple partners or multiple orgasms.

In other words, a “Christian” seminary is likening the Second Coming of Christ to gay sex.

I don’t know that condoms are used exclusively for homosexual sex, but even so sexual licentiousness is not a Christian value. Distributing contraceptives with the avowed purpose of increasing the quantity of sexual acts, whether inside or outside of marriage, also runs against Christian teaching about an properly ordered sexual life. The fact that a seminary would be behind this stunt calls into question what, exactly, are they teaching there. That is a rhetorical question.

Even so, the Patheos article I quoted really misses the point. Churches and denominations have contributed to their own demise by going along with each new innovation in sexual morality. Let me digress here for a moment, I’m not a Puritan by any stretch of the imagination but sexual mores is the gateway drug to the general destruction of morality in general. Easy divorce, no fault divorce, churches remarrying divorced persons, legal contraceptives and contraceptives given to minors without parental knowledge or consent, acceptance of bastardy, the celebration of bastardy,the normalization of cohabitation out of wedlock and the celebration of pre-marital and extra marital sexual relations have all led us to the point where homosexual marriage is now the law of the land. It is fine to object to the end point but unless you objected along this path to perdition you are a little late to the show.

More and more Protestant denominations are surrendering to the rule of Caesar and the mob. The Episcopalians have ordained as a bishop a man who was living in a homosexual relationship. The Lutherans (ELCA) and Presbyterians (PCUSA) have approved homosexual marriage thereby creating a perpetual energy supply as Martin Luther, John Knox and John Calvin spinning in their graves. Increasingly, Jesus Christ is not our Lord and Savior. He is a New Age-style hipster guru who was only concerned about not hurting feelings. His blistering critiques of the Pharisees, His condemnation of towns to perdition, His driving the money changers from the temple, His promise that He will bring division to the culture setting man against wife, and His curse upon those who would lead believers from the faith are all forgotten. What is remembered is his forgiving the woman caught in adultery. Even then they forget the part where He calls her action a sin and tells her to not do it again.

While the short term impact of this is small the long term impact is deadly. Churches who have thrown off the Gospel of Salvation for the Prosperity Gospel or the Feel Good Gospel or (and as a Catholic I am very aware of this) the Social Gospel produce members who are not catechized, people who don’t know what the believe or why they believe it.

This is what makes freedom of religion more important than the freedom of worship Obama and his buttboys blather on about. Freedom of worship relegates religion to the status of a cultural artifact. Something that is trotted out on religious holidays and certain family occasions (marriage increasingly is not one of those) as an interesting but irrelevant symbol. The United Church of Christ distributing condoms neatly dovetails with the interest of big government because they are assisting government policy without objecting to the inherent evil in that policy. What we are seeing is that a lot of mainline Protestant denominations are not only signing onto this idea but they are cheerleading the effort to strip religion of all mention of morals and thereby divorce religion from the idea of Eternal Salvation and firmly yoke it to the regulatory state.