According to the Public Religion Research Institute (PPRI), only 16 percent of Americans surveyed say that religion is the most important thing in their lives. This marks a 4 percent drop in one decade. Melissa Deckman of PPRI says that Americans are “increasingly likely to become religiously unaffiliated.”

With the decline of religious affiliation there is a corresponding rise in unbelief. 18 percent of Generation Z identifies as agnostic or atheist – the highest in U.S. history. There have also been significant changes among the religiously affiliated. 21 percent claim to have undergone a change in religious belief, which is a 50 percent increase from just a couple of years ago.

According to the Pew Research group, Christians in the U.S will be a minority within a few decades if the current decline continues. Religion News Service reports that approximately 4,500 churches close each year while only 3,000 new churches launch. Don Feder, writing in the Washington Times, says that these statistics “should set off alarm bells in our heads.”

The alarm bells have been going off around the Christian community for years now. Dire warnings of apostasy have been issued. After a 2,000 year run, a weary Christianity appears to have collapsed onto its death bed to await the end.

But we’ve heard that before. It looked like Christianity’s downfall was at hand in the fourth century under the Emperor Julian. It wasn’t. At the end of the 18^th century in France, and in the early and middle years of the twentieth century in Russia and China, leaders attempted to de-Christianize their countries. They closed churches and persecuted believers, but Christianity survived. In fact, there are now more Christians in China than in any other country.

In the years immediately following the Second World War, C. S. Lewis wrote about the so-called “religious predicament” in England. He claimed that among young, educated adults “Plenty of evidence can be produced that religion is in its last decline.” Similarly, plenty of evidence can be, and has been, produced that religion in America is in its last decline.

Lewis, however, believed that people were misinterpreting the evidence. He was not denying the facts – there really were fewer people attending chapels and churches – but he was questioning the interpretation of those facts and the assumptions behind it.

Lewis acknowledged that “In every class and every part of the country the visible practice of Christianity has grown very much less…” Yet Lewis believed that “the religion which has declined was not Christianity. It was a vague theism with a strong …ethical code.”

The great twentieth century thinker Malcolm Muggeridge agreed. In the early 1970s, Muggeridge was predicting “the end of Christendom.” Though he was a devout Christian, he anticipated the end of Christendom as a good thing for Christianity. He, like Lewis, considered Christendom’s “vague theism with ethical code” to be a rival to the true faith and wished it good riddance.

Lewis attributed the decline in the visible practice of Christianity to a change in cultural standards rather than to a change in people’s hearts. He believed that the number of committed Christians – one might call them disciples of Jesus – had remained roughly the same. For example, as soon as society dropped the expectation that “good Christians” would attend chapel services, people who were merely conforming to society’s expectations stopped attending. It is not that they stopped believing; they never really had believed in anything but society’s expectations.

We are seeing something similar in today’s America. In the 1950s and 1960s, society expected good, vaguely theistic people with a strong ethical code to go to church. That expectation has faded, which accounts for much of the decline in the visible practice of Christianity. Yet, committed Christians are still in church, just as they always were.

The good news is that people who are not and never have been committed Christians are waking up to the fact. When they thought they were Christians, they were essentially unreachable. If they are now realizing that they are not, they may prove more open to Christ than ever before.