Give up, or Give Witness?

A recent poll of U.S. residents, taken in March by the nonpartisan National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, has yielded some distressing and ominous results. According to the poll, only 39% of our citizens now say that religion is “very important” to them in their lives. Twenty-five years ago, in 1998, 62% said that it was “very important” to them. That’s a huge decrease!
Another interesting statistic: Only 30% of those who participated in this poll said that having children was “very important” to them. That’s down from 59% in 1998 and 43% in 2019 — another very significant drop.
We are obviously living right now in a highly secularized and materialistic culture. In the face of that distressing fact, we can choose to respond in one of two ways. We can either choose to give up, or we can choose to give witness; we can either allow ourselves to be overwhelmed by the world and its current condition, or we can do our best to change our little corner of it.
May the Lord help each of us — and every Christian — to make the right choice.