American Pie was the title of a risque comedy. I might receive a letter or two for saying it, but I sometimes wonder whether popular American piety might be sardonically dubbed 'American Pie'. Except, of course, it's not funny.
Statistical as well as anecdotal evidence combine to paint a far from pretty picture. Long ago Francis Schaeffer called it The Great Evangelical Disaster: 'Here is the great evangelical disaster - the failure of the evangelical world to stand for truth as truth... The evangelical church has accommodated to the world spirit of the age'. More recently, Gallup addressed a national seminar of Southern Baptist leaders saying, 'We find there is very little difference in ethical behaviour between churchgoers and those who are not active religiously. The levels of lying, cheating, and stealing are remarkably similar in both groups'. Barna would go further, identifying patterns of extra-marital sex, racism, and the physical abuse of spouses as at about the same level as 'in the world.'
Bad fruit
Religion is up but morality is down. Who can square such a circle? Certainly not the book of James, nor the Lord himself who it was that cautioned 'by their fruit you will know them'. If we are not careful the church will enter a new Babylonian captivity, this time not geographical but of the spirit, where the exile is not from a physical but psychological space, where the cash value of central terms to the preaching of the gospel ('born again', 'Bible-believing', 'evangelical') will have become so devalued that nothing but a radical reversal will stand a chance of renewing the remnant.
