A Nation of Idolatry & Dead Faith: America at 250

A Nation of Idolatry & Dead Faith: America at 250

Host: Hon. Sam Rohrer

Guest: George Barna

Note: This transcript is taken from a Stand in the Gap Today program aired on 6/26/26. To listen to the podcast, click HERE.

Disclaimer: While reasonable efforts have been made to provide an accurate transcription, the following is a representation of a mechanical transcription and as such, may not be a word for word transcript. Please listen to the audio version for any questions concerning the following dialogue.

Sam Rohrer:

Hello and welcome to Stand in the Gap today. And it’s our monthly focus here on culture, values and biblical worldview with Dr. George Barna, founder of the original Barna Research Group and now Director of Research at the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University. Each month, Dr. Barna, George, as we call him, and if you’re listening to me, you know we go informal here when we talk to each other, but he joins us again to break down the latest findings from the American Worldview Inventory, about which we’ve discussed much on this program, but all of this groundbreaking tracking data. It’s unique. There is nothing out there like it, but dates all the way back to 2020. And you can find it, it’s fully accessible. All of the reports, you can find that culturalresearchcenter.com. And I would encourage you to go there. And we’re going to be referring to the last report.

I’ll give more information about that as we go through it. But as with all biblically centered research measuring what God deems is important, I’m going to submit there’s not very many who do that, but George and his work does. But when that’s done, there are always multiple applications of the findings. Applications. Interpreting it is what a lot of people don’t do accurately, but then you can apply it. And that’s our exact focus today. In James chapter one, verses 22 to 25, the Apostle James there warns that looking into the mirror of God’s word must end up as a changed life. Our lives must change because he says they’re otherwise to be a hearer only and not a doer carries rather severe eternal consequences. And as I’ve reviewed the stunning research we’re about to consider today from report number four, that’s how you’ll find it in American Worldview Inventory 2026.

That’s what you look for. And you go to that website. I came to an indictment of our culture that should serve as a massive wake up call for our nation, particularly in this historic semi-quincentennial year, our 250th. And that urgent application I think is found within the title I’ve chosen for today’s broadcast and that is this, A Nation of Idolatry and Dead Faith America at 250. And with that short introduction, I’d like to welcome again, Dr. George Barna. George, thanks for being back with me again. What we discuss is so critical and vital, but it’s great to have you back.

George Barna:

Well, I appreciate the opportunity. I always look forward to these discussions.

Sam Rohrer:

George, in this particular research release, I’ve noted that you and your team have emphasized more than one issue. You often do because it’s so applicable, this data, what good data does. And you’ve made more than one application. For instance, in just your summary titles and introductory paragraphs, there are references to people’s attitudes toward faith, toward God as creator, the human condition, God’s word, life, abortion, the sacredness of life being made in God’s image, life’s purpose, the supernatural, including the nature of God, the holiness of Christ and the existence of the Holy Spirit and Satan. So you have covered a lot, but that shows to me the critical nature of this particular research. Would you begin by giving an overview of this particular research and indicate what you personally found to be, let’s say the most significant findings overall in this particular report, number four?

George Barna:

Sure. I mean, if we look at the big picture of what we were trying to do with the research, I’d say it was organized around two mega themes. One was people’s beliefs and behaviors related to the natural, particularly humanity. And then second theme would be our beliefs and behaviors related to the supernatural, what external beings, what supernatural beings do we believe exist and what do we believe about those? And in each of those two areas, the natural and supernatural, we had a variety of points of view that we were examining. When you asked me, well, what would be the overview or general outcome? I would say I’m just shocked by the depth of our spiritual depravity in America. This isn’t news. I mean, before me, George Gallop Jr. And his father before George Gallop Sr. Measured some basic elements of faith in America. When I came along in the 1980s, I thought, gosh, if we could only take it deeper, try to have different types of research that would be applicable to people’s lives, in addition to measuring the standard things about church attendance, Bible reading, whether you thought you were a Christian or not.

And so we’ve been doing that. And so for 40 years, more than 40 years, we have all of this data and it is consistently shown that we’re moving ourselves toward the cliff and preparing to jump off if we haven’t jumped off already. So when I look at these things, I mean, in the research in this report, which is just a part of this larger research project we do, the American Worldview Inventory, we’re looking specifically at seven questions about beliefs related to the natural and seven questions related to the supernatural. And in each of those two cases, we have a majority of Americans who have a biblical view on only one out of the seven questions for both the questions about the natural and the supernatural. And Sam, I think what blows my mind the most is the velocity with which we are moving away from biblical truth.

Now, since I started measuring this when I was in grad school back in the 70s and early 80s, we saw that, okay, yeah, there’s a little erosion going on here, but I mean these last 10 to 15 years, we’ve seen the velocity of movement away from God, away from his truth really pick up steam to the point where now we’re at only half of Americans even believe that the God of the Bible exists. We look at so much of what I would call the syncretistic delusion where we now think we are the only ones who can identify truth. We have no accountability other than to ourselves. We’re not passing on the Christian faith to the generations that come after us. And I think this is all part of Satan’s strategy. I can’t speak for him. I don’t want to speak for him, but it just seems to me that at one point he realized it’s going to be virtually impossible for these Christians on earth and particularly in America.

In America, you got 265 million adults roughly. What if each one of them had a unique worldview, a unique philosophy of life? You can’t really attack that very efficiently. And so rather than saying, “Yeah, I want everybody to buy into Marxism because it’s a godless, hateful philosophy.” He’s gone to syncretism and that’s what we’re resting with now and it’s not a pretty picture.

Sam Rohrer:

Ladies and gentlemen, I hope that this introduction with Dr. George Barna today is intriguing this first segment. Stay with us. Our theme today is a nation of idolatry and dead faith America at 250. George is talking about this falling away very fast. Well, exactly how does it quantify? What’s it mean? We’ll talk about that in the next segment. Stay with me. Well, welcome back to this second segment now of our conversation with Dr. George Barna, Director of Research at the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University. George, we look closer at the current report number four of the American Worldview Inventory 2026, which ladies and gentlemen, you can find in its entirety and all of the worldview inventory all the way from 2020, you can find at the website of culturalresearchcenter.com. I encourage you to go there and do that. But George, I found the statistics regarding our nation’s attitudes toward life and abortion as exposing a terrifying, I’m going to put, I don’t know what adjective I best use, but a terrifying spiritual reality.

For instance, this current research when I looked through it shows that, ladies and gentlemen, listen to this 57% of Americans while that number acknowledge that they are created in the image of God, you could say only 57%, that’s incredible, but say 57% of Americans acknowledge that they are created in the image of God and incredibly measly 27%, less than half of that actually believe that human life is sacred. You get what I’m saying, ladies and gentlemen, listen to that. 57% of Americans acknowledge they’re created by God. That’s not a good number to begin with, but an incredibly measly 27% actually believe that human life is sacred and equally abysmal 27% believe that life has no intrinsic value at all. Consequently, now get this 52%, only 52%, that’s a majority, that is a majority, 52% majority now view abortion as morally acceptable. And in a bizarre thought process, George, I’m thinking that through, this majority, the 52% acknowledges a creator, but ladies and gentlemen, figure this, but they reject his authority and ownership over creation making themselves in essence little gods.

George, having walked with the Lord for over 64 years now, that’s me in my life. I trusted the Lord when I was seven years old. I’ve served as a minister of God and government for 18 years. I’ve preached multiple places around the world and with that perspective, I look at these numbers and I confidently conclude that we are not moving to a dangerous position as a nation, but we’re already there fully captive to a dead faith and as I look at scripture, idolatry, institutionalized, even worse, I am seeing no evidence of shame or remorse. And when I studied scripture, it’s clear to see that the shedding of innocent blood in scripture is never a political issue. It’s always the direct fruit of false worship. Ladies and gentlemen, Psalm 106, if he’d go there and look at it, go back and read that chapter, God there explicitly fuses, connects these sins together declaring that when his people served pagan idols, idolatry, they immediately proceeded to sacrifice their sons and daughters to demons and to shed innocent blood.

Idolatry and scripture always demands sacrifice to a false God, whether Molech of old or the modern idols of comfort, control, and personal pleasure. George, I don’t know how else to describe where we are, but I was struck in a significant way by these findings. Would you expand upon these staggering findings? Walk us through the data, help us understand the profound connection between what these people are saying, the murder of the unborn, the contradictory positions held by people on matters of life and death and connected to idolatry, because it’s all connected biblically

George Barna:

Yeah, it’s an interesting view of that, Sam, that I think you’re putting on the table for consideration. Again, I’m trying to understand what’s Satan doing here, what’s the strategy, what’s the game plan? I mean, he’s a false God and yet he’s convinced most Americans, frankly, to reject the true God and at the same time he’s not trying to get us to embrace him as the true God, not yet. There’s a little bait and switch that’s going on here where we’re rejecting the true God, but we’ve taken over that true God’s throne. We now have substituted ourselves, I think you called it little gods or something like that. I mean, that’s kind of what’s going on and on route to doing that, I believe what Satan has accomplished is injecting a whole new value system into our culture. And so at the core we no longer believe in the God of the Bible, no longer believe that God is truth.

We no longer believe there is any absolute moral truth. We don’t believe that life itself is a gift, that it has inherent value instead we become very self-centered. Now it’s all about us and what we, not even what we think so much, but we’ve moved rationality to the side of the table and what we’ve put in its place is emotionality and so now it’s about our feelings. We feel pretty good about ourselves. And so when I look at all the data here, do people believe that we’ve been made in God’s image?

Yeah, a lot of them do. Well, that’s a fascinating contradiction because at the same time they’ll say that. They also say, “But I don’t believe in the God of the Bible.” On the one hand they’ll say, “Well, humanity is morally fallen, needs to be saved.” And yet most of us in America don’t believe that we’re born into sin. Most of us in America would say that Jesus was human and therefore he sinned. Most Americans have chosen not to rely upon Christ as their savior. They’re not born again. A large majority of Americans believe that all people are basically good. Well, how does that square with this idea, but wait a minute, we’re falling and we need to be saved. And then we say, “Well, yeah, all people are basically are essentially good and how do we reconcile that with the high and rapidly rising levels of anxiety and depression and fear and suicide attempts and cultural dissatisfaction and divorce and child abandonment and the list goes on and on and on.

All those numbers are growing at the same time. We’re pretty good. What’s the problem here?” Because we’re looking at ourselves as God’s, we’re in charge of our destiny, we’ve got it all figured out. Really the only consistency is one that you touched on and it’s possibly the most tragic one of all and that’s us believing that life is not sacred, that it’s intelligent, it’s wise, it’s rational, it’s reasonable to support abortion. What a slap in the face of the God who gave us this life that even allows us to think those thoughts, to feel those emotions. It’s horrific. And so what does this have to do with idolatry? Well, we basically abandon the idea that the God of the Bible is real, that he’s in charge, that he knows everything, he can do anything, that in this daily ongoing spiritual war with Satan that he ultimately is going to win, which he will, but we don’t think about that and if we do, we tend to reject it.

And so at the same time that we reject the God of the Bible whose handy work is evident all around us, every moment of every day whose miracles we can see occurring in our lives, around our lives if we have the eyes to see. Instead, what we’ve chosen to do as one of the things this report shows is that a large number and a growing number of Americans are attributing spiritual aliveness, spiritual life to things like wind and water, the air, you

Know, rocks, animals, growing numbers of Americans admit that they’re not just worshiping the God of the Bible. The numbers who are worshiping the God of the Bible are on the decline. The numbers who say they’re worshiping some other supernatural force are increasing and so you look at this and you can’t help but conclude that we have become so self-centered that we’ve rejected the place of humility and repentance and confession and obedience and gratitude which need to be front and center if we’re going to experience the great life that God has in mind for us, which is why he gave us the Bible, not as a bunch of don’ts, but instead as a bunch of do these things and it will go well for you. Do these things and when you come before me for final judgment, I’ll be able to say, well done, good and faithful servant, but in America today I fear that there are not nearly as many people who are going to hear good and faithful servant as get out of here.

I don’t know you.

Sam Rohrer:

You know, George, we’re about down to this segment, but it reminds me as you’re describing that of what the book of Romans in chapter one talks about whereas you said the hand of God is visible all around us and will witness against us, ladies and gentlemen, but when we choose not to worship God as creator, we instead begin to worship the creation of God. And George, that’s what we’re talking about. That’s what the research is indicating, not moving toward this position, but firmly in that position when you look at these statistics, now when we come back, we’re going to continue our discussion on this, a nation of idolatry and dead faith America at 250. Next time we’re going to look at this area about faith, dead faith, dead faith.

Well, George, as we continue here, and again, ladies and gentlemen, if you’re just joining us, we’re midway through the program. Dr. George Barna is my guest again today and as we do nearly every month and have done for a long time now, is releasing and commenting on analyzing a particular report. This now being today report number four from the American Worldview Inventory, it’s called 2026. You can find 2020 one, two, three, four, five those past years, you can find them all on the website at culturalresearchcenter.com and I’ll encourage you to do that. And when you find those, if you do that, if you’re led to do that because you have interest, if you coordinate by finding a program which you will find one of these programs stand on a gap today, normally every one of those will have a program like we’re doing today that will connect with one of those, maybe not all of them, but just about all.

And then you can kind of compare what we’re saying in conjunction while you’re looking at that survey. A lot of people are uncomfortable looking at survey information. It’s not one of those things you just read, you have to kind of read with a certain level of understanding about it, but if you do it in this fashion, I think it would be very helpful. Now the emphasis today, I’ve entitled A Nation of Idolatry, we’ve talked about that a little bit in the last segment, and then dead faith, a nation of idolatry and dead faith America at 2:50 and saying, “What better time to take stock of where we are as a nation than now and looking at it in light of this research that George, you’ve been doing for 40 years, it’s a wealth of information.” So anyway, based on that, when I was looking at it, I was once again struck by the staggering contradictions in the worldview of the American people where on one hand, people loudly acknowledge God and even God as creator, as we talked about in the last segment, yet simultaneously deny that life is sacred or connected to that, that Jesus lived a sinless life.

I mean, it doesn’t make sense that these things can go together, but yet they are and people feel comfortable with it. This reminds me once more of the accuracy of the Apostle Paul’s statement in two Timothy three: five where he declared as in our days talking about having a form of a godliness, but denying the power or the authority thereof, meaning people say they’re godly, they can talk about Christ, they can call themselves a Christian, but they deny that Jesus was God. You perfectly diagnosed George, I think, this spiritual schizophrenia, which is what it is in your report when you wrote this, “This glaring gap between claimed faith and actual faith is at the heart of my latest report, the one we’re talking about. ” You go on to say, “My research shows that American Christianity is increasingly feelings-based rather than truth-based, producing believers whose lives and convictions are largely indistinguishable from those of non-Christians.” You go on to say, “In fact, more than nine out of 10 Americans operate from a syncretistic worldview, blending elements of Christianity with contradictory beliefs rather than a consistently biblical one.” All right, ladies and gentlemen, you can see the problem and so George, expand upon your faith comments relative to claimed faith versus actual faith and this glaring gap that you’re talking about.

Talk about that.

George Barna:

Yeah. Sam, it’s interesting because when I was analyzing the research and writing the report, one of the things that came to mind is a favorite quote of mine from Abraham Lincoln and he was in a cabinet meeting at one point, at least this is how the story goes and they were arguing about something or other and apparently in Lincoln’s eyes at least they were distorting the truth of the matter. They had some facts and figures, some knowledge, they didn’t like it so they were kind of making up their own version of reality and Lincoln apparently stood up and he looked at everybody and said, “Friends, just answer me this. How many legs does a dog have if you count its tail as a leg?” And cabinet members look around and he said, “Well, this is stupid. Five.” And then he says, “No, he has four.

Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.” And that story came to mind because I think that’s what’s going on in America today where we’ve got people who are only too happy to go around and say, “Well, sure, I’m a Christian.” See, because one of the things that I’ve found in our research over the course of the last few years is that people think they are good, but they need a label that’s going to give them some humility cover if you will,

Where they don’t come out sounding arrogant. So what do they do? They’ve chosen this label. “No, I’m a Christian.” And what that means is I’m a good person. Now it has nothing to do with the person of Christ and what he did for us and what he taught us. So today in America we’ve got seven out of 10 adults who call themselves Christian, but how many of those have not only acknowledged that they’re a sinner but they’ve gotten on their knees and wherever and they’ve begged God through Jesus Christ to forgive them for the fact that they are a sinner, that they don’t have any eternal hope other than what Christ can give them through his substitutionary death by his taking on our sins. How many have done that? Well, less than half of the number who call themselves Christian and then let’s take that percentage who we might call born again Christians, those people say, “Look, my eternity is secure, but not because of anything I’ve done.

I’m a wanton sinner. I needed Jesus to save me and I’m repenting and I’m trying to turn my life around so that I honor God and please him.” How many of those people who are about one out of three adults in America actually meet the qualifications that Jesus gave us as disciples, people who would obey his teaching would love other disciples, produce spiritual fruit by making more disciples always put God first in their life, submit their own agenda or get rid of their own agenda and submit to God’s agenda and surrender everything in life to no love and serve God with all the hormone strength and soul. Well, we’re talking about one out of every 25 adults in America. I would say as we think about America 250, the people who sweated, they sacrificed, many of them died coming over here or once they got here they died defending what they came here for, which was the freedom to know, love and serve the God of the Bible and so that was a big deal to them.

They so passionately wanted to be a disciple of Jesus. Today we got one out of every 25 Americans who take that on. Why is that? Well, partly it’s because of such widespread biblical illiteracy. Partly it’s because of our rampant disobedience, our unwillingness to change our lives that might be a bit uncomfortable to us or it might not give us the pleasure, the satisfaction, the happiness that we’re looking for. We’d rather do our own thing than worry about God’s thing. And frankly, what all of my surveys are showing is so much in the way of spiritual indifference. Let me tell you, you put together

Biblical illiteracy, rampant disobedience, spiritual indifference, that’s a deadly combination. And so if we were to take a medical analogy here, when you feel sick and you think there’s something that’s significantly wrong, you may go to a doctor and what do they do? They test because they want the facts and then based on the facts they’ll come up with a prescription and that might have some remedies then that you have to follow through on. That’s critical that follow through that application and yet if we look at America’s spiritual health today, we are not spiritually healthy. What we do is we reject diagnoses like this one. I talked to a lot of groups of people. I just got off the road. I was on the road three weeks talking about these things. People say, “Well, yeah, maybe with some people, but not with me, not with my church, not with my family, not with my friends, not with my community.”

And so we’re not even willing to sit down and pray through and ask for the Holy Spirit’s guidance on, “Is this true of me, Lord? Is this true of my family? Is this true of my church? What can I do about that? I don’t want it to be like that. ” We reject the measurements, we reject God’s word, we reject the truth and instead we insert our feelings. So if you’re driven by feelings of faithfulness to the God or the Bible, what are you going to do? Those things that Jesus told us make us a disciple. You’re going to obey, you’re going to love, you’re going to reproduce There’s that obedience and love of God in other people, i.e. Make other disciples, you’re going to always seek God’s will first above and beyond anything else that you could ever conjure up and you’d be willing to do anything to please him and honor him and follow his ways.

But instead what the research is clearly showing is that in America today what we have is a nation of people who have placed self above God, we love other people but only if they love us first. And our primary goal is to feel happy, safe, and comfortable and secure. And that’s not what God put us on earth for. He tells us, “You know what? You may have to sell out to me and be persecuted for it and that’s okay because I will take care of you. We’re not buying it. ”

Sam Rohrer:

Ladies and gentlemen, we started the program talked about James 1:22 to 25 where James there talks about looking into the mirror of God’s word, the only place of unchanging truth and then walking away saying, “Well, no problem with me. ” If that happens, there is no life within. Serious condition very much like the data is suggesting. Stay with us, we’ll come back, we’ll conclude the program. Well, as we go into our final segment here today, I hope and pray that you’ve been with us since the beginning of the program. And if not, please go back and listen to all of this together, standinthegapradio.com run or stand in the gap app. Listen to this program again. You can get the transcript there and consider the research, which I gave you the link to where you can go to get that. Our commentary, Dr. George Barna and myself today, because as we consider the research that George has done for 40 years and that which was just done and available here in report number four of the American Worldview Inventory 2026, it causes us, well, if we have eyes to see and ears to hear to not just ignore, but we got to act accordingly.

We’ve got to do something about this information. That’s what good research does. That’s what the word of God is and the research is not equivalent to the word of God, but the research measures attitudes that the word of God says those who fear God should have and be able to measure it. So these are things are connected, everything we’re talking about, but I can listen to it. But as we’ve reached this end of today’s program, this is my analysis. I’ve already shared some of it, but I’m going to give just a little bit of it again here. And then George, I’m going to ask you to, well, then take what’s been said and put it all together and deliver a final challenge to our listeners. But I find that these findings, my analysis of this report number four, demands a sobering conclusion like looking in the mirror of God’s word.

We’ve got to do something with it. And this is my conclusion. America is in extreme peril. We can console ourselves that, well, all things are getting better tomorrow it’s all going to be better or that we’re … Well, we’re a little off track but not that bad. We’re not a nation simply sliding in the wrong direction. We’re already a condemned nation captured by idolatry. We defend the gods of this world having rejected the God of creation as proven by observation, just look around us, but also by this data. Our spiritual condition, I think mirrors two Timothy three: five of a people flaunting a form of godliness but denying the power thereof. Many who say they’re Christians, but clearly in name only. While 70% of our citizens claim the Christian label, their functional convictions reveal a dead faith. We just talked about that. And when a majority reduce human life to a commodity of personal convenience, our societies exchanged biblical truth for feelings based syncretism idolatry.

There is no other way to define it. And I think this profiles and positions the United States exactly as Israel of old when God pronounced judgment on them, when God declared through as in Hosea four: six, he said, “My people are destroyed for a lack of knowledge because they have rejected knowledge.” God said, “I’ll also reject you. ” And he did. God cannot remain just and judge ancient Israel while making an exception for America. And it’s clear that this lack of knowledge is not an absence of access. It’s not like we don’t know the truth or can’t get it. It’s a deliberate rejection of truth and that’s what Romans chapter one talks about. When 52% of Americans normalize abortion, we mirror the ancient idolatry condemned in Psalm chapter 106 where spiritual adultery, which is the same thing as the essence of idolatry, inevitably culminates in the shedding of innocent blood and even more by rejecting the holiness of Christ and the reality of the Holy Spirit, which we didn’t even talk about, but as evidence in this report as well, America embodies the lukewarm end times church of Laodicea, who if you read there in Revelation three, that church thought herself rich and in need of nothing, but Jesus said they were spiritually destitute, naked.

At 250 years old, our crisis I believe isn’t political or economic, although it is those things. It’s more so a crisis of worship. We’re a nation and peril consoling ourselves with the phrase, “In God we trust, while literally sacrificing the unborn on the altars of modern idolatry and I believe when we look around, we are reaping to ourselves the consequences of our pride. That’s my analysis. Now, George, those are my summary thoughts to your research. Add to that whatever you want, but then what would be your concluding comments to our nation as a whole and the church in America specifically as we are now into and celebrating our 250th anniversary?

George Barna:

Well, I think what you said was great, Sam. I know you like to end the program with applications and so let me just jump to some things that occur to me. I mean, clearly America needs a spiritual revolution, but I think just as clearly what many Christians are doing is waiting for somebody to come along and lead that revolution. And it took me many, many years to realize it’s not about waiting for somebody else to get in the front of the parade. That spiritual revolution needs to start with me. It needs to start with you. Each of us individually needs to take responsibility for our commitment to God and his kingdom, the resources and experiences and relationships, everything he’s given to us to prepare us for such a moment as this. And so I think it’s incumbent upon each of us to take an inventory first of all of our own beliefs and behavior

Because that’s what comprises our worldview and that’s what determines whether or not we’re going to become a disciple because you do what you believe, which means first you need to think like Jesus so that then you will act like Jesus. And so we’ve got an assessment people that can take that will help them to figure out where they’re at. But once you do that self-evaluation, then we’ve got to remember right now that culture is influencing the church of Christ more than the church of Christ is influencing the culture. That’s what we’ve got to turn around. So one way of doing that would be by looking at things like this research and saying,” Well, okay, yes, we need to clean up in the house. I love the fact that your book is about renewal. It’s not talking about revival. Renewal has to happen within the church before we can go outside and revive the culture.

So once we renew the church, what do we do? The research talks about various segments of the population, the don’ts, the non-Christians, Catholics, Asians, homosexuals, people under the age of 40, people living in New England as well as New York and California who consistently resist the things of God. What if each of us who wanted to serve God well, what if each of us who was willing to be a revolutionary to bring the kingdom of God more appropriately to America identified one or two of the people who are in those categories who are rejecting this and we said, “They’re my project. I’m going to love them into the kingdom of God and so I’m going to connect with them and build a relationship. I’m going to pray morning, noon, and night for them. I’m going to model for them what the Christ life looks like and it’s through that love and that commitment that they will be changed.

I’m not going to do it. The Holy Spirit’s going to do it through me when I give myself over to God for these purposes, but I don’t know that we have enough, but I do know because I do the research. We don’t have enough Christians in this country who have that mindset. We’ve fallen for the cultural narrative of, oh, those are the bad guys. They’re the enemies. They’re not like us. No, they’re not. And it’s our job to help them not become like us but to become like Christ. Hopefully we’ve become like Christ and if we can lead them in that process, that’s what brings spiritual renewal to our culture.

Sam Rohrer:

Dr. George Barna, thank you so much for being with me today. This report and all can be found culturalresearchcenter.com. Ladies and gentlemen, ultimately remember, when we stand before the Lord, we can’t blame anything on anybody else. It’s what we choose to do.