The very first freedom guaranteed within our very first individual right is that of religious liberty. It was no accident, no matter of happenstance. Our Christian forefathers fought and died for that right, were burned at the stake for it, were drawn and quartered for it.

And yet today, we willingly squander it.

A recent poll by the Pew Research Center downplays this reality. Its headline reads: “Decline of Christianity in the U.S. Has Slowed, May Have Leveled Off.”

“After many years of steady decline,” Pew writes, “the share of Americans who identify as Christians shows signs of leveling off — at least temporarily — at slightly above six-in-ten, according to a massive new Pew Research Center survey of 36,908 U.S. adults.”

Don’t believe it.

The survey, called the Religious Landscape Study, is massive in scope. This is the third time in 17 years it’s been conducted, each time with more than 35,000 randomly sampled respondents. The findings are, frankly, depressing — unless you can find a silver lining in the trend outlined below:

The first RLS, fielded in 2007, found that 78% of U.S. adults identified as Christians of one sort or another. That number ticked steadily downward in our smaller surveys each year and was pegged at 71% in the second RLS, conducted in 2014.

The latest RLS, fielded over seven months in 2023-24, finds that 62% of U.S. adults identify as Christians. That is a decline of 9 percentage points since 2014 and a 16-point drop since 2007.

It’s not just that our nation’s Christian numbers are declining; Christian practitioners are also declining. Among that 62% who describe themselves as Christian, only a third attend religious services even monthly, either in person or online.

What happens when a people forgoes its Christian faith? We can get a good sense of this by peering across the pond. All across Europe, our decadent, self-loathing, post-Christian brothers are failing to reproduce and failing to defend their Western heritage. In Germany, the equivalent of the country’s Democrats and Republicans are colluding to ward off a conservative uprising in their recent national elections. And in Great Britain, the politicians are whitewashing the gang rapes of their young, working-class white girls by Pakistani men — all to hide the disastrous reality of their failed experiment in multiculturalism.

As John Daniel Davidson writes at The Federalist, “If America loses the Christian faith from which our system of government is derived, we will lose everything that makes America what it is. All of the rights and freedoms we enjoy, the rule of law, the checks and balances on government power, all of that will disappear.”

When it comes to the decline of Christianity in America and the dark days this decline foretells, Davidson knows of what he speaks. After all, he wrote the book on it.

“Put bluntly,” he warned a year ago, “America is becoming pagan. That doesn’t necessarily mean a sudden surge in people worshipping Zeus or Apollo (although modern forms of witchcraft are on the rise). Rather it means an embrace of a fundamentally pagan worldview that rejects both transcendent moral truth and objective reality, and insists instead that truth is relative and reality is what we will it to be.”

Ask yourself: Why are human rights different than the law of the jungle, than the “rights” enjoyed throughout the animal kingdom? Where, for example, did those Ten Commandments come from, anyway? The answer is that they were divinely inspired. They’re the “transcendent moral truth” that Davidson is talking about. And when those truths go away, as they inevitably do in a pagan society, that society goes out of business. Davidson adds:

The radical moral relativism we see everywhere today represents a thoroughly post-Christian worldview that is best understood as the return of paganism, which, as the Romans well understood, is fundamentally incompatible with the Christian faith. Christianity after all does not allow for such relativism but insists on hard definitions of truth and what is — and is not — sacred and divine.

The American Experiment is a moral one, a fundamentally Christian one, and it can only be carried forth by a moral people. As Davidson writes, “As Christianity fades in America, so too will our system of government, our civil society, and all our rights and freedoms. Without a national culture shaped by the Christian faith, without a majority consensus in favor of traditional Christian morality, America as we know it will come to an end. Instead of free citizens in a republic, we will be slaves in a pagan empire.”

Where did America come from, and what made it special? Alexander Hamilton put it magnificently, writing that “the sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments.” Instead, “They are written, as with a sun beam, in the whole volume of human nature by the hand of Divinity itself.”

When he spoke of the Divinity, Hamilton was speaking of the Christian God specifically. That was the God our Founders worshiped. That was the God whose people built this country, this last best hope of mankind.

Unless we correct course, our pagan lurch will continue. Unless we come to realize that our Christian heritage is worth defending, embracing, and reinvigorating, our slow but steady descent into darkness will continue.