Outspoken American conservative Pat Buchanan has written a column arguing that the status of the United States as a "Christian nation" is on the decline.
The column, which has been posted on Townhall on Tuesday, cited statistics from the Pew Research Center survey about the decline of Christianity in the United States. Buchanan contended that the "mainline churches appear to have made themselves irrelevant to America's young."
"The decline in Christian identity is greatest among the young," Buchanan wrote, citing statistics from Pew. "While 85 percent of Americans born before 1945 still call themselves Christians, only 57 percent of those born after 1980 do."
Buchanan thought that the future of Christianity in the U.S. would play out similar to Europe; he noted the fact that traditionally Catholic Ireland legalized same-sex marriage in a landslide vote. He argued that there were several causes behind the formation of a "de-Christianized America."
"High among them is the Supreme Court, which, since the Earl Warren era began, purged Christianity from all public schools and the public square -- and has been met with a puzzling lack of resistance from Middle America to the secularist revolution being imposed upon it," Buchanan wrote.
Buchanan then blamed the "anti-Christian elite" for assaulting "Christian beliefs and morality" through "the arts, elite universities, popular culture, [and] the media." As a prominent member of the Republican Party, He also elaborated on the changes that took place in the U.S. during the 1960s, which he termed as a "social revolution."
"The counterculture of the '60s would be used as a foil to build 49-state landslides for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, but then the '60s views and values were embraced by the elites and came to dominate the culture in the time of Bill and Hillary Clinton," Buchanan wrote. "Given his baggage, 'Slick Willy' of Yoknapatawpha County would have been a comic figure in the 1950s. Today he is the Democratic Party's beau ideal of a statesman."
Buchanan noted that many churches have tried to reconcile with the "cultural revolution."
"The results were irrelevance and scandal -- too many Elmer Gantrys in televangelist pulpits and too many predators in priestly cassocks," Buchanan wrote.
Buchanan then went on to decry marriages that end in divorce, a lower birthrate, children born "out of wedlock," "soaring crime rates" and "deadly STDs" as reasons behind America's decline. He argued that "as Christianity dies, individualism, materialism and hedonism replace it."
"Historically, as the faith dies, the culture and civilization to which it gave birth die, and then the people die," Buchanan wrote. "And a new tribe with its own gods comes to occupy the emptying land."
The columnist then argued that Christianity played an integral role in the United States and Western culture.
"Christianity was the founding faith of the West," Buchanan wrote. "That faith and the moral code and culture it produced once united this disparate and diverse nation and civilization."
Buchanan then wondered what will hold the U.S. together now, given that he thought Christianity would "recede into irrelevance" in the future.
"Economically, we are dependent on foreigners for the necessities of our national life," Buchanan wrote. "Our politics are poisonous. Our racial divisions, once ameliorated by shared belief in the same God and Bible, are rawer than they were in the 1950s. As for equality, diversity and global democracy, who will march and die for that?"
Buchanan ended his column with a quote from historian Arnold Toynbee.
"Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder," Toynbee said.
