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America has become a hindu nation

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Ask any young person if there is more than one way to get to God and you are likely to hear the answer “yes.”  Although Jesus said, “No man comes to the father except by me,” that’s not what most Americans and especially young people believe. Every year the people we accept on our AIM progra…
By Seth Barnes
By Seth Barnes
Ask any young person if there is more than one way to get to God and you are likely to hear the answer “yes.”  Although Jesus said, “No man comes to the father except by me,” that’s not what most Americans and especially young people believe. Every year the people we accept on our AIM programs have a more relativistic and less biblically-informed perspective.
 
A recent article in Newsweek describes how, though we say we are Christians, in fundamental ways, what we believe is actually more Hindu in its outlook than anything.

America is not a Christian nation. We are, it is true, a nation
founded by Christians, and according to a 2008 survey, 76 percent of us
continue to identify as Christian (still, that’s the lowest percentage
in American history). Of course, we are not a Hindu-or Muslim, or
Jewish, or Wiccan-nation, either. A million-plus Hindus live in the
United States, a fraction of the billion who live on Earth. But recent
poll data show that conceptually, at least, we are slowly becoming more
like Hindus and less like traditional Christians in the ways we think
about God, our selves, each other, and eternity.

A Hindu believes there are
many paths to God. Jesus is one way, the Qur’an is another, yoga
practice is a third. None is better than any other; all are equal. The
most traditional, conservative Christians have not been taught to think
like this. They learn in Sunday school that their religion is true, and
others are false. Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.
No one comes to the father except through me.”

Americans
are no longer buying it. According to a 2008 Pew Forum survey, 65
percent of us believe that “many religions can lead to eternal
life”-including 37 percent of white evangelicals, the group most likely
to believe that salvation is theirs alone. Also, the number of people
who seek spiritual truth outside church is growing. Thirty percent of
Americans call themselves “spiritual, not religious,” according to a
2009 NEWSWEEK Poll, up from 24 percent in 2005. Stephen Prothero,
religion professor at Boston University, has long framed the American
propensity for “the divine-deli-cafeteria religion” as “very much in
the spirit of Hinduism. You’re not picking and choosing from different
religions, because they’re all the same,” he says. “It isn’t about
orthodoxy. It’s about whatever works. If going to yoga works, great-and
if going to Catholic mass works, great. And if going to Catholic mass
plus the yoga plus the Buddhist retreat works, that’s great, too.”

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