Many Canadians have left Christianity--or simply ignore it as irrelevant. In 1991, 82% of Canadians identified in some way with the Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox faiths. By 1996, the figure had fallen to 68%.

Canada's largest Protestant church, the 1.9-million-member United Church of Canada, is in turmoil after a newspaper quoted its leader as saying that Jesus is not God. Asked about heaven and hell, new moderator Bill Phipps said, "I have no idea if there is a hell. I don't think Jesus was that concerned about hell. He was concerned about life here on earth. … Is heaven a place? I have no idea." Phipps also said, "I don't believe Jesus is the only way to God. I don't believe he rose from the dead as scientific fact. I don't know whether those things happened. It's an irrelevant question."

Large-scale rejection of Christianity has resulted in "enormous cultural change" as Christian values have faded in government, education, and the media, according to a report prepared for evangelical Protestant leaders.

"God in the Netherlands," a national symposium, found that secularism has infested society and the church. The Roman Catholic Church is the strongest denomination, but even in that church many have abandoned church teachings, according to a Dutch cardinal. Less than one-third of those asked said they believe the Bible is the word of God.

The Church's total population in England and Wales has fallen by an estimated 250,000, while weekly Mass attendance is down by nearly 25,000 people. The figures are a sign that increasing numbers are going to church once a fortnight, once a month or hardly at all. In six years, the proportion of the Catholic population attending weekly Mass has fallen from nearly a third to a quarter. Scotland is facing a similar decline. According to the Right Rev. Ambrose Griffiths, Bishop of Hexham and Newcastle, the situation is dire. "In our diocese, church attendance has been going down on a straight-line graph for the last 25 years." Extrapolating from that, the Catholic church in his diocese would cease to exist by 2028.

LONDON -- More than 70 serving Anglican priests are members of an organization that does not believe in the literal truth of the Bible, the existence of God, or the resurrection. The clergymen have joined Sea of Faith, an organization which dismisses the traditional beliefs in God. Instead, it believes that God is a mystical and personal experience which has no physical incarnation.

Sea of Faith, which started in the early 1980s, has grown in the past few years and now has a membership estimated at 800. Among clerical sympathizers are Roman Catholics as well as ministers from evangelical Protestant denominations.

When asked how in conscience he could prepare his people for Christmas while not himself believing in the virgin birth, one clergyman, who asked not to be identified, said: "I wouldn't tell people that Father Christmas didn't exist -- it's the same as that."

"Most Europeans are 'post-Christian,'" Assemblies of God European director Greg Mundis said. Agnosticism, atheism, materialism, and nihilism keep millions of people from recognizing the truth of Jesus Christ, he said. "In France there are more witches than Bible-believing preachers," Mundis said.

I am haunted by the penetrating truth and significance of a "one minute" statement recently made on the floor of the House of Representatives by James Traficant, a Democrat from Ohio:

"Mr. Speaker, students in Alabama are skipping school, protesting the fact that they are not allowed to pray. Think about it. Even though America has guns, rape, drugs, even heroin and murder in our schools, students are not allowed to pray. Unbelievable! A school without prayer is a school without God. And a nation that denies prayer is a nation that denies God. And a nation that denies God is a nation that just may welcome the devil."

Traficant concluded with these biting remarks to his colleagues: "Members of Congress, the Constitution may separate church and state, but the Founders never intended to separate God and the American people. I yield back any common sense and logic we have left."

The Founders were trying to protect people from a state-mandated religion; they were not trying to impose secular humanism or New Age idolatry as a mandatory system of unbelief.

Today God is tolerated as long as He stays in His place and doesn't cause trouble for proud and practicing heathens or for statists [those who advocate highly centralized governmental control] who lay first claim to the allegiance of American citizens.

Children get the idea quickly; they understand the schools wouldn't go to such pains to prevent their exposure to something "good" or "helpful."

In one class, we tell our children the universe began by accident with some sort of explosion or "Big Bang." Life began billions of years ago as a result of some random and pointless chemical reaction.

In the next class, having laid the foundation by announcing the universe is not rational, life has no purpose or meaning and the womb of humanity was a puddle of primeval slime, we set about teaching our children self-esteem and respect for life--and wonder why it doesn't take.

By retreating from God, we have advanced His enemies. Our culture, books, movies, art and music are a unified chorus of smut and antisocial messages. Television glamorizes criminals, adulterers and perverts, giving them celebrity status.

Muddled messages from our schools, sick images from our culture and soggy sermons from our pulpits are destroying what few vestiges remain in our society of the common sense produced by clear minds and the moral discernment provided by uncluttered consciences.

Without religion, we descend to that place where human conduct is judged not by what is right and wrong, but by what is legal and illegal. We replace the human conscience with the law, the Bible with a law book. Man, not God, is in charge.

We are in imminent danger of becoming a nation of people with no view of ultimate accountability, whose tolerance for wrong has given wrong dominance, and for whom the only crime left is the crime of getting caught.