A FAITH THAT HAS TO BE CHOSEN

A Spiritual Portrait of America at 250

America turns 250 years old this July. For those of us who love both this country and its Lord, that anniversary invites more than celebration. It invites honest reflection on where we’ve been, where we are, and what faithfulness looks like from here.

Here is something most Americans don’t know: when the founders signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776, only about seventeen percent of Americans were formal members of a church. They were Christian in conviction, in language, in the rhythms of the week. But on the membership rolls, they were a minority. The faith that built this nation was not a comfortable majority faith. It was something that one chose, something costly, something that had to be lived out deliberately against the grain of a culture that did not require it of anyone.

What happened next was extraordinary. By the postwar revival of the 1950s, somewhere between ninety and ninety three percent of Americans claimed membership in a Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox denomination. It transitioned from being a nation of scattered, undersupplied frontier congregations to one in which Christian identity was simply assumed. This expansion of American Christianity across those two centuries was among the most remarkable religious growth stories in modern history.

Then, somewhere around 1990, a hinge turned. Christian identification fell from approximately ninety percent in the early 1990s to about sixty three percent today. Twenty four points in three decades. The steepest religious shift in American history. And yet the headline most Americans are reading — that Christianity in America is dying — is not quite right. It is reorganizing. The cultural Christianity of the 1950s, comfortable and assumed, is receding. Something older and more demanding is taking its place.

A faith that has to be chosen. That phrase matters because of what it implies. A chosen faith must be forged in the fire of intention: practiced daily, deliberately, in the company of God’s Word. Our own 2025 SALT Index, a nationally representative survey of more than six thousand U.S. adults, found that while sixty-one percent of Americans still call themselves followers of Jesus, only thirty-five percent read Scripture in a typical week, and only thirty-one percent have ever personally discipled another person. The gap between what people believe about the Bible and how consistently they open it is nearly twenty-seven percentage points, even among the most committed believers.

If one’s initial response to the gospel isn’t paired with intentional discipleship, it becomes a faith that is chosen once and then quietly abandoned. What the next two hundred and fifty years require, therefore, is not just Christians who “make decisions for Christ,” but Christians who are daily shaped by his Word into the kind of people who change the world around them.

This is what Back to the Bible has existed to do for eighty years. It is why we built the Back to the Bible Daily and Spiritually Fit Today podcasts: to give every believer, young or old, a simple and trusted daily pathway into Scripture. It is why we measure transformation rather than just reach, and why we invest in research that tells us whether lives are actually being formed, not just informed.

The founders did not build a nation on a single decision. They built it on daily conviction, sustained over decades, at enormous personal cost. The Christians who will shape the next two hundred and fifty years of this country will be built the same way — one morning, one passage, one act of obedience at a time.

Your partnership makes that possible. And on this two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the nation we love, we are grateful beyond words that you are in this with us.

DID YOU KNOW?

A little quiz for America's 250th

1. Which Bible verse is inscribed on the Liberty Bell?

   1. Psalm 46:1 — "God is our refuge and strength"

   2. Leviticus 25:10 — "Proclaim liberty throughout all the land"

   3. John 8:36 — "If the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed"

      
      

2. George Washington's first inaugural address contained no mention of policy, legislation, or political opponents. What was its primary theme?

   1. The strength of the new American military

   2. Gratitude to Divine Providence for guiding the nation's founding

   3. The importance of free speech and a free press

      
      

3. Frederick Douglass, the great abolitionist and former slave, drew his most powerful arguments against slavery from what source?

   1. The philosophy of John Locke

   2. The French Declaration of the Rights of Man

   3. The Bible, which he said condemned slavery as a sin against God and man