Religious leaders recently expressed how there is a brewing “crisis” of faith in America. Over the past few decades Western culture has demonstrated a declining affiliation with religion as society becomes increasingly secular and distance from the Christian foundations. Reverend A.R. Bernard, Rabbi Joseph Potasnik, and Cardinal Timothy Dolan recently sat down to discuss the issue.
“Getting along is a lot easier than we think it is,” Sheen Center Executive Director MaryLou Pagano claimed. “They really care about interfaith events. They care about being diverse, but getting along. And there’s no better time than right now.”
“I think we have a crisis here,” Rabbi Postanik weighed in. “But we have an opportunity. Many of these young people don’t walk through the front door of the house of worship, but they will walk to a food pantry. They will do something to help others. And they’ll say, ‘I’m not religious, I’m spiritual.’ And we try to say to them, ‘what you call spiritual, we call religious.’”
“When you feed the hungry, help the poor and do something to rehabilitate someone else, that’s religious,” Potasnik noted, outlining the importance of faith. “At the end of the day, it’s what you do, not what you say, because belief is measured by behavior.”
Rev. Bernard of the Christian Cultural Center spoke about the importance faith and voting saying, “The message of Jesus transcended the political landscape of his time, and it transcends the political landscape of our time..The reality is that we live in this world, and we are affected by policies, systems, structures and practices. And we need to respond. And we respond through vote. And when we think about voting, we are actually giving power to someone to make decisions about our quality of life and the future of our nation, so we should take it very seriously and imagine a nation that’s consistent with our key principles of human dignity and common good.”
The Christian Tribune previously reported on the warning from Calvin Robinson, a Catholic priest who warned about the decline of Christianity in the West. “We’re starting to see the bad fruits of that. And so, without our Christian moral compass, without our Christian values, without our Christian ethics, without any of that, we are grasping at straws. And this is why we’re seeing some woke ideologies temporarily take the place of what used to be Christian,” he said.
Warning that trends in “These kinds of trends are happening in the States, too, I think,” he said. “Be careful. American culture is a fantastic culture. Hold on to it, promote it, encourage it. If you want to become multicultural and let other cultures in, that’s something you have to consider. But do not give it up to the detriment of your own.”