Hindu temple backpedals after erasing Lutheran church from website
Pastor: Secularism not Hinduism is the 'biggest threat to Christianity in North Texas'
As for the future, a number of demographic changes that were already gaining momentum before the pandemic — including the number of Indian-Americans statewide topping 434,000, or roughly 1.5% of the entire population of Texas — have only served to expose what White says was a trend that has been well underway for years: the unchurching of North Texas.
In fact, for White, the biggest threat to Christianity in the region isn’t from other religions or immigrants from other nations and cultures.
“My honest opinion is Hinduism is not the biggest threat to Christianity in North Texas, nor in Frisco, nor in my community’s life,” he said. “It’s secularism.”
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Before the pandemic, explained White, the stress of what he called “people being pulled in all kinds of other directions” has gradually been building in the Church, particularly in North Texas, where football and other sports are a priority for so many young families.
For example, he said, many of the families at Rejoice Lutheran are involved in club sports which often play on Sundays, which White said not only lures people away from regular attendance to church, but keeps them from rites of passage like church confirmation, where middle-schoolers can dive deeper into the fundamentals of the faith.
“That used to be on Wednesday nights,” he explained. “Any of our students who are involved in the band or were involved in any kind of athletics were being told, 'well, you have to show up at this Wednesday night practice, or you don't play on the next game.’
And then came the coronavirus pandemic of 2020.
“Rejoice navigated COVID really, really well,” he said. “But I don't know of any church that wasn't impacted by COVID and by the way in which it pushed us more into the digital sphere, but it also got a lot of people out of the practice of being at church on a regular basis.
“…Again, maybe I'm naive, but I'm less threatened by Hinduism than I am by a lot of other things that are going on in our society right now.”
Ian M. Giatti is a reporter for The Christian Post and the author of BACKWARDS DAD: a children's book for grownups. He can be reached at: [email protected].
