Below are this week's Articles of Interest as compiled by Mr. Van Baker. This collection of articles is cultivated by Mr. Baker with the goal of highlighting some of the trends, upheavals, and things to watch for in our society. These articles are not necessarily the express views of the United Church of God, Mr. Baker, or me as the pastor, but they are informative of what is occurring in our nation and culture. In accordance with Christ's warning to correctly discern the times (Matthew 16:1-4), it is wise to be aware of what is going on around us. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Global Christian Decline – A newly released map shows a decline in the number of nations where Christians are in the majority. While most countries still boast Christian majorities, there was a noteworthy decline from 2010 to 2020, according to data just published by the Pew Research Center, which found the U.K., France and Australia no longer qualify as majority Christian countries.
https://www.faithwire.com/2025/08/04/global-christian-decline-new-data-exposes-alarming-trend-worldwide/

U.S. Divorce Rate at 50-Year Low – New research from the Institute for Family Studies suggests marriage is making a comeback. Specifically, divorce is down and the share of kids being raised in married families is up, especially among black families.
https://ifstudies.org/press-release/divorce-rates-are-at-a-50-year-low

Pro-marriage groups divided on latest divorce stats – In apparently good news, divorce rates are arguably at historic lows, with the 2023 figure being the third lowest since 1971. However, it should be noted that this may be simply because people are not getting married in the first place - marriage rates are half of what they were 50 years ago.
https://christiantoday.com/news/pro-marriage-groups-divided-on-latest-divorce-stats

How America Losing Religion Is Hurting the Birth Rate – The United States is one of many countries struggling with declining birth rates and this is partly because more people are abandoning religion, population and religion experts told Newsweek. There are many reasons for people all over the world having fewer babies, and Newsweek has reported on the economic pressures making parenthood difficult. But "there's no question that growing secularization is another factor in falling fertility, both here in the United States and across much of the globe," demographer William B Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project, told Newsweek.
https://www.newsweek.com/less-religion-less-babies-declining-birth-rate-2110254

THE TROUBLING DECLINE IN CONSCIENTIOUSNESS – Of all personality types, conscientious people tend to fare best on a number of key measures. They live the longest, have the most career success and are less likely to go through divorce.. Intuitively, this makes sense. Life isn’t just about knowing what you should do, or having the resources to do it, it’s about following through. Being motivated and persistent is a huge help. Some studies suggest the advantage of conscientiousness is growing over time, and it’s easy to imagine why. When contemporary daily life is full of temptations... the ability to ignore it all and put long-term wellbeing ahead of short-term kicks becomes a superpower. Generative artificial intelligence could supercharge this dynamic. All this makes it disconcerting that levels of conscientiousness in the population appear to be in decline. Extending a pioneering 2022 US study which identified early signs of a drop during the pandemic, I found a sustained erosion of conscientiousness, with the fall especially pronounced among young adults. Digging deeper into the data, we can see that people in their twenties and thirties in particular report feeling increasingly easily distracted and careless, less tenacious and less likely to make and deliver on commitments. [article is behind a paywall] 
https://www.ft.com/content/5cd77ef0-b546-4105-8946-36db3f84dc43

This question will change the way you read your Bible – Let’s just be honest: some books of the Bible are hard to read through. Really hard. In fact, some parts of the Bible can be downright boring. (Is that wrong to say? Well, it’s too late to take it back now.) But there’s a question we always ask ourselves as we read our Bibles: “What does this mean to me?” It’s a fair question. Application is important. “What does this mean to me?” is a question we all ask either consciously or subconsciously as we’re reading through Scripture. As I neared the end of the book [2 Chronicles], I found myself unsatisfied with uncovering any practical applications. There seemed to be no great answers to the question of “What does this mean to me?” So, I decided to change the question. Instead of asking what 1 and 2 Chronicles mean to me, I decided to ask: “What do these books mean to God?”
https://www.christianpost.com/voices/this-question-will-change-the-way-you-read-your-bible.html

The day God scares people to death – We flippantly talk about being “scared to death” like it can’t happen, but under the right conditions, yep, although rare, you can keel over just like, particularly if you have underlying heart conditions. There’s a place in the Bible that talks about it being very real and on a global level when, one day in the future, God will literally scare people to death. Today, we naturally look to the book of Revelation for instruction on what to expect in the future, but we forget that much of the same content is found in the Old Testament. As you’d expect, both the Old and the New Testaments tell the same story about everything, including a coming universal panic attack that will be so powerful that people will drop dead from it on the spot. In Revelation, that future terror is found in Chapter 6 with the breaking of the sixth of seven judgment seals...
https://www.christianpost.com/voices/the-day-god-scares-people-to-death.html

Today’s fitness tracker is tomorrow’s surveillance leash - Predict. Punish. Comply. Welcome to the Future of Health Surveillance – The surveillance state has a new disguise: public health. From wellness trackers to wearables, we’re entering a world where biometrics are being weaponized to monitor, profile, and control the populace.
https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/the_wearables_trap_how_the_government_plans_to_monitor_score_and_control_you

The New Nostalgia - Longing for authenticity, Gen Z is romanticizing a pre-Internet era they never knew – It is of course true that each era experiences a crisis about the new wave of tech destroying people’s souls— when it wasn’t the Internet, it was TV [or automobiles], or the radio, or the printing press, even papyrus scrolls; nostalgia is common across every generation. But I don’t think any previous generations were ever so down on their own era, in such large numbers, to the point they’d erase its major salient feature. We feel nostalgic for a world that can’t be brought back.
https://archive.is/J69zo

AI can write you a new Bible. But is it meaningful? ChatGPT just wrote a sacred text for Buddhists — and it exceeded expectations.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/440950/ai-chatgpt-bible-religion-spiritual-buddhism