The Coming Evangelical Collapse?

This opinion piece appeared in yesterday's Christian Science Monitor and has been generating a lot of discussion. Personally, I think it is overstated and the timeline too short, but the basic trends that he describes are true. Here's a section that caught my eye and made me glad that we are welcoming a new associate pastor this week who will have as one of his primary ministries our youth:

We Evangelicals have failed to pass on to our young people an orthodox form of faith that can take root and survive the secular onslaught. Ironically, the billions of dollars we've spent on youth ministers, Christian music, publishing, and media has produced a culture of young Christians who know next to nothing about their own faith except how they feel about it. Our young people have deep beliefs about the culture war, but do not know why they should obey scripture, the essentials of theology, or the experience of spiritual discipline and community. Coming generations of Christians are going to be monumentally ignorant and unprepared for culture-wide pressures.

I trust that, by God's grace, this will not be true of us.