Sermon Illustrations on united states

The United States retains a basic respect for religion though it may be following European trends: surveys show a steady rise in the “nones” (now one-third of those under the age of thirty), that is, ...

The United States is undergoing a marked change in its attitude toward religion, and Christians here face new challenges. When a blogger named Marc Yoder wrote about “10 Surprising Reasons Our Kids Le...

In his thought-provoking book, Twelve Lies That Hold America Captive, Jonathan Walton uncovers some of the hard truths about American culture. In this excerpt, he describes the consumption associa...

The wall Jefferson referred to is designed to divide church from state, not religion from politics. Church and state are specific things: the former signifies institutions for believers to congregate ...

Many people have misinterpreted the separation of church and state to mean that religious views shouldn’t play a role in public discussions and lawmaking. Someone might say, “We shouldn’t restrict abo...

During much of the twentieth century, the aspiration of most middle-class Americans was to own a home and a car. Now more than two out of three Americans own the homes in which they live. (In fact, so...

Religion has always been woven into American politics. John Quincy Adams liked to read the Bible in the mornings and would plunge naked into the Potomac for a swim before attending his weekly Sunday c...

Did you know the United States once had an emperor? Believe it or not, it’s true – at least, it was in the rather confused mind of Joshua A. Norton. Norton lived in San Francisco during the gold-rush...

The United States is now the most anxious nation in the world.” (Congratulations to us!) The land of the Stars and Stripes has become the country of stress and strife. This is a costly achievement. “S...

Even more germane to the concerns of this book, it is important to remember how the American concern for enumerating Christian work can look to non-Americans. Kanzo Uchimura (1861-1930) was a Japanese...

By many accounts the first Muslim in America was Estevancio of Azamor, a Moroccan guide for a Spanish expedition in 1528 that landed in Florida. A couple of centuries later, as many as a third of the ...

Dutch social psychologist Geert Hofstede measured individualism and collectivism across people from fifty-three nations. He found the three most individualistic nations in the world were the United St...

I am always intrigued by how few Americans know the account of what has been called the most important unknown moment in American history and the single most important gathering ever held in the Unite...

According to the World Health Organization, one in thirteen globally suffers from anxiety. In the United States, one in five adults have a mental health condition. That’s over forty million Americans;...

To illustrate how the racial oppression of previous generations has benefited European Americans, we can look at the fate of Native Americans. When Europeans arrived in North America, Indians owned al...

Jim Clifton, CEO and Chairman of Gallup, points to the shrunken GDP (gross domestic product) of the United States and the vast shortfall in new job creation. What is the solution? He writes, If you w...

Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for y...

A radio conversation between a US naval vessel and Canadian authorities off the coast of Newfoundland. Americans: Please divert your course 15 degrees to the North to avoid a collision. Canadians: R...

While I was sitting at a stoplight a few blocks from my [Emerson’s] home in Minneapolis, reflecting on the recent rash of drive-by shootings in the area, three African-American teens clad in the urban...

In March 2009, we received the results from the widest religious survey conducted in the United States, the ARIS (American Religious Identification Survey) study. There is much to gain from this repor...

When Frederick Douglass asked his famous question, “What to a Slave Is the Fourth of July?,” he didn’t simply ask a question about the United States of America . He asked a question about Amer...

In 1830, the Indian Removal Act led to what’s known as the Trail of Tears, in which almost fifty thousand indigenous people were removed from the southeastern United States and relocated west of the M...

The day after Christmas would normally have been a quiet day in Washington, D.C., above all on Capitol Hill. But December 26, 1941, was different. It was only nineteen days after the Japanese attack o...

The Latin root of curiosity means “cure,” which makes me wonder if it isn’t a way to heal some of our oldest sicknesses. Like, perhaps, the “amnesia of affluence” that theologians point out in the Bib...

In the fall of 1986, just out of college, I set out to hitchhike across the northwestern part of the United States. I’d hardly ever been west of the Hudson River, and in my mind what waited for me out...

We have the same biblical texts that earlier generations of Christians thought their way through, of course, but our reflections are shaped by six unique factors. (1) Especially in the Anglo-Saxon wo...

Sometimes, older relatives find it hard to grasp the success of their younger family members. Shortly after Woodrow Wilson’s victory in the 1912 election, he visited his elderly aunt. “What are you do...

Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States, once visited the Great Pyramid of Giza as part of an official state visit. When visiting the Great Pyramid of Giza, he was told it had taken twen...

There has been a paradigm shift going on in neighborhoods in the United States since the end of WWII. For decades before the 1940s, neighborhoods were places where people were known and were active. W...

President Harry Truman placed on his desk in the Oval Office a sign that said “The Buck Stops Here.” The sign had to do with a saying that was popular in his day: “Pass the buck,” which meant to shirk...