Big Changes for Black Friday…A new economy shows its power…and a new report shows the weakness and hope of religion in America.

Welcome to Black Friday – that day on the calendar when many retail outlets go into the black as the Christmas shopping season begins in earnest. Only this year – the lines outside stores where thousands wait for an item at rock-bottom prices has been replaced by looking at a computer screen.

During the COVID crisis, many companies made huge investments in their digital infrastructure so they could deliver goods and services directly to the homes of their customers quickly and efficiently. As a result, families purchased new services and gadgets to help them while they were sheltering in place.

While economic analysts for the National Retail Federation project a rise of somewhere between 20% to 30% in online sales, amounting to between $202.5 billion and $218.4 billion this holiday season, the fact remains, large portions of the American and even the global economy have shifted in only one year. The massive changes have taken place so rapidly that Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said on Tuesday to a group of business leaders at the Bay Area Economic Council in San Francisco, “We’re not going back to the same economy —we’re recovering, but to a different economy.”

Earlier this year, Lyman Stone, a research fellow specializing in demography with the American Enterprise Institute, released a report about the state of religion in America.

According to his research, religious life in America is declining very quickly.

Since 1960, the number of American adults attending a weekly religious service of worship has fallen from 50 percent to about 35 percent. Membership in a religious body has fallen from more than 75 percent to about 62 percent. Americans who identify themselves as religious has fallen from more than 95 percent to about 75 percent in just four decades.

In a recent podcast with The Gospel Coalition’s Collin Hanson, Stone also discussed research found in the report of a robust, growing, yet smaller, movement of serious Christians across the nation who were committing themselves to local churches.

He was quick to point out that throughout history, the ebb and flow of religion and its public effects on politics and education could be seen most clearly in the membership of local churches. When local churches grew and were strong, the impact was quiet, but influential. The stability of a local congregation investing over time in the lives of hundreds resulted in a widespread community impact for good.

Hanson and Stone agreed – the real impact of Christianity is best seen in a local church where the hardships of life are faced without fear because the community of that church assists in the work of child rearing, caring for the sick, and instruction in the teaching of the Bible. The bottom line: strong local churches make for a strong and lasting impact in the world. Stone’s report - Promise and peril: The history of American religiosity and its recent decline - is worth a look – you can find it at aei.org.