A professor that I respected came out with his history of Christianity. He mentioned Latourette's POV, how Christianity on planet earth has gone through cycles (like a sine wave) up & down. But Robert Culver had a different POV. He took a piece of chalk and drew a horizontal line on the board & followed it up with an eraser! His POV was that in region after successive region on earth,
1) Christianity is planted,
2) Chrsitianity grows,
3) Christianity flourishes,
4) Christianity is extinguished,
5) Christianity never again has much significant presence in that region (hard soil).
An example of this for him would be North Africa, where there was much professed Christianity before the Moslems came & stamped it out.
Perhaps Great Britain with its empire is another example & the USA now. Already the USA is having missionaries come here!
Maybe the next nations that will have the flourishing will be Russia & China.
On the USA my POV is that since the 1950's like tares & wheat both Christianity and humanism have grown side by side, with the public political scene more & more dominated by humanism to the point that now we have Sodomy getting special privilege and baby-murder abounding. From all appearance Christianity has lost the cultural war. Christians are an inch way from prison terms for not cooperating with sodomists.
Here is how I compare the 1950's with now, as I see it:
In the 1950's in some states the Bible was read by law in the schools every day. In Georgia the students took turns reading a passage each morning. The culture was professed Christian many places, but there were not many actually saved. The populace endorsed Christ & the Bible in general, but they were dead spiritually by vast majority, even if they went to church. There were not many Christian radio stations, no Christian TV, Christian music was mostly a choice between classical sacred and the old hymnal.
Since that time, Christian radio has flourished, Christian publishing has flourished, Bible study has undergone great advancement with programs like Accordance & Logos. Christian contemporary music has produced really great praise music. The Christians are more identifiable, believers vs unbelieving humanists.
IMHO, we live in the overlap of the Philadelphia Era (Open door for evangelism) and the Laodicean lukewarm, Christ on the outside knocking to get in era, of dead Christendom.
My guess is that the Rapture will happen soon and the USA will be destroyed as when Lot left Sodom. But who knows the plans of the Lord & His timing?
Does anyone realize that the Clinton era was an era of Southern Baptists in charge; yes, both Clinton & Al Gore, southern baptists (I believe)? But the Southern Baptists are hardly a unified fundamentalist denomination. But what is the religion now of our leaders???