As Religion News Association colleagues vote on the top stories of 2021, here's The Guy's own pick for first place: Gallup spotlights the great downward Church Lurch in 21st Century America.
The polling organization, which is unmatched for data on trends that span decades — including a steady barrage of questions about religion — marked the Easter and Passover seasons by announcing that only a minority of Americans report membership in a religious congregation any longer.
Yes, yet again we confront those religiously unaffiliated "nones,” “nothing in particulars” and the long-emerging flock often called “spiritual, but not religious.”
The much-buzzed-about poll report, full details here, said membership rates held remarkably steady from the 73% in Depression-era 1937, when the question was first asked, through 70% in 2000. But now, self-reported affiliation has plummeted to 47% -- and a mere 36% for younger Americans in the Millennial generation. Equally significant, a three-year aggregate of 6,000 respondents in 2018-2020 also gave membership minority status at 49%.
This slump drew attention from media that rarely mention much less cover religion substantively. Assessing the many reactions, GetReligion boss Mattingly's post back in April — “Thinking with two key Southern Baptists: Concerning those scary Gallup Poll numbers” — astutely focused on two pieces by Baylor historian Thomas Kidd and the Rev. Russell Moore, who was soon to quit as president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. They analyzed Protestantism with little specific to Catholicism or other faiths. Links to both articles are included in Mattingly's post.
Note that responses in 2000 would not capture the potential negative impact of COVID-19 — which was hurting attendance and donations — on future membership counts.
So, what's happening?
Kidd so clearly summarized the "why" factor that The Religion Guy has little to add except that Kidd may downplay how strongly younger Americans spurn commitment, traditional authorities and any demands made upon their lifestyles, time and money.
Also The Guy might put even more emphasis on the way the Birth Dearth underlies the Church Lurch. The U.S. marriage rate is falling and childbearing appears to be permanently stuck below the population replacement level. This automatically undercuts the way Americans used to turn or return to church participation as they settled down and raised children. And there are simply fewer future parishioners being nurtured in religious congregations.
Mattingly's crisp summation of reality: Churches will grow or at least hold steady if their members have children, raise them in the faith such that they retain religious loyalty into adulthood and are able to win converts -- which "has more to do with doctrine than politics."
Kidd's observations on the pitfalls of polling about religion are worthy of reflection by news personnel. Putting that aside, his main point is that religious membership has been moved toward the cultural margins. Time was that people "assumed that you should be a church member to be a good citizen and a good American, even if a person is not particularly devout." Most younger people no longer think that way. In other words, "a lot of the church decline has to do with the death of cultural Christianity."
This is not particularly healthy for society. It "may encourage increasingly prominent cultural roles for rabidly anti-Christian views" that harm American cohesion and toleration. There's also the dwindling of well-documented "social capital" that local congregations provide -- fellowship, stability, moral education, charity services and even psychological and physical well-being.
So membership decline, with no turnabout on the horizon, will very likely cost the culture. But what about Christianity?
Kidd contends that the big slump is not all that damaging to authentic faith because what should matter is not mere numbers on the rolls but active, devoted and "regenerate" Christians. "If nominal, utilitarian, civil-religious 'Christianity' is mostly what's fading away with the cratering of American church membership, then I say good riddance."
Neither Kidd nor Mattingly discussed whether many citizens disgusted with Donald Trump and his support from, especially, evangelical Protestants is a factor in church decline. This is explored by Moore, who defied fellow Southern Baptists and boldly criticized the former president on moral grounds.
Moore, now a public theologian with Christianity Today magazine, recounts that even as a troubled teen he disliked the way fellow Baptists in the South fused biblical belief with conservative Republican politics and too often gave priority to the latter. Further chastened by the swirl of recent years, he sees mounting evidence that much of the religious shrinkage Gallup and others document "is accelerated and driven, not by the 'secular culture' but by evangelicalism itself," through scandals, moral hypocrisy and politicization.
"We are losing a generation -- not because they are secularists, but because they believe we are. What this demands is not a rebranding, but a repentance -- meaning, as the Bible does, a turnaround. Stranger things have happened. …”
FIRST IMAGE: Uncredited illustration with a post at the American Atheists website.