It’s time for another “think piece” weekend double-shot.
In other words, I want to point readers toward two different online features that, at first, may not seem to be related. However, when you look closer you can see the DNA that connects them.
The first is a blog post by my friend Rod “Live Not By Lies” Dreher, but I want readers to consider his post as a mere frame work around a blast of data from the Pew Research Center team. The headline on Dreher’s post states, once again, an old trend (think “Sheilaism”), but one that is being more — not less — important: “Christianity Declines — But Not ‘Spirituality’.”
Dreher points to this quotation from a recent Pew feature, which digs deeper into the center’s mine of religiously unaffiliated research:
The secularizing shifts evident in American society so far in the 21st century show no signs of slowing. The latest Pew Research Center survey of the religious composition of the United States finds the religiously unaffiliated share of the public is 6 percentage points higher than it was five years ago and 10 points higher than a decade ago.
Christians continue to make up a majority of the U.S. populace, but their share of the adult population is 12 points lower in 2021 than it was in 2011. In addition, the share of U.S. adults who say they pray on a daily basis has been trending downward, as has the share who say religion is “very important” in their lives.
Currently, about three-in-ten U.S. adults (29%) are religious “nones” — people who describe themselves as atheists, agnostics or “nothing in particular” when asked about their religious identity. Self-identified Christians of all varieties (including Protestants, Catholics, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and Orthodox Christians) make up 63% of the adult population. Christians now outnumber religious “nones” by a ratio of a little more than two-to-one. In 2007, when the Center began asking its current question about religious identity, Christians outnumbered “nones” by almost five-to-one (78% vs. 16%).
The recent declines within Christianity are concentrated among Protestants.
A trend this massive will affect almost every area of American life, including politics.
But, to state the obvious, this is a reality that religious leaders — local, regional, national and in some cases global — have to be taking seriously.
It will do no good, says Dreher, to deny the obvious or even to shoot the messengers:
America continues to transition to its post-Christian reality. … We in the churches still don’t know what to do about it. We have never before faced a crisis like this. Many believers want to console themselves by thinking that if we just double down on what we have been doing, all will be well. Many of those people, and others, think that if we can just gain political power and implement the program we want, that will turn things around. As I’ve said here before, I believe politics has to be part of any effective response, but it won’t solve the problem, or even come close. You cannot order people to believe in God. Despite what some fringe intellectual fantasists like to believe, the Grand Inquisitor Option is not a thing.
People want a silver bullet. There is no silver bullet. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t hope, and that we are powerless. It does mean, though, that we are going to have to be highly creative and motivated minorities.
One of the most interesting, and unexpected, developments is that in the US, relatively few of these people who are falling away from Christianity are becoming atheists. Rather, they are cobbling together a bespoke bricolage religion, one designed just for them. QAnon is a politicized pseudo-religion. There’s all kinds of lunatic syncretism going on.
There’s much more to read there, including in the Pew source.
However, let’s move on to the second article, published by The Gospel Coalition website: “3 Surprises from New Research on ‘Progressive’ and ‘Conservative’ Christians.” This focuses on research reported in a new book from New York University Press, which is (#DUH) not a right-wing or even an evangelical Protestant publishing company.
The title of the book is “One Faith No Longer: The Transformation of Christianity in Red and Blue America” and the authors are sociologist George Yancey of Baylor University and Ashlee Quosigk, a visiting scholar in the Department of Religion at the University of Georgia.
The thesis: Divisions between conservative and liberal Protestants have become so wide that churches on both side of this split radically different goals and approaches to core theological issues. The reality is two warring belief systems.
Obviously, this is going to affect how leaders in these two competing faiths view moral, social and political issues. Here is the first of two crucial chunks of material from this TGC essay, written by Trevin Wax, a visiting professor at Wheaton College.
First, the primary lens in this book is doctrinal, not political:
In defining conservative and progressive Christians, the authors use theological rather than political criteria. Individuals who believe the Bible is the inerrant Word of God and say Jesus is the only path to salvation are conservative Christians. Those who do not believe the Bible is the inerrant Word of God and do not see Jesus as the only path to salvation are progressive Christians.
The decision to define these groups by theological rather than political criteria is itself one of the areas where the differences between progressives and conservatives are most starkly represented. Everywhere we turn, we hear that conservative evangelicalism has become overly politicized and partisan, unable to speak to power prophetically. And we can certainly point to people and places where this has been the case. But we’re wrong to assume that the answer to this politicization will be found by turning to the Christian left. On the contrary, progressive Christians who fit this description are more, not less, politically minded than the conservative Christians.
Here is the key surprise: Conservative Christians are more likely to “defy political orthodoxy” within their camp, broadly define, than are their liberal counterparts.
But what about that whole “81% of white evangelicals just love Donald Trump” mantra?
Just look at the last five years to see this point proven. There was a virtual Civil War among conservative evangelicals when Republican Party orthodoxy became synonymous with Donald Trump and a host of positions on immigration, poverty, racial justice, and environmentalism.
Many conservative evangelical leaders pushed back, hard, at great personal cost, against “conservative political ideology” when they saw it in conflict with biblical teaching and values. Even now, you will find theologically conservative evangelicals with major disagreements on political policy.
Such is not the case for progressive Christian leaders. “The only political issue where multiple bloggers differed from the general political progressive orthodoxy was abortion,” the authors found, and even then, the pushback was light, as if designed to highlight the harmlessness of their dissent. Their conclusion: “There are more paths by which conservative Christians defy conservative political ideology than paths by which progressive Christians defy progressive political ideology.”
Now, think back to the Dreher piece and the Pew numbers. Evangelicals are losing some members into the new world of “nones,” “nothing in particulars,” atheist-agnostics and the religiously-affiliated — but the liberal and/or Mainline Protestants are losing way more.
Looking at the doctrinal divide described by Quosigk and Yancey — with its implications for politics — where are the new Sheilas most likely to go?
There are news stories there.