Two think pieces on changes in American religious life, with a few political twists

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.

Emerging split inside old mainline: Is U.S. Christianity becoming two different religions?

THE QUESTION:

Is Christianity in the United States becoming two different religions?

THE RELIGION GUY'S ANSWER:

If the question above seems off the wall, at least look why it has arisen.

Two years ago, The Guy wrote that he was quite astonished by some survey research reported in "The Twentysomething Soul" (Oxford University Press) by Tim Clydesdale of the College of New Jersey and Kathleen Garces-Foley of Marymount University.

Young Americans age 30 and under, quizzed about religion, were asked how they think of God.

One option was "a personal being, involved in the lives of people today." It doesn't get any simpler or more basic than that, whether you're Jewish, Christian or Muslim. Other choices were some impersonal "cosmic life force," or a deistic creator who is "not involved in the world now," or that God does not exist.

Not surprisingly, the evangelical Protestants were virtually unanimous in embracing the first definition. But remarkably, only half of those in the predominantly white, theologically pluralistic "mainline" Protestant church bodies made that choice, while 40 percent favored the vague "life force." Young adult Catholics fell in between the two Protestant groups. (In this random sample, 30 percent were evangelicals, 18 percent Catholic, 14 percent "mainline" Protestant, and 29 percent with no religious affiliation.)

The Guy therefore posed the question whether Protestants' long-running two-party rivalry "could be evolving toward a future with two starkly different belief systems."

Now a more radical version of that scenario is explored at book length in "One Faith No Longer" (New York University Press) by Baylor University sociologist George Yancey and Ashlee Quosigk, a visiting scholar of religion at the University of Georgia. More info here.