September 14, 2023 - 10:00am
The US is unusually religious by Western standards, but that is changing fast. To understand what’s really going on — and what it might mean for the country’s politics — we need to look under the hood of America’s apparent secularisation.
The key fact which is ignored is that there are millions of Americans who used to be regular churchgoers, but who have now stopped. In a new book, The Great Dechurching, Jim Davis and Michael Graham put the number at 40 million. This is, they write, “the largest and fastest religious shift in US history”.
It’s easy to craft a liberal narrative here: under the growing influence of university education, younger, smarter Americans are turning their backs on the Right-wing evangelicalism of earlier decades and embracing secular modernity instead.
But in explaining the flight from the churches, Davis and Graham worked with social scientists Ryan Burge and Paul Djupe. Their key findings, based on 7,000 interviews, confound the conventional wisdom.
For instance, though young adults (18 to 30-year-olds) are most likely to break their churchgoing habits, this is not because they’ve been educated out of their faith. Rather, it is those with the most education in this cohort that are the least likely to quit (and who are also the most likely to go to church).
In any case, loss of faith is by no means the only reason why people stop going to church. Davis and Graham point out that among people quitting evangelical churches, levels of conservative religious belief remain high.
So if religion isn’t the problem, what about politics? With important exceptions like black-majority churches, American Protestant Christianity does indeed lean to the Right, so it would be reasonable to conclude that this is repelling moderates and liberals. Yet this is hardly the whole story because, according to Davis and Graham, “evangelicals are dechurching at almost twice the pace on the right political flank than they are on the left.”
“Dechurching” is a complex phenomenon, which has more to do with shifts in everyday lifestyle than the fallout from the culture war. Think Bowling Alone, not the Handmaid’s Tale. As Davis and Graham observe of America’s absent evangelicals, “more than half […] are willing to come back right now”. They just need better churches.
Until then, there are millions of non-college-educated Americans whose religious and political views put them at odds with the secular liberal establishment, but who lack strong institutions of their own.
If the Democrats are hoping to harvest their votes, they’re likely to be disappointed. Indeed, the dechurched find themselves in diametrical opposition to Joe Biden. According to Ryan Burge, no recent US president is more regular in his church attendance than the current occupant of the White House — and yet his administration is slavishly aligned to the extreme social liberalism that dominates the Democratic Party.
As for who might benefit from the rise of rootless conservatism, look no further than Donald Trump. The televangelist era of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robinson may be dead and buried, but that doesn’t mean that America’s lost sheep are looking for a liberal saviour.
Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.
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SubscribeThe Catholic church under Francis seems captured by Woke-ism.
For my sins I once got onto an LGBT Catholic mail list – I’ve left three times, but they keep recreating the list and rejoining me to it.
Nothing could make me want to remove myself from a religion faster than this nonsense.
Perhaps this trend of leaving the ‚church‘ does not necessarily mean leaving faith. The last few decades has been marked by such a pervasive ‚business style‘ model of church growth and practice in evangelical churches that doubtless leaves younger people disenfranchised and like ‚cogs in a consumer system‘. I’d be questioning too wether the church has strayed from being simple gatherings of love and service to franchises driven by ‚success‘. I hope a generation of younger believers can discover and form gatherings that are honest, reflective and take seriously what it means to have Christian faith.
It’s interesting to note that the further modern liberalism infects Christianity, the less compelling the claims for Christianity are. I’ve never really understood why the church chases the woke with woke-lite. The only way to capture the woke on their own terms is total abandonment of the gospel. Surely it’s better (and more honest) to simply exposit biblical Christianity, remain true to the Jesus of the gospels and let the Holy Spirit do what He will.
It’s also worth pointing-out that the bible itself says that the only way to God is through His Son and few find that way. It seems rather unbiblical to worry that church attendance is dipping below, say 30-40%, when anything like that figure means (in biblical terms) that most of those in the pews aren’t on the way.
Discuss…
You have got it exactly right. So many churches stand for nothing
“‘Dechurching’ is a complex phenomenon, which has more to do with shifts in everyday lifestyle than the fallout from the culture war. Think Bowling Alone, not the Handmaid’s Tale. As Davis and Graham observe of America’s absent evangelicals, “more than half […] are willing to come back right now”. They just need better churches.”
This strikes me as a really important element of this analysis. The stale narrative is that gay rights and evolution and friendly Buddhists have convinced American Christians to abandon their faith. But this article makes it clear that this is about something else altogether: what fellowship, community and personal relationships look like in a post-COVID social-media-saturated world, a world where work has invaded every moment of the day, where traffic congestion and kids’ schedules and working moms and all the other features of modern life, have made it more and more difficult for people to maintain ‘voluntary civic associations.’
Good point. This is also true for allegiances to other civic associations, like political parties, unions, etc. Numbers are down across the board as compared to the past. It is not just a religious-related phenomenon.
The really weird thing is that atheism has split into two.
Over Jesus, of all people. You couldn’t make that up.
There’s a whackjob ‘Jesus Mythicist’ faction – which is more or less an anti-religion, since it believes in demonstrated falsehoods, and has a lot of people in it who are openly mad.
They have a kind of childlike & ‘Christlike’ tendency to want to exhibit their mental health wounds.
If you give these guys attention (and I don’t advise giving them much) they think it means you’re taking them seriously, when hopefully, you’re studying their narcissism and working out how that works into some of the puzzles around their stories and their positioning.
And there’s another faction which is worried that Jesus-mythicism makes atheism look like a clown car, and which has become interested in the historical Jesus, or at least the environment that resulted in him.
This tendency could resolve in a lot of interesting ways – one of which might be a kind of secular cult of Jesus or more likely, a philosophy which unapologetically deploys the Christian cultural inheritance.
Didn’t Nietzsche, hardly a fan, say Christ was probably the strangest person who had ever lived?
I think you might be on to something with the second group. In recent conversation with some in their early 30’s and in their 20’s, I think there is a growing group who see Jesus as a representation of how to live a moral life that they don’t see in a lot of the dominant culture of the West. They don’t have a lot of regard for the modern Church, but they are also repelled by modern culture that pushes the pursuit of money, porn and trans.
I think the church is a busted flush.
It’s interesting – well some churches are – but not in a way that relates much to the fact of Jesus being historically interesting and an enigma.
I’m in my 40s but I would say this describes me quite aptly too.
Your depiction of atheism as having “split into two factions” is a typical misunderstanding of the term, so i’ll just say that atheism isn’t about following the “factions” model of religious belief that those who subscribe to it can’t seem to be able to comprehend.
It’s wonderful that you have an opinion, Steve.
Take it out for a walk sometime.
Preferably not near an abyss in high winds, because we wouldn’t want it to come to harm x
Yep, lack of comprehension.
Atheism isn’t an opinion, however much you might wish it otherwise; rather, a deeper understanding of the world that requires no myths to underpin it.
Furthermore, i’ve stared into your “abyss” and i’m not afraid of it.
Well said Steve Murray. Gave you thumbs up on this and the previous post.
Jesus came for the sinners not for the righteous.
Julian, you are correct. As a pastor who has attended larger churches and pastored smaller rural ones, I’ve seen the opposite too many times. It’s about the cliques and committees rather than the lost or the sick. But after attending a small church (subsequently affirming my calling) that put the cliques on notice and pared down the committees to those dealing with the missions work i.e. food, clothing, & housing, as well as calling all to repentance I knew what the church should look like.
And by church, I’m referring to the bride of Christ, not the local brick and mortar building.
Does the second group have a name? If I wanted to do research, what would I google?
I don’t know since they’re a tendency within atheism, more a faction, not a group – they have come about due to the intransigence of the other grouping.
They would say they prefer to treat Jesus’ historicity like that of any other historical figure.
I don’t know how to categorise an ardent belief in the non–existence of a person when the proof indicates it is more likely he existed? It’s certainly more fictive, isn’t it? Certainly their stance is adamant and more intolerant.
The head of the Australian Atheists, a guy called Tim O’Neill, with his website, ‘History for Atheists’, champions the pro-history, anti-Mythicist view. It’s gained broad support.
Not all of those on his side think the same thing . . . it’s more they want a refuge from what they’d say are unreasonable, loopy dogmatists.
And as I said, the negative insistence on the non-existence of someone who did exist, seems to go along with some very strange positive beliefs as well. Some of them are crazy-8 bonkers.
I thought that, in this day and age, there is no doubt that the Jesus story is a myth. The many aspects of the myth are all borrowed from many pagan religions.
The pagan borrowing thing is long gone. It just doesn’t hold.
I don’t think there’s any major historian who seriously argues Jesus did not exist as a historical figure.
Absolutely false
I don’t think there’s too much debate as to whether Jesus existed, I think it’s fairly settled that a man called Jesus was crucified by the Romans. The debate revolves around whether people believe the miracles he supposedly performed
Within atheism there are ‘faithful’ who argue strongly that he didn’t. They seem invested in his non-existence, creating a strange paradox where it’s now non-belief that requires the leap of faith.
They have little support from any serious historians however.
You’re right, there’s sufficient evidence that there was a preacher called Jesus, who was executed. it’s insane to say it didn’t happen . . . you’d have to deny the existence of Hannibal, Caesar Tiberius, lots of people, if you can’t accept what historians of the era say- who are non-Christians for the most part.
Whether you believe Jesus’ miracles or not, Jesus was a living person who, as you stated was crucified. However, if you believe in God, do you believe He has the power to resurrect Jesus and take him to heaven?
I am not American. But I do know about the world in general, past and present.
Past – the only way to meet people was to go out. Churches were a great meeting place, when people spent the rest of the week working.
Present- most meeting is done via screens. You don’t need to go out on Sunday to prove that you’re still alive.
Conclusion – don’t try to relate everything to politics. Consider instead how many people visit online churches.
Valid points. The social aspect was very important when i was growing up; many married couples met either at their church or church-related activities.
“American Protestant Christianity does indeed lean to the Right, so it would be reasonable to conclude that this is repelling moderates and liberals. Yet … ‘evangelicals are dechurching at almost twice the pace on the right political flank than they are on the left.’”
Seriously? The truth is that the mainline Protestant churches were captured by liberal Progressivism decades ago. Google the activities of the National Council of Churches.
Yes, but the quote refers to Protestant Christianity in general, not mainline Protestantism. And there are more evangelical Protestants in the U.S. than mainline ones. And the evangelicals lean right.
Writing in the early 20th century Gramsci defined the route necessary in order to impose socialism (marxism) across the West:
“Socialism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity. … In the new order, Socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches, and the media by transforming the consciousness of society.”
Yes, there is a reason why mainstream media and education are called The Cathedral.
I don’t mind reading short articles; in fact, I prefer them as long as they tell me something. But this short article is not worth reading — the equivalent of click-bait. It calls for “better churches”, without any further explanation except for a link to an article in The Atlantic — access to which is refused to those unwilling to be put on that magazine’s mailing list. Forget it! What a waste of time.
archive.today usually works for the Atlantic.
Around here, a mission of ‘how to raise brave, unfragile children’ is attracting young people.
Very interesting. Thank you.
From what I’ve read, it is young people, college and not, who are leaving the evangelical churches because they are uncomfortable with the dogmas. Most are still believers. What I don’t understand is why they don’t attend main-line churches (Methodist, Lutheran, Episcopal, etc.) Some are dogma-free, some are more to the left and some are more to the right. Most of them are NOT crazy, and they don’t focus on cultural issues and politics (which should cause them to lose their tax-free status).
This is not right. Mainline Protestant denominations are at the forefront of social and political activism – certain no less than evangelical denominations are, and by my reckoning much more so.
The phenomenon of “still believing but uncomfortable with dogma” sounds like someone whose faith was built on quicksand. What is belief but dogma? Faith is subscription to the unprovable… there’s nothing more dogmatic than that.