Evidence: The Decline of Christianity in America
NOTE: Davidson Loehr, who recently contributed a guest post, titled, Secular Religion, and I have been in communication re the decline of traditional religion and rise of secularism in America, as revealed by these USA Today charts and graphs. What follows was written by Davidson. It's an excellent summary of some of the data on this unmistakable trend. Also see the sermon of James A. Haught's that I posted a week ago, titled, America's Religious Decline & Secular Boom, as well as the late Michael Spencer's insider piece (Spencer was an evangelical) in the Christian Science Monitar titled, The Coming Evangelical Collapse (or his expanded version on the Internet Monk website). UPDATE: I also highly recommend the December 2010 article in Slate magazine: "Walking Santa, Talking Christ: Why do Americans claim to be more religious that then are?" and this post on a fundamentalist Christian website: "The Decline of Christianity in America."
Only about 18% of Americans attend any church regularly – 82% don’t.
From 2000 to 2005, overall church attendance declined in all fifty states. Even when broken down into subsets of “mainline,” “Catholic” and “Evangelical,” declines overwhelmed the infrequent small gains.
Growth or decline in percentage of population attending a church on any given weekend from 2000-2005[1]
State All Christian Churches Mainline Catholic Evangelical
1. Alabama -0.6% -3.3% +9.0% -0.9%
2. Alaska -7.9% -16.9% -13.7% -3.8%
3. Arizona -7.3% -17.6% -14.4% +1.5%
4. Arkansas -0.6% -7.1% +9.6% -0.4%
5. California -5.3% -13.2% -7.0% -1.8%
6. Colorado -3.3% -13.5% -9.2% +3.9%
7. Connecticut -13.4% -14.8% -17.4% +0.4%
8. Delaware -2.8% -6.4% +1.2% -4.1%
9. Florida -8.6% -13.8% -19.5% -2.5%
10. Georgia -4.8% -10.3% -8.8% -3.1%
11. Hawaii -0.0% -10.2% +0.3% +2.8%
12. Idaho -5.4% -16.9% -8.2% -0.5%
13. Illinois -7.2% -10.4% -11.4% -1.2%
14. Indiana -4.3% -10.3% -12.2% +1.6%
15. Iowa -6.1% -10.0% -10.6% +2.7%
16. Kansas -3.4% -8.5% -10.1% +3.8%
17. Kentucky -1.7% -4.0% -10.8% +1.2%
18. Louisiana -5.8% -6.0% -12.1% -0.6%
19. Maine -11.9% -10.6% -19.2% +0.2%
20. Maryland -4.5% -9.7% -9.5% +0.9%
21. Massachusetts -13.7% -9.7% -19.7% +4.8%
22. Michigan -5.4% -9.3% -9.3% -0.6%
23. Minnesota -6.1% -10.4% -11.8% +4.7%
24. Mississippi -3.3% -9.9% -0.5% -2.3%
25. Missouri -4.8% -8.3% -13.2% +0.1%
26. Montana -3.7% -15.3% -2.3% +0.9%
27. Nebraska -6.1% -10.3% -4.9% -4.1%
28. Nevada -2.6% -21.8% -4.2% +4.5%
29. New Hampshire -17.5% -17.4% -22.9% +1.1%
30. New Jersey -10.9% -7.8% -17.2% +2.3%
31. New Mexico -11.4% -17.1% -13.2% -8.0%
32. New York -10.7% -10.5% -17.1% +1.5%
33. North Carolina -3.8% -8.1% +9.4% -4.0%
34. North Dakota -6.6% -10.1% -6.3% -1.8%
35. Ohio -6.1% -10.1% -12.3% +1.4%
36. Oklahoma -0.2% -8.6% -1.7% +1.7%
37. Oregon -9.5% -14.1% -23.6% -2.9%
38. Pennsylvania -7.4% -10.5% -12.4% +3.4%
39. Rhode Island -14.1% -9.8% -17.1% +9.4%
40. South Carolina -2.5% -7.4% +1.2% -1.4%
41. South Dakota -10.3% -10.7% -20.4% -0.1%
42. Tennessee -1.9% -5.6% -5.0% -0.9%
43. Texas -5.6% -12.1% -8.3% -2.6%
44. Utah -3.1% -19.8% -0.5% +3.8%
45. Vermont -9.8% -8.9% -15.8% +12.7%
46. Virginia -3.0% -10.2% -3.4% +0.3%
47. Washington -3.4% -14.7% -6.3% +1.6%
48. West Virginia -7.9% -11.0% -27.9% +0.9%
49. Wisconsin -13.3% -8.4% -22.6% -1.1%
50. Wyoming -8.5% -19.3% -8.2% -3.3%
No religion in America has kept up with population growth for the past hundred years. And while about 25% of Americans are routinely reported to be Catholics, far fewer actually attend church regularly. Besides, American Catholics now account for only about 7% of Catholics in the world: Roman Catholicism has become primarily a Third World religion, which will bring out its more conservative theological strains.
Christine Wicker (a former evangelical) reports that Evangelical Christianity in America -- supposedly Christianity’s cutting edge -- is dying. She says the idea that evangelicals are taking over America is one of the greatest publicity scams in history, a perfect coup accomplished by savvy politicos and religious leaders, who understand how the media work and exploit them brilliantly.[2]
The facts are that about a thousand evangelicals walk away from their churches every day and most don’t come back.[3] As a whole, American Christians lose six thousand members a day – more than two million a year,[4] while the U.S. population increases by 1.2% -- currently 3.3 million people a year. The real figures are that fewer than seven percent of the country are really evangelicals – only about one in fourteen, not one out of four as they have claimed. Southern Baptist growth isn’t keeping up with population growth, and it hasn’t for years.[5] Baptisms are going down in every age group except children under five. And in the critical group of young adults ages eighteen to thirty-four, Southern Baptist baptisms fell 40 percent, from 100,000 in 1980 to 60,000 in 2005.[6] During these 25 years, the U.S. population grew from about 226,545,805[7] to 296,000,000,[8] a growth of over 30%. The Baptists would have had to baptize over 130,000 in 2005 just to stay even with population growth; they baptized fewer than half that number.
The fastest growing faith groups in the country are atheists and nonbelievers. In just the eleven years from 1990 to 2001, they more than doubled, from 14 million to 29 million, from 8% of the country to 14 percent. There are more than twice as many nonbelievers and atheists as there are evangelicals.[9] Since it’s hard to believe everyone would have the nerve to tell a pollster they were an atheist or nonbeliever, the real figures are almost certainly higher. You don’t read this in the media because there are no savvy or powerful groups pushing the story.
When asked to rate eleven groups in terms of respect, non-Christians rated evangelicals tenth. Only prostitutes ranked lower. In an almost comic side note, Wicker wonders how the prostitutes feel about that.[10] Atheists and nonbelievers are looking pretty good.
Misbehavior is so widespread among evangelicals that one evangelical author (Ronald Sider) calls the statistics devastating. When pollster George Barna, himself an evangelical, looked at seventy moral behaviors, he didn’t find any difference between the actions of those who were born-again Christians and those who weren’t. His studies and other indicators show that divorce among born-agains is as common as, or more common than, among other groups. One study showed that wives in traditional, male-dominated marriages were 300 percent more likely to be beaten than wives in egalitarian marriages.[11] Evangelicals make up only seven percent of the population, but about twenty percent of the women who get abortions.[12] (Most Catholics in America use contraception, and also have abortions at about the same rate as others.)
Every day the percentage of evangelicals in America decreases, a loss that began more than a century ago.[13] While the U.S. population grows at a rate of about 1.3% a year, Southern Baptist growth was down to 0.02% in 2005 and still falling.[14] This is part of the bigger picture of the continual decline of Christianity in our culture, which is another story that’s been underreported.
What’s to blame for all this? It’s a long list of both the usual suspects and some unusual ones, as we’ll see. But basically, evangelicals tried to fight the modern world and the world won.
Josh McDowell, who has worked for Campus Crusade for Christ since 1964, says that 94% of high school graduates leave the faith within two years. The Southern Baptists estimate that 88% of their kids leave the church after high school.[15]
During the past century, evangelicals have never kept up with the population growth in this country. They don’t have anywhere near the real power they have claimed. They have fought to make abortion illegal for 35 years. It’s still legal. They have fought for a Constitutional amendment to outlaw homosexuality. Nobody’s buying it. And though they have done harm to and through the Republican Party, they don’t have anything like control there either. Remember that the recent court decisions permitting homosexual marriages in Massachusetts, California and New York all came from Republican judges.[16]
Politically organized evangelicals have censored some school textbooks, but one result is that American students now lag far behind students in Europe and Asia, especially in science education, which will make us less competitive. Eventually, even market forces will have to improve the quality of our public education, because we need independent thinking workers, not just obedient ones.
“The upshot of all this,” says Wicker, is that
evangelicals number 15 million adults, a large enough group to make a difference but in percentage terms a tiny proportion of Americans, and they are not growing enough to make a difference. Nonreligious people, whose numbers are rising, outnumbered them two to one in 2001. We have been duped.[17] It is no exaggeration to say that the fate of Protestant Christianity in America hangs on the success of the evangelicals. If they aren’t making it, neither is Western Christianity.[18]
[1] The American Church in Crisis, by David T. Olson (Zondervan, 2008), p. 42.
[2] The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, by Christine Wicker (Harper One, 2008), p. ix.
[3] Wicker, p. xiii.
[4] Wicker, p. 123.
[5] Wicker, p. 56.
[6] Wicker, p. 63.
[8] Pew Research
[9] Wicker, p. 53.
[10] Wicker, p. 143.
[11] Wicker, p. 80
[12] Wicker, p. 81
[13] Wicker, p. 198.
[14] Ibid., p. 49.
[15] Ibid., p. 124
[16] Ibid., p. 94
[17] Ibid., p. 93.
[18] Ibid., p. 50
