Pew Research and the decline of the American church

On October 17 the Pew Research Center published a piece titled “In U.S., Decline of Christianity Continues at Rapid Pace.” The data contained in this report should be understood as a ministry bombshell necessitating a wake up call for American evangelicalism.

The opening paragraph reads:

“The religious landscape of the United States continues to change at a rapid clip. In Pew Research Center telephone surveys conducted in 2018 and 2019, 65% of American adults describe themselves as Christians when asked about their religion, down 12 percentage points over the past decade. Meanwhile, the religiously unaffiliated share of the population, consisting of people who describe their religious identity as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular,” now stands at 26%, up from 17% in 2009.”

Down further on the article we read:

“Christians have declined and “nones” have grown as a share of the adult population in all four major U.S. regions. Catholic losses have been most pronounced in the Northeast, where 36% identified as Catholic in 2009, compared with 27% today. Among Protestants, declines were larger in the South, where Protestants now account for 53% of the adult population, down from 64% in 2009.”

A few comments are in order in relation to these dramatic shifts.

First, although the Nones are usually understood as largely a growth in Atheism, this is not the case. As the Pew Survey notes, confirmed by Elizabeth Drescher’s research, the majority of Nones have some interest in spirituality, but it is in the form of a rejection of mainstream, institutionalized forms of religion, with a preference for eclecticism. The Nones can be understood as a variation on the more familiar “Spiritual But Not Religious” group.

Second, in the past some conservative evangelicals dismissed the growth of the Nones by saying they represented only the nominal Christians who weren’t deeply committed anyway. Even if this is true, there is also the phenomenon of the Dones, those highly committed Christians who came to see the present forms of church as failing to nurture their Christian faith. As a result they have left the institutional church in favor of the creation of new forms. Whether the Nones or the Dones, the church is losing members.

Third, in response to the decline of the American church the temptation will be to double down on familiar forms of church growth, church planting, and evangelism. But this simply won’t work. The culture has shifted to a very different form of environment in which the modern evangelical church was born. Many people are no longer asking “Is it true?”, but rather, “Does it work for me?,” and they are answering this question through spiritual resources that come from non-traditional spiritualities. This new reality necessitates a very different approach, not only to churrch planting, but also cultural and personal engagement.

In 2008 I wrote a piece for Lausanne World Pulse that touched on some of these issues. You can read that here. The cultural realities and ministry methods I wrote about eleven years ago are even more relevant now.