Just prior to the 2008 presidential election, 52% of American adults attended worship. As the 2024 election approached, only 31% of the white American population was regularly in church, a decline of 21 percentage points.
In 2008, 68% of 18- to 29-year-olds claimed to be Christian. By 2024 it was only 45%, a slide of 23 points.
The Religious Landscape Study released last week by Pew Research Center suggests America’s secular shift may be slowing, but the dramatic decline in religious interest among young adults over the past quarter century leaves little room for confidence.
However, some segments of American Christianity are experiencing robust growth. According to Ryan Burge, rapidly growing congregations tend to be located in booming parts of the American Bible Belt and are strategically situated at the intersection of major thoroughfares.
But there’s more to it.
Does MAGA grow churches?
Unapologetic support for MAGA politics and impressive church growth stats are closely associated phenomena. In particular, the Christian nationalist congregations described in Elizabeth Newman’s Kingdom of Rage, Matthew Taylor’s The Violent Take it by Force, and Katherine Stewart’s Money, Lies, and God have experienced explosive growth in recent years. A similar link between conservative religion, big money, authoritarian politics and church growth is apparent within the American Catholic community.
Stewart’s Money, Lies, and God charts the tangled web of influence connecting the upper echelons of the business community to conservative politicians, right-wing think tanks, religious movements and the Republican base. Stewart follows the money. Free market capitalism, opposition to government regulation, conspiracy theorizing, disdain for “woke” inclusivism and an allergic reaction to pluralistic democracy hold this ideological marriage of convenience together.
The rise of Donald Trump has energized, and laid bare, this reactionary nexus.
“It starts out as a coalition, as a shotgun marriage, and eventually the populism and authoritarianism takes over.”
“It’s the synchronization with Trump that is most alarming,” Matthew Taylor recently told The Atlantic’s Stephanie McCrummen. “The agenda now is Trump. And that’s how populist authoritarianism works. It starts out as a coalition, as a shotgun marriage, and eventually the populism and authoritarianism takes over.”
The authoritarian network exposed by investigative reporters and historians like Stewart and Taylor are part of an international movement. Donald Trump and JD Vance have much more in common with autocrats like Vladimir Putin and Turkey strongman Recep Tayyip Erdoğan than with their Democratic opponents. Like all good authoritarians, the religious, plutocratic, ideological and political segments of the MAGA revolution are determined to crush dissent.
They aren’t looking for a seat at the table; they want to be the table.
Us vs. them church
Those committed to inclusive and pluralistic forms of civil society are alarmed by this rapid explosion of organized, and extraordinarily well-funded, authoritarian fervor. Progressive Christians, especially in the United States, wonder if we might have targets on our backs. If MAGA religion speaks for Jesus, where does that leave the rest of us.
Do we even want to be associated with a faith that has been hijacked by us-them fanaticism?
David Bentley Hart
In a recent Substack post titled “Confessions of an Irreligious Christian,” David Bentley Hart shared his lack of enthusiasm for Christian hymnody, most Christian sermonizing and even, he reluctantly admits, the eucharist. His devotional life brings him little joy, and although his more devout brothers encourage him to observe a “rigorous schedule of prayers and readings, observing the daily offices and keeping to the lectionary,” he confesses that, “the habit will not take in me, and the attempt to cultivate it has invariably resulted in agonized boredom.”
Nor is Hart enamored of the leading doctrines of traditional Christian theology, particularly “the ideas of inherited guilt or penal substitutionary atonement or predestination” and the “vague but seemingly binding notions of God’s limited will to save or of an ultimate division between the blessed and the damned (which to me makes the blessed seem peculiarly damnable and the damned boundlessly pitiable).”
When the age-old “problem of evil” is added to this mix, Hart’s affection for traditional Christianity becomes particularly shaky. He never has found a satisfactory reason why a good and loving God would allow innocent children to suffer horribly, and he doubts he ever will.
Not surprisingly, Hart claims to have “a deeper affection for Voltaire and Thomas Paine than for just about any of their religiously cultured despisers” and sees in them “a more genuinely Christian spirit than I do in most of their more voluble Christian contemporaries.”
Conservative Christians might wonder why, given all these reservations, Hart continues to call himself a Christian at all. He has considered this question carefully and says it comes down to “two singular facts: the continued and unwavering faith of Christ’s followers after his Crucifixion and the startlingly unprecedented radicalism of early Christian teachings.”
Hart realizes the resurrection narratives found in the Gospels have been shaped and stylized by decades of retelling and by the theological thrust of the various authors. But from the earliest days of the Christian movement, he says, men and women (most notably the Apostle Paul) testified boldly to personal encounters with the risen Christ even though, in a world dominated by imperial Rome, this message was fraught with peril.
The second anomaly Hart references is the teaching of Jesus: “I know Graeco-Roman late antiquity extremely well; it has been a subject of personal fascination and scholarly labor on my part for most of my life; and I simply cannot place the teachings of Christ as they are credibly recounted in the Gospels within the normal continuum of the religious and moral expectations of their age.”
Hart realizes the moral vision Jesus proclaimed was firmly anchored in the Hebrew Scriptures and, in some respects, resemble certain aspects of first-century Greek thought. “But even so” he says, “it constitutes so profound an inversion of all the reigning perspectives of Christ’s time that I find it almost impossible not to believe that Christ’s kerygma truly is the word of God breaking in upon a world only half ready to hear it.”
“The fact that Jesus survived death in some fashion would mean little apart from his moral vision.”
It is the synergy between resurrection faith and the radicality of this moral vision that speaks to Hart. The fact that Jesus survived death in some fashion would mean little apart from his moral vision; and kingdom ethics cannot be associated with the heart of God apart from the resurrection.
He explains: “If any person has ever truly been ‘God with us,’ Emmanuel, it should surely be this man. If the claim of anyone’s resurrection by the power of the Spirit should seem not so much outlandish as simply fitting, it is that of this first century Jewish prophet — this one who loved the excluded, the forgotten, the oppressed, the poor, and the despised with a love the world could not give.
We can’t all be mystics
Both the negative and positive elements of Hart’s confession drew a hearty “amen” from me. Like Hart, I often envy people who live in the holy embrace of God. But there is room in the kingdom of God for people of all spiritual temperaments. We can’t all be mystics, and that is probably a good thing.
I was particularly drawn to the two “anomalies” Hart identifies. When I arrived at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., in 1975, I was exposed to precisely the kind of spiritual synergy between resurrection faith and revolutionary moral vision Hart describes. Frank Tupper recently had returned from Germany as a disciple of Wolfhart Pannenberg, an erstwhile religious skeptic who concluded the proclamation of the risen Christ must be rooted in historical fact. Meanwhile, professors like Frank Stagg, E. Glenn Hinson and Glen Stassen were laying out the table-flipping radicality of Jesus’ teaching.
“For the first time in my experience, the core message of Jesus was front-and-center.”
For the first time in my experience, the core message of Jesus was front-and-center: “Love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, for he himself is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.”
The species of Christianity presently commanding center stage in America is defiantly opposed to this kind of faith. And for a very good reason. If Jesus provides a window into the heart of God, us-them thinking collapses. The enemy who is loved can’t be relegated to a “them” basket. Conversely, our continual failure to love and forgive our enemies makes it impossible to construct a credible “us” basket.
Let’s face it, we are drawn to forms of religion that divide the world into us-them categories. We are the godly; they are ungodly. We are angelic; they are demonic. We are the chosen; they are the damned. The kingdom of God will burst on the scene the minute the ungodly, the demonic and the damned are either silenced or, better still, swept off the face of the earth.
If you don’t believe this is the import of MAGA religion, check out Money, Lies, and, God or any of the other volumes I referenced earlier. This is scary stuff.
Back to the question
So why, if the various flavors of MAGA religion have so thoroughly betrayed the essence of Christian faith, is the movement generating so much heat and light? Why are the Christian nationalists growing while the rest of Christendom retreats in disarray?
It’s simple, really. The “spirit warriors” (as Stewart calls them) are burning down the church. They have generated beau coups of heat and light by torching the Christian gospel.
When resurrection faith embraces the moral vision of Jesus’ touch, there is fire. Like the burning bush Moses encountered on Sinai, these smoldering embers burn without being consumed.
“We yearn for a Christendom without Christ.”
This isn’t the first time Christians have put a torch to their own tradition, of course. The church ostensibly aligned with Jesus has been self-immolating for two millennia. We yearn for a Christendom without Christ. When we get what we desire, it isn’t long before the steeple is engulfed in flame and a ragtag assembly of potentates, plutocrats and politicians is drawn to the exciting spectacle.
Progressive Christians are just as susceptible to us-them thinking as our more conservative brothers and sisters. We pride ourselves on being inclusive, we celebrate diversity, we elevate the oppressed and pour contempt on the powerful. Then we bask in the warm glow of our moral superiority.
The “enemies” Jesus talked about are those who reject his way. And that’s all of us.
It isn’t just hard to follow Jesus; it’s hard to want to follow Jesus. Before it feels good, it feels really bad. Our us-them addiction runs deep. Spiritual detox isn’t for the faint of heart and never should be attempted alone. That’s what the church is for.
Building a church is an unnatural act that cuts against the grain of human nature. Jesus knew he was asking a lot. The Jesus-gate may be narrow and the Jesus-road may be hard, but they lead to life.
A burning church brings people flocking from miles around. It’s a great show. People will pay dearly for a pair of tickets. But a burning church is hours away from an ash heap.
A faithful church, embarrassed by its own failure, huddles around two glowing anomalies: resurrection faith and the moral vision of Jesus. The fire burns low. The gate is narrow and the road is hard. But the gospel fire that draws us can never be extinguished. It’s God’s fire. And that is good news indeed.
Alan Bean
Alan Bean leads Friends of Justice based in Fort Worth, Texas, where he is a member of Broadway Baptist Church.
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