Between the New Atheist movement of the 2000s, clergy shortages in the Catholic Church, and the demographic collapse of Mainline Protestant sects in the United States, the story of religion for the past 35 years has been one of persistent decline.
However, this may be about to change. Maybe.
The decline of organized religion in the aftermath of the Cold War has created one of the largest ongoing crises in Christianity. Between 1990 and 2021, the percentage of self-identified American Christians dropped from 91% to 63%. This number dropped to 36% among Gen Z. This drop similarly facilitated the rise of “nones,” or people with no particular religious identification.
Of the 28% of Americans who are religiously unaffiliated, 63% neither identify as agnostic nor atheist but are apathetic toward organized religion. During COVID, religious attendance plummeted and has only slowly recovered to pre-pandemic levels. Regular church attendance, a key statistical indicator, dropped from 39% in 2019 to 33% in 2023.
Despite these statistical indicators moving in a negative direction, there is evidence the hemorrhaging has paused. Pew Research released a report Feb. 26, as part of its 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study, which sampled 37,000 Americans for their “religious affiliations, beliefs and practices, along with their social and political views and demographic characteristics.”
Is the decline plateauing?
The report indicates the decline in self-identified Christians has leveled off in the past six years at around 60% to 64%. While this may be a temporary trend, it is coming on the heels of December’s Wall Street Journal report that Bible sales had increased from 9.7 million in 2019 to 14.2 million in 2023.
Pew indicates further declines in Christian identity are likely to continue as older generations age out and just 46% of 18- to 24-year-olds are religious compared to 80% of those over the age of 74. Christian social scientist Ryan Burge offered a similarly sobering note the day after the report, saying: “Let me make two things clear about the current religion landscape and what the future will look like. 1. The rise of the nones has hit a plateau recently. 2. That won’t last. Gen Z is ~45% nones. Boomers are ~28%. Generational replacement means the nones will continue to rise.”
However, Pew also notes no change in religiosity rates between those aged 24 to 34 and the younger generation, meaning declining religious affiliation rates among American youth appear to be flatlining. Burge told The New York Times this could indicate the rise in nonreligious affiliations may have hit a natural ceiling. “The ‘nones’ have run through the easy parts of the market, and now they’re hitting the bedrock of committed evangelicals.”
American Christianity is changing
Regardless of the statistics, the face of American Christianity is changing. The Protestant-ruled discourse of the 20th century has broken down, and new cultural forces are growing. The face of the church is rapidly going to change, and this is reflected in several key ongoing changes.
First, current movements are primarily being driven by men rather than women. According to The Survey Center On American Life, Gen Z has seen a rare trend with more women dissociating with religion than men. It found 54% of those leaving religion are women, reversing generations of historic trends. Only 34% of Zoomer men have no religious affiliation, while that’s true of 40% of women in the same generation.
Notre Dame political scientist David Campbell told The New York Times a significant reason for the current plateauing and gender swapping could be political. Christianity is increasingly becoming tangled in right-wing politics, with prominent conservative influencers regularly coming out to the public as newly converted Christians and seeing influxes of popularity, such as Russell Brand, Nala Ray, and Candace Owens. Online Christianity is more directly engaging with reactionary politics and hyper-masculine leaders, which appeals to young men more than women.
And The New York Times reports men are statistically underperforming compared to women and have different immediate priorities: “Young men have different concerns. They are less educated than their female peers. In major cities, including New York and Washington, they earn less. At the same time, they place a higher value on traditional family life. Childless young men are likelier than childless young women to say they want to become parents someday, by a margin of 12 percentage points.”
This divide between American men and women is similarly reflected in politics, with men swinging toward Donald Trump in the 2024 election by 13 points and women toward Kamala Harris by 38 points.
Are Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism a threat?
The change in religious affiliation also is noted in the emergence of traditionalist sects among the younger generation. This has been shown in recent coverage on the rise of Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism.
In December, The New York Post reported about the rapid increase of converts toward Orthodox churches, with converts increasing 78% between 2019 and 2022. Father Josiah Trenham of Saint Andrew’s Orthodox Church in Riverside, Calif., directly attributed this trend to the “feminization of non-Orthodox forms of Christianity.”
The Gospel Coalition similarly reported March 1 that the increasing number of high-profile conversions to Catholicism — such as Candace Owens, Cameron Bertuzzi and Eva Vlaardingerbroek — requires a response from Protestant leaders before thousands of displaced and alienated congregants “cross the Tiber.”
However, Burge notes the largest statistical threat to Protestantism continues to be the growth in evangelicalism. Evangelical Protestants remain one of the only statistically stable groups in American Christianity, drawing in those who despise organized religion and retaining thousands of Protestants shed by larger denominations. It is uniquely well-suited to the current American status quo of low-trust and institutional decay, he says.
“Nondenominationalism is predicated on the collapse of institutional trust,” he said. “Americans, for myriad reasons, do not trust major institutions. Banks, unions, big business, media and government are all viewed with deep skepticism. Nameless and faceless CEOs and bureaucrats are wasting your money and taking your freedom. In religion, there’s a simple solution to this: Kill the denominations. Voila! No more unaccountable head office that wastes your money on projects to spruce up the national headquarters. In a nondenominational church, all the people who decide where the money goes are sitting right next to you in the pew. That’s a whole lot more accountability.”
Is a revival possible?
There is no doubt American Christianity will change rapidly in the next 20 years, particularly as Mainline denominations like the United Methodists, the Episcopal Church, Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, Presbyterian Church (USA) and United Church of Christ continue to see their demographic situations decline. Many of these individual churches will cease to exist between 2050 and 2070. Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy also are declining in the aggregate, despite bringing on additional converts.
The passing of the Baby Boomer generation inevitably will hand Christianity over to younger, less religious adherent generations with different ideas about religiosity and piety — the majority of them believing in the supernatural but despising organized religion or its moral precepts about abortion, IVF and women. Christianity also will be competing against Neo-Paganism’s ascendancy, with immigration and high birth rates likely increasing Islam’s population percentage from 1.1% to 2.1% by 2050.
The “nones” will continue to be the biggest albatross for evangelization going forward, given that nearly half them are religiously apathetic. However, in a March 6 Wall Street Journal op-ed, Burge argued the “nones” are a more nuanced statistical lot, with a large portion of them being open to religious ideas.
“The majority of nonreligious Americans do yearn for some kind of connection with a higher power,” he said. “This suggests that a religious revival is certainly possible in the U.S., so long as the nones aren’t seen as a problem to be solved, but a group that needs to be better understood.”
The late Pastor Timothy Keller wrote for The Atlantic in 2023 that Christianity’s growth is going to depend on its ability to dialogue with non-Christians, foster a strong moral voice of justice in the world, avoid adopting the beliefs of the culture, and challenge the naturalistic and materialistic impulses that leave modern people feeling alienated and depressed.
“Is Christianity going away in the U.S.? No. And although no one can predict when it will happen and how rapidly it will happen, there are many reasons to believe that growth will resume,” he said. “But it will not happen until the church applies this famous saying of Jesus to itself: ‘But whoever would be great among you must be your servant … even as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve.’ If the church aims at loving service to one’s neighbor while clearly speaking the truth, it will grow again and may have cultural influence. But if it aims at influence rather than humble service, it will have neither.”
Tyler Hummel is a Wisconsin-based freelance critic and journalist, a member of the Music City Film Critics Association, a regular film and literature contributor at Geeks Under Grace, and was the 2021 College Fix Fellow at Main Street Nashville.
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