By Jeff Brumley
Two new polls show that religious conservatives — mainly white evangelicals — are complaining louder as they lose ground in the so-called culture wars. They also describe a widening gap between the faithful and religiously unaffiliated Americans.
What’s it all mean for Baptists?
“This is a challenge for all Baptists in how they are going to come to terms with” declining numbers and influence in society, says Bill Leonard, professor of Baptist Studies and church history at the Wake Forest University School of Divinity in Winston-Salem, N.C.
Leonard said he really means “all Baptists” — liberals, moderates and especially the Southern Baptist Convention.
“The demographics affect all religious groups,” Leonard said.
Evangelicals v. ‘nones’
But the surveys, released this week by the Pew Research Center and the Public Religion Research Institute, show that religious conservatives are feeling the pressure from their numerical declines.
The Pew survey, released Monday, discerned a “widening divide between religiously affiliated Americans and the rising share of the population that is not affiliated with any religion” (sometimes called the “nones”).
Its findings for increased support for religion in politics stems, it said, from those Catholics, Protestants and others who have become “significantly more supportive” of religious organizations that speak out on political issues. They also have increased their support of politicians who openly speak about religion.
The “nones,” meanwhile, have grown to rival white evangelicals, according to a Religion News Service report. The Pew survey said this group is “much more likely to oppose the intermingling of religion and politics.”
The PRRI American Values Survey, released Tuesday, said 63 percent of religiously unaffiliated Americans and 64 percent of Jewish Americans “report more concern about religious groups trying to pass laws that force their beliefs on others.”
A small majority of Catholics — 51 percent — agreed.
Altogether, the Pew survey found that close to three-quarters of those surveyed see religious influence in public life declining, with most saying that’s a negative development.
‘Losing … the culture wars’
While 8 percent of “nones” say it’s becoming harder to be religiously unaffiliated, 42 percent of white evangelicals claim it’s becoming harder to be a member of their religious groups.
Evangelicals “are on the losing side of the culture wars such as gay marriage,” PRRI CEO Robert P. Jones told Religion News Service. “And they see that their share [of society] is shrinking and aging, adding to their sense of being embattled.”
After reading the surveys Wednesday, Southern Baptist minister Steven Owensby said he’s seen firsthand some of the attitudes documented in the polls.
“Our folks do bemoan the idea that our country is not the way it used to be,” said Owensby, pastor of Enoree First Baptist Church in South Carolina.
Most there also want more religious influence in government and politics, he said.
“They are independent about some things — they don’t like denominational rules being imposed on them — but they are OK with morality coming from the government.”
And older members of the church bemoan the cultural changes, though they would never describe it as the flight of Millennials or the growth of the ‘nones,’” Owensby said.
Instead, they “talk about young people today, saying they just don’t seem to be as willing to be a part of the church as they used to be,” he said.
‘Bigotry in the public square’
Feelings of cultural persecution and fears of numerical decline among Southern Baptists and other conservative evangelicals result from years of linking numbers to theological orthodoxy.
“The evangelicals are taking this harder because for years they promised if churches stayed with their conservative ideology, the declines of the liberal, mainline churches would not occur [to them],” Leonard said. “Demographics and pluralism have caught up with them.”
Contributing to spiraling membership, especially among Millennials, is a negative perception of religious values expressed in the public domain, he said, adding, that in a pluralistic culture, what is considered conviction inside a religious community can sound like bigotry in the public square.
But that’s not a bad thing. In fact, it’s in keeping with Baptists’ historic status as minorities and outsiders in the societies in which they lived, he insisted.
And those were times when Baptists excelled at living and sharing the gospel, Leonard said.
More recently, liberal and moderate Baptist groups have already shown it’s possible to thrive as the underdog.
“The smaller groups that lean to the left have already experienced this numeric difficulty,” Leonard said. They “have already learned that theirs is a minority voice in the South and in the culture.”
Related commentary:
In his column “‘He Tells Me I Am His Own?’ Maybe …,” Bill Leonard asks, “Now what?” as numbers of persons distance themselves from the nurture and evangelical witness of the church.