For the Church | The Death of Religion?

Two major storylines have dominated news coverage of American religion in recent years. One is the decline of Christianity. Writers have often based this theme on Pew Research Center reports about the rise of the “Nones,” or people who say they adhere to no religion in particular. One Pew headline, for example, declared, “In U.S., Decline of Christianity Continues at Rapid Pace.” The book The Great Dechurching, by Jim Davis and Michael Graham, helped to popularize the idea of American church decline for a Christian audience. Davis and Graham argue that “we are currently in the middle of the largest and fastest religious shift in the history of our country,” with tens of millions of Americans having stopped attending church in the past quarter century. Happily, Davis and Graham write as faithful church leaders who believe that the downturn in Christian adherents is reversible. But they still paint a grim picture of the contemporary church landscape. At the most popular level of dour predictions, Elon Musk even tweeted, “Unless there is more bravery to stand up for what is fair and right, Christianity will perish.”

The second and related storyline has been the politicization of self-identified white “evangelicals.” These accounts have often focused on the (allegedly) large number of people leaving evangelical churches, partly due to the churches’ alignment with Donald Trump’s Republican Party. One characteristic column from The Conversation investigated “Why Some Younger Evangelicals are Leaving the Faith.” This account was drawn from data publicized by the Public Religion Research Institute, an organization which regularly touts the decline of “white evangelicalism.”

We take a different approach to these matters. Our goals in The Death of Religion? are threefold. One is to argue that the decline of American and world religion—and Christianity, in particular—has been vastly overstated. The second objective is to show that predictions of religion’s demise have been commonplace in America since the Pilgrims stepped off the Mayflower in 1620. The third is to show what a terrible loss it would be if religion did collapse in America or around the world. Or, to put it more positively, we show that religion is one of the anchors of human flourishing worldwide.

We do not believe that it is impossible for religious groups to decline or even disappear. Indeed, we will demonstrate why and how some denominations have done so. But if the forecasts by media and pollsters of religion’s or Christianity’s doom came to pass, it would exact a terrible social and spiritual price.

This book is contrarian. It goes against dominant media and scholarly narratives regarding religion. We present conclusive data to show that religious people are thriving and that practicing religious people are thriving most of all. We further show that at almost every turn, commonly used polling and survey data on religion is misleading, confused, or grossly incomplete. Many self-identified evangelicals, for example, rarely, if ever, go to church, whereas many of the so-called Nones do go to church. We also demonstrate that typical surveys of American congregational life undercount the number of American churches by as much as 40 percent. The uncounted churches are disproportionately evangelical or Pentecostal, and often minister to immigrants and people of color.

We are not contrarian just for the sake of it. Decline is definitely happening among the Protestant mainline churches. Recent years have also seen weakening in major evangelical and Pentecostal churches in America (though not in their global counterparts). Media, polling agencies, and even some pastors have a vested interest in casting religion’s downturn as an unprecedented development.

In historical perspective, however, the storyline seems like a familiar prophecy of spiritual malaise. People in early America worried about the religiously unaffiliated too. They talked about them constantly, although they did not call them Nones, but by the long-forgotten term, nothingarians. The religiously unaffiliated were already stock characters in discussions of religion’s decline by the early nineteenth century. This fact should make us pause when we hear today’s alarm bells concerning the death of religion. Once again, it seems there is nothing new under the sun.