Finally, when the data are available, I examine Christians’ changes over time. On a given measure, are Christians getting better, worse, or staying about the same? Unfortunately, most data sets do not have suitable data for this type of analysis, but I present them when feasible.
Cautions
At this point I would like to issue several cautions in interpreting the analyses of this book. My goal is to simply describe religious differences with no attempt to explain what causes them. Actually developing and testing explanations for these differences becomes enormously complex, and it usually takes us—at least with survey data—to the land of “multivariate analysis,” a place where researchers live but few others dare to visit. In fact, trying to explain the findings presented in any one figure in this book would probably require a separate article, if not a whole book in and of itself. Rather, this book simply describes religious differences. But given the many misconceptions about these differences, this is a needed exercise.
On a related point, each religious difference reported in this book is open to multiple causal interpretations.[12] For example, later in this book you’ll read that Christians are significantly less likely to smoke marijuana than non-Christians. This could mean that Christianity makes people less likely to smoke marijuana. It could also mean that people who smoke marijuana are less apt to join Christianity. Or maybe Christians who smoke marijuana are more likely to leave their faith. Finally, it could be that some underlying characteristic, say a propensity for conventional behavior, both increases churchgoing while decreasing substance abuse, so there might be no causal relationship between the two at all.
Finally, it’s worth noting the limitations of survey data themselves. They allow us to describe social groups along many different dimensions, but by themselves they can be both superficial and incomplete. This is why sociologists routinely complement survey research with other research methods, such as ethnographic studies and experiments. The analogy has been made that analyzing a population with survey data is like flying over a city in a helicopter. There is a lot you can learn from viewing a city from the air, but it is far from a complete picture.[13]
CHAPTER 2
Is American Christianity on
the Brink of Extinction?
Evangelical Christianity in America is dying.
—Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation
We are on the verge—within ten years—of a major collapse of evangelical Christianity.
—Michael Spencer, Internetmonk.com
The cure for most of our country’s problems would be found in a return to the beliefs and morals of America’s Founding Fathers.
—American Heritage Ministry
A funny thing happened to American religion on the way to the new millennium—some people wanted out. Maybe they kept their religious beliefs, but they stopped affiliating with an organized religion, which, here in the United States, usually means Christianity.
To explore this change, I’ll present data from various sources. Before I do, however, let’s briefly review where I’m getting my data. Probably the most useful, and most used, data for the study of American religion is the General Social Survey. It’s the Cadillac of national studies because it has been collected every year or two since 1972, and thus it allows us to track changes in religious beliefs, attitudes, and affiliation. Do you want to know if Christians read the Bible more now than they did in past decades? Do you want to know how many Christians are living together before marriage? Do you want to know how many Christians have volunteered to help homeless people? The General Social Survey is your data set. The main limitation of the General Social Survey, however, is that each wave only collects data from several thousand respondents. This is plenty for studying Christianity because so many Americans are Christians, but it’s too small to analyze properly other religions with fewer American adherents. To illustrate, the latest wave of the General Social Survey, collected in 2008, interviewed over 1,000 Protestants, almost 500 Catholics, but only 39 Jews, 13 Muslims, 7 Hindus, and 15 Buddhists. This means that if we want to compare across religions, we’ll sometimes need to use data from other sources.
Fortunately, in recent years, two very large surveys about religion have been collected—The American Religious Identification Study and the Pew Religious Landscape Survey. These studies survey tens of thousands of Americans, meaning that we can examine smaller religions. Unfortunately, these studies, being so big, are collected less frequently, so they aren’t as good for tracking changes.
There are some data available from before the 1970s. Starting in the mid-1930s, the Gallup Poll asked basic questions about religion, questions such as whether people believed in God, were members of churches, and attended churches. Prior to the 1930s, there is some data about religion in the U.S., but not very much.
In addition to these data sets, I’ll also use data from various surveys that have unique survey questions or a design feature that addresses a particular issue.
So what does all this mean for discussions of religion? There are a lot of things we’d like to know about religion, but some things we just can’t answer because the data aren’t there (though baseless speculation is always available). In particular, we can speak about religion in America after 1970 with much more authority than we can before 1970, and we know much less, at least in terms of survey findings, about religion before the 1930s.
Okay, enough preface—let’s go to the data.
The Rise of the Unaffiliated
Since the early 1970s, the General Social Survey has asked its respondents a basic question about their religious affiliation: “What is your religious preference? Is it Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, some other religion, or no religion?” Figure 2.1 plots the percentage of respondents who have answered “no religion.” As you can see, in the 1970s and 1980s, about 7 or 8% of the American adults surveyed stated that they had no religious affiliation. Then in the 1990s, the number doubled to about 14 or 15%, and it’s been above that ever since.
Given the magnitude and significance of this change, let’s see if we find it with another data set as well. The American Religious Identification Study was collected in 1990, 2001, and 2008. Each time it collected data from at least 50,000 American adults, and it asked them “What is your religion, if any?” In 1990, 8% of respondents answered “no religion,” in 2001, 14% did, and in 2008, 15%. I’ve plotted these data points on Figure 2.1, and as you can see, they closely match the General Social Survey data. We see almost the exact same trend using two high-quality data sets, so we can be pretty sure that it really happened.
Figure 2.1: Percentage of Americans Not Affiliated With a Religion
Let’s call this group of people the “religiously unaffiliated.”[1] The obvious question is, what happened in the 1990s to increase their number so dramatically? Perhaps the most persuasive explanation for this change comes from sociologists Michael Hout and Claude Fischer.[2] Analyzing data from the General Social Survey, they found that the increases in religious disaffiliation happened among political liberals and moderates who had relatively weak ties to the church. Disaffiliation did not increase for political conservatives. They concluded that many Christians left the church because of the church’s active affiliation with conservative politics.
In the 1980s and 1990s, high-profile evangelical leaders snuggled up with Republican politicians under the banner of the Moral Majority and Christian Coalition. This drove away more liberal members of the Christian church who were at odds with their leaders’ conservative agenda. In the current decade, most prominent evangelical leaders in America, such as Rick Warren and Bill Hybels, have not actively supported a given political party, and this might have slowed the rate of religious disaffiliation.
What Hout and Fischer’s conclusion warns us is that there may be a substantial cost for the church to play politics—we lose people. Quite possibly, the church would be bigger now without its prior foray into politics. Hout and Fischer
write that “had religion not become so politicized, these [unaffiliated] people would have gone on identifying as they had been and the percentage of Americans preferring no religion would have increased only 3 to 4%.”[3]
Historian Mark Noll writes that this isn’t the first time American Christianity has delved into partisan politics, and doing so had negative consequences the last time as well. Evangelical political activity was especially high in the 1850s, when Evangelicals actively supported the Republican Party in the days leading up to the Civil War. According to one researcher, evangelical ministers were just as enthusiastic about overseeing Republican rallies as revival meetings. As a result, in the aftermath of the war, evangelical Christianity was factionalized and spiritually spent. Their deep political participation came “at the cost of nearly losing their souls.”[4]
While researchers have engaged this increased disaffiliation with curiosity, church leaders and other commentators have responded with near hysteria. Christian apologist Josh McDowell warned that this indeed might be “the last Christian generation” in America.[5] In academic language, but saying pretty much the same thing, R. Albert Mohler Jr, President of the Southern Baptist Seminary, wrote that “the so-called Judeo-Christian consensus of the last millennium has given way to a postmodern, post-Christian, post-Western cultural crisis which threatens the very heart of our culture.”[6] Outreach magazine writes that “the picture is bleak,” the facts are “sobering,” and “94% of our churches are losing ground in the communities they serve.”[7] Critic Christine Wicker wrote The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, in which she claims that “it seems more likely each year that the United States might go the way of Western Europe where Christianity is irrelevant.”[8] She summarizes George Barna’s work as indicating that “the Evangelical Church as we know it is beginning to die.”[9] Quick, put on your chicken costume, because the sky is falling.
A Look at the “Affiliated”
When we look closer at the data, we find a richer, more nuanced story about what’s happening with religion in America, and for Evangelicals there is some good news. Let’s start with a simple question: Which religions do Americans practice today? The short answer is that we’re mostly Christian with some religiously unaffiliated. Figure 2.2 divides Americans’ religious affiliations into three groups: Christian, unaffiliated, and all other religions. Three out of 4 Americans affiliate themselves with Christianity; 1 in 6 is religiously unaffiliated; and 1 in 13 practices another religion. As such, the United States is still very much a country of Christians.
Figure 2.2: Religious Affiliation in America
Among Christians, about two-thirds are Protestant and onethird Catholic. Among Protestants, about half are Evangelicals. That means that about one-fourth of Americans are evangelical Christians. Among the unaffiliated, only about one-third of them define themselves as agnostic or atheist. The remainder has some mix of spiritual or religious beliefs. Among other religions, there are some that have roots elsewhere in the world, such as Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism. We also have home-grown versions of other religions, such as Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses.[10] While America has many non-Christian religions, none exceed even 2% of the national population; nonetheless, given the large size of this country, these religions still have millions of adherents.
Religious Affiliation Since 1972—A Closer Look
In the previous section, I described religious affiliation today, but how has it been changing over time? Are some religions increasing in numbers while others decrease? As mentioned earlier, the General Social Survey has been collected every year or two since the early 1970s, and in each survey it has asked respondents: “What is your religious preference? Is it Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, some other religion, or no religion?” If respondents answer “Protestant,” then they are asked: “What specific denomination is that, if any?” There are many different ways to categorize these affiliations.[11] For my analyses of the General Social Survey, I’ll use a scheme based on seven religious categories: Evangelical Christian, Mainline Protestant, Historically Black Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Other Religion, and No Religion.[12]
Evangelical Christians have been defined as having four central convictions: (1) salvation through faith in Jesus Christ, (2) an experience of personal conversion (i.e., being born again), (3) the importance of missions and evangelism, and (4) the truth of the Bible.[13] Evangelical denominations include Southern Baptists, Pentecostals, Charismatics, Assemblies of God, Lutherans in the Missouri Synod, the Church of Christ, and most nondenominational Protestant churches.
Mainline denominations tend to be more moderate or liberal than Evangelicals with regard to their theological orthodoxy and personal lifestyle. Also, they often express a strong sense of ethical responsibility in the public sphere (e.g., social justice) rather than focusing more on individual morality.[14] (In recent years, evangelical churches have followed suit, becoming increasingly involved in issues of social justice.) Mainline denominations include the United Methodist Church, Episcopal Church, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), Presbyterian Church USA, and the United Church of Christ (Congregationalists). These denominations historically came from Europe via immigration in the 1700s and 1800s.
Historically Black denominations share many of the same theological beliefs as Evangelical Christians, but they have a distinct culture that emphasizes the importance of freedom and a quest for justice. While they tend to be more liberal in their economic and political attitudes, they are conservative in social and family issues.[15] Their denominations include the National Baptist Convention, African Methodist Episcopal, and the Church of God in Christ.[16]
Unfortunately, the General Social Survey doesn’t collect large enough samples for separate analysis of other, non-Christian religions, such as Judaism, Hinduism, Islam, and Buddhism. Depending on the availability of data, I either clump together all non-Christian religions or I separate out Judaism and then combine the rest.
Figure 2.3 describes Americans’ religious affiliation over the past three decades. There are seven different lines on this figure, and each line represents the percentage of General Social Survey respondents in a particular religious group.[17] For example, in 1972, about 30% of all respondents reported being affiliated with a Mainline Protestant church, about 26% of respondents were Catholics, about 20% were Evangelicals, and so on. As shown in Figure 2.3, there has been both change and stability in American religion since the 1970s. Among Christian groups, Evangelicals grew to about 25% of the population by the 1990s, and have remained there since, perhaps dropping a percentage point or two. Catholics have remained remarkably stable, at about 25 to 26%. Black Protestants have steadily hovered at 8 to 9%. The big story in Christianity, however, is that Mainline Protestantism has decreased dramatically over the past several decades. They have fallen from over 30% of the population to less than 15%—a tremendous change that has happened steadily over time and has shown no sign of abating.
Figure 2.3: U.S. Religious Affiliation since 1972
Among other religious groups, Jews have stayed steady at 2 to 3% of the population, and members of other religions have increased from about 3 to 6%. The other big change, in addition to the drop in Mainline Protestants, has been the increase in the religiously unaffiliated, as discussed at the start of this chapter.
To understand these changes better, let’s take a look at the religious groups separately. Starting with Evangelicals, while their representation in the country has stayed fairly stable in recent decades, the form of their affiliation has changed. In particular, an increasing number of Evangelical Christians now describe themselves in general terms such as nondenominational, born again, or just Christian instead of using denominational labels such as Baptist or Evangelical Free. Reflecting this change, in 1990, only about 200,000 Americans described themselves as nondenominational Christians, but in 2008, 8 million did so.[18]
The continued strength of evangelical Christianity in the United States
poses a puzzle. Why have Evangelicals thrived in such a diverse society that many Evangelicals believe actively opposes Christianity? Sociologist Christian Smith offers a compelling answer. He posits that American evangelical Christianity has prospered because its members perceive society as opposed to them and as threatening their faith. This distinction between the church and secular society has various benefits. It provides identity and meaning for Evangelical Christians. It defines them as group members and increases their commitment to their group. Also, the existence of other religious options reinforces our understanding of evangelical belief as a choice rather than merely an expectation of society, and this too increases commitment. Ironically, the contemporary forces of secularism, pluralism, and postmodernism that Evangelicals sometimes denounce might actually help keep the church strong.[19]
Another reason given by sociologists for the size of evangelical Christianity, at least relative to mainline churches, regards a factor that many Christians haven’t thought of—differential fertility rates. Children born into a given religion are more likely to remain in that religion as adults. For example, more adult Catholics were born into Catholic families than into Protestant or Muslim families. We’ll look at this dynamic more in the next chapter, but for now let’s just assume that it’s generally true. This being the case, religions or religious groups whose members have the most children should, all else being equal, grow the fastest. This helps explain the growth rates of Evangelicals and Mainline Protestants, for Conservative Protestant Christian women have historically had more children than Mainline Protestant women. In the early 1900s, conservative Christians averaged one more child per family than more liberal Christians, and current projections place the difference at .3 children more.[20] Certainly there is more to religious change than fertility rates, but it does seem to be a piece of the puzzle.
Christians Are Hate-Filled Hypocrites...and Other Lies You've Been Told Page 3