What Happened To US Churches The Past 50 Years?
(ANALYSIS) Lots. And no expert is better equipped to portray the turbulence than Washington University political scientist Ryan Burge.
Drawing from extensive survey research and his own previous books and columns for Substack, he offers sweeping, statistics-rich, and notably bleak scenarios in a book out starting Tuesday: “The Vanishing Church.”
The following can only sketch some of the multiple revelations in a work highly recommended for anyone who cares about religion in America.
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And what if you don’t particularly care? Burge insists that when thousands of churches might be shutting down in the coming decades, much is at stake for the entire nation. (That “vanish” in the title is hyperbolic but sorta truthy).
Accumulating research shows the societal, psychological, economic and even medical benefits from a healthy faith culture.
One study found that churches are the most important places where people find positive personal connections, “not neighborhoods, schools, or workplaces.” Local churches’ social programs and quiet help to individuals are immeasurably vast, with no conceivable replacement.
In his latest book, Burge moves beyond scholarly objectivity to express alarm summarized in the subtitle: “How the Hollowing Out of Moderate Congregations Is Hurting Democracy, Faith and Us.” He champions old-fashioned churches that are “moderate, sensible, pragmatic, and unifying.”
The distorted and polarized political situation gets far more press. Consider Gallup polling data that in 2004, 31% of Americans identified as Independents, spurning the establishment’s two major parties. The latest survey, reported this week, shows Independents are an impressive 45%, alongside a historically abysmal 27% for both Democrats and Republicans.
Simultaneously, “the growing polarization of American religion has left us lonelier, angrier, sicker, and more divided (both economically and politically) than ever before.” Burge is a well-known analyst of “nones” who tell pollsters they have no religious affiliation or identity. They’ve grown to 28% of Americans in the 21st Century, up from a mere 6% in 1990.
Millions of moderates who are not “nones” are also uncomfortable with the form of evangelical or “born again” religiosity that now dominates Protestantism. Evangelicals achieved a high of 30% identification among Americans in 1993 but slipped to their more typical 17% by 2020. That number seems to be holding steady, defying a secularization trend, even as the Trumpite conservatism of a vocal and politicized segment alienates many from religious involvement.
The centrist option that Burge considers necessary for a wholesome religious mix was long provided by more flexible and sometimes outright liberal “mainline” Protestant denominations, such as those that belong to the ecumenical National Council of Churches. Burge confesses personal angst from his years as the part-time pastor of just such a congregation in the American Baptist denomination that recently disbanded.
Burge came to conclude that “the mainline was dying, and rapidly.” If current trends and aging memberships persist, he expects that in 20 or 30 years “the mainline tradition will largely be extinct across many parts of the United States.”
This is the most dramatic of the patterns Burge documents. Historian James Hudnut-Beumler figures in the late 1950s, more than half of all Americans were associated with this type of church. By 1982, they slipped to 29% of Americans, then plummeted to 10% by 2016. No comparable calamity had ever occurred in the U.S.
Though solid, Burge’s treatment downplays the impact of controversies over mainline political activism and, far more vital, the fuzziness when belief liberalizes. The Christianity Today review by Michael Wear, who led faith outreach for Barack Obama’s 2012 victory, observes that “while the church should have room for people who struggle with doubt, churches should not be organized to affirm and encourage doubt.” Mainline churches also developed a degree of intolerance toward their once-thriving evangelical factions, whose eventual shrinkage is a key trend that needs more attention.
An especially crucial chapter deals with Roman Catholics. Unlike the vanishing mainline, those baptized and identifying as Catholics were 28% of the population in 1970 and currently hold on at 21% thanks to Hispanic immigration. But those same years saw an “absolute collapse in Mass attendance” that was once observed by most.
As of 2022, 23% of those who considered themselves Catholics attended worship on a weekly basis, half the rate of 50 years earlier. This abandonment occurred before the notorious clergy sexual predation scandals hit hard. Burge also recounts white lay Catholics’ significant shift from Democratic to Republican loyalty and the more recent conservative trend among priests in both religion and politics.
Yet another trend is Burge’s “Big Church Sort,” in which religious involvement is becoming more of a specialty for relatively well-off, well-educated and successful Americans, leaving behind those with less money, dimmer prospects and often lacking stable marriages.
Burge’s analysis is largely based upon numbers from the General Social Survey, Cooperative Election Study, and Nationscape more than churches’ own statistical reports. He bypasses the independent 2020 tabulations by the Religion Census.
The book pays scant attention to the all-important “historically Black” Protestant denominations. In the final edition of the “Yearbook of American & Canadian Churches” in 2012, the eight main Black church groups reported memberships that totaled 22,447,387. The Religion Census counts only 7,031,055 members. This anomaly should be next on Burge’s agenda.
As before, this writer must note one more huge change. While longstanding denominations like the large Southern Baptist Convention decline, non-denominational independent congregations, almost all of them similarly evangelical in substance, now number 44,319 and encompass 21 million adherents, by far the largest constituency in U.S. Protestantism — and the most energetic and disruptive.
Richard N. Ostling was a longtime religion writer with The Associated Press and with Time magazine, where he produced 23 cover stories, as well as a Time senior correspondent providing field reportage for dozens of major articles. He is a recipient of the Religion News Association's Lifetime Achievement Award. He has interviewed such personalities as Billy Graham, the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI); ranking rabbis and Muslim leaders; and authorities on other faiths; as well as numerous ordinary believers. He writes a bi-weekly column for Religion Unplugged.