USA’s Churning Religious Ferment

There’s much chatter over a new survey showing the decline of USA Christianity has stopped, at least momentarily, with 70% of Americans identifying as Christian. (A 2019 survey found only 65% identifying as Christian.) Religiously unaffiliated Americans are 23%, down from 25% two years before. Other religions comprise less than 7%.

Lots of media have hyped the survey’s claim that white Mainline Protestants are growing and now outnumber white Evangelicals, at 16% versus 14%. It says white Evangelicals have fallen from 23% in 2006, while Mainliners have climbed from 13% in 2016. They were 19% in 2007.

New York magazine harrumphed:

Still, the news that mainliners are growing as Evangelicals decline will be shocking to those who have been told for many years — by gloating Evangelicals as well as by secular conservatives and many nonreligious observers — that liberal Protestantism is “dead” or “dying,” condemned by lax theology and too much tolerance of sinfulness (you know, women having nonmarital sex, using birth control, and having abortions; divorced people remarrying; and LGBTQ people coming out of the closet in defiance of God’s plan).

But the survey counted as Mainline any Protestant not identifying as born again or evangelical. All Mainline Protestant denominations are dropping dramatically in membership and attendance. It’s extremely unlikely that more Americans now identify as Mainline even as those churches implode as fast as ever.

The slight uptick in non born again identifying Protestants is likely comprised mainly of former Evangelicals and nominal Christians who don’t relate closely to any particular tradition. The term evangelical has become increasingly political and there’s no surprise that fewer would tell pollsters they identify with it.

Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), the survey organizer, specializes in deriding white Evangelicals as political reactionaries while also insisting they are fast becoming extinct. This appraisal typically ignores or minimizes growing numbers of non white Evangelicals and the ongoing institutional and membership collapse of Mainline Protestantism.

According to Religion News Service, PRRI’s chief cited “circumstantial evidence” suggesting “over the last two years in particular, white mainline Protestants seem to have absorbed at least some folks leaving white evangelical and other churches who may have otherwise landed in the religiously unaffiliated camp.”  

If significant numbers of Evangelicals are newly associating with Mainline churches, they are not appearing with any force in the latest declining membership and attendance statistics. Instead these new non evangelical Protestants probably more typically are a former Southern Baptist who no longer attends church or drifts through various nondenominational churches that are more experiential than theologically specific.

Adding to the confusion but not acknowledged by PRRI or many media is that many Mainline Protestants identify as born again or evangelical. A United Methodist poll found that 44% of USA church laity were theologically traditionalist. Many if not most of them would profess to be born again. Ironically, many of the supposed Mainline Protestants in the survey are actually not, while at least some of the identified Evangelicals are also Mainline Protestants.

Perhaps PPRI should simply have avoided reference to Mainliners and just delineated between evangelical and non evangelical Protestants. The ongoing de-institutionalization of USA Christianity will make these terms increasingly fluid and less meaningful. People who sporadically attend numerous different churches and practice various online spiritualities while not identifying with any particular tradition will become almost impossible to categorize.

USA Christianity is not collapsing as many have surmised and even hoped. But it is in a state of roiling ferment. The old denominational categories are fast fading. Americans in their increasingly individualized religion more and more define their spirituality by their social media intake, or the podcasts they enjoy, their favorite religious music from satellite radio, the books they download from Kindle, their favored YouTube videos, or the ad hoc prayer or self help group they attend when they’ve time.

The typical American is not so much secularizing as partaking of a wide stream of spiritualities that include Evangelical, Catholic, Charismatic, Prosperity Gospel, New Age and eastern mysticism. The resulting mishmash is not easily detected by a pollster or even described coherently by the subject.

This hybrid of practical religiosities is not new. It’s always existed in America and was especially pronounced after the Second Great Awakening, which electrified and created new Protestant movements while also generating new heterodox sects and practices. Online spirituality and community enables such tendencies to metastasize exponentially.

Pragmatic religion has almost always outweighed more purely theological categories in America. Such practicalities frustrate the purists. But popular churches and religious movements today or yesterday speak in the language of practicality and adaptability.

The more religiously conventional and orthodox are always a minority. But if they are shrewd they will see the current social upheaval as a rich opportunity for building new communities and new institutions that will replace the structural descendants of 18th and 19th century USA Christianity. Those old structures had a remarkable run, creating a civilizational ethic that transformed the world.

So what’s next for America? It’s not secularism, but neither will it be entirely orthodox conventional Christianity. It’ll be an evolving spectrum of largely Christian generated spiritualities, good, bad and in between. Pollsters in 50 years won’t be dividing Americans between evangelical and not. There will be new categories not yet imagined.