Evidence continues to accumulate that the United States is rapidly de-Christianizing. Eighteen months ago, we reported that only 65% of Americans were claiming to be Christian.
Below is a graph that tracks the percentage of Americans who say they are a member of a church, synagogue, or mosque:
As you can see, church membership coasted along at about 70% of the population for six decades. Then, between 2000 and 2010, it dropped about ten percentage points. In the past decade, church membership has dropped from 61% to 47%. This is an astonishingly rapid decline in church membership, which is now below 50% of the population for the first time since Gallup began polling this question. And since some of the respondents were Jews and Muslims, the percentage of Christians who are church members is even less than 47%.
Any pastor can tell you that attendance is some fraction of membership, usually not more than 50%. This is true in the Seventh-day Adventist Church as well. And current polling indicates that only about 24% of the population attend church regularly.
The rapid de-Christianization of America is a real phenomenon. The sudden and rapid de-Christianization of America corresponds to the even more sudden and rapid dystopianization of American life—economic hari kari, closed churches, normal life an increasingly dim memory, all over a virus comparable to seasonal flu, we cannot hold trustworthy national elections, and an incredibly vile, hate-filled Marxist ideology—critical race theory—has leapt out of academia to infect all institutions of America life, just to name things that have happened in the last 12 months. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the rapid de-Christianization of America is causally related to the rapid dystopianization of American life.
The chart below indicates that most of the “nones” are coming out of the ranks of collapsed mainline Protestantism. Other groups are basically holding steady, but mainline Protestantism has seen a rapid shrinkage, and those professing no religion have increased at about the same rate:
Considering that the lion’s share of immigration over the past 55 years has come from heavily Catholic Latin America, the Catholic Church, to be merely holding steady as a percentage of the population, is doing very little right. They have been hurt by the pedophile priest scandals, and now by a liberal pope and liberal bishops who are more interested in Leftist politics than in shepherding their flock.
Conservatives evangelicals are obviously doing better than mainline Protestants, and have pretty much held their own, but the idea that Christians are leaving the liberal churches to join conservative ones is not as true as we might wish. Most of those leaving liberal churches are becoming “nones.” The Southern Baptist Convention, representative of conservative evangelicals, peaked in 2006, at 16.3 million members, but has been in an accelerating decline since then. Their current membership stands at around 14 million members. Clearly, they are not immune to the trend of increasing secularization.
You would think that mainline Protestants, seeing that liberalism is rapidly ruining them, would change course. If your business is faith, and you cannot bring yourself to believe in anything, as mainline Protestants seemingly cannot, wouldn’t you have to know that will bad for business? There seems to be little hope of a reformation in those churches. They are headed for oblivion.