Southern Baptist congregations shed nearly half a million members in 2022, the denomination's biggest one-year membership loss in more than a century, new data show.
Research from Lifeway Christian Resources shows that America's biggest Protestant and second-biggest Christian denomination lost 457,371 members to end the year with some 13.2 million members.
The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), one of America's most influential religious groups, began growing very rapidly after the Second World War. In 1950, the denomination had 7.08 million members; by 2006 it had grown to an astonishing 16.3 million members, more than twice the 1950 membership. But that is when its membership peaked, and it has since lost about three percent (3%) of its membership annually. Membership now stands close to where it was in 1978.
We can expect this trend to continue and accelerate. Last year, the Leftist leadership of the SBC handed the denomination over to its mortal enemies, the current FBI and DOJ.
The SBC lost 416 churches and another 165 'church-type' missions in 2022. The good news is that although membership dropped, participation is beginning to rebound post-Covid. Covid saw weekly attendance drop from 4.4 million in 2020 to 3.6 million in 2021, but last year it was back up to 3.8 million.
The Catholic Church in America isn’t doing well, either. The number of US-based priests fell from 58,000 in 1965 to 38,000 today, and the number of nuns dropped from 180,000 to 50,000.
The membership slide in the Southern Baptist Convention is typical of American Christianity. If current trends continue, America will be less than 50% Christian in less than fifty years. Religious belief is much stronger in the older demographic: About two thirds of people born between 1927 and 1945 believe in God as an 'all-knowing, all-powerful, and just creator and ruler of the universe.' Less than a third of millennials have the same degree of faith.