217. The Decline of Christianity in America – Part One

Part One: This week we’ll look at the depressing facts. The decline is unarguable. I don’t really intend to drive you crazy with charts and graphs and statistics, but we Orthodox need to know these things. Obviously we must go for Truth, not growth, but it is helpful to see what is not working lest we be tempted.

Part Two: Next week I’ll share what I’ve seen and experienced in my eighty two years, and give my best guesses as to why most (not all) of American Christianity and religion is declining.

The Statistics

I was tempted to title this Post “The Decline and Fall of Christianity in America”. We don’t know that, of course, because no one can see what the future will bring. But it certainly looks like we could be following the pattern of Christianity in western Europe.

This is from the heart of former Christendom:

DeutscheWelle, March 2018: In Germany “only 10 percent of registered Catholics attend church on Sundays. Among Protestants, it’s 3 percent.”

The Guardian in 2016: “The number of people attending Church of England services each week has for the first time dropped below 1 million – accounting for less than 2% of the population.” If you fly over hoping to find “merrie olde England” – sorry, folks, it’s not there anymore.

The Scandinavian countries are even worse. I’ll spare you the gory details.

From Statista, July 3, 2020: “Every year the number of Italian believers attending religious services becomes lower and lower. In 2018, there were about 14.3 million citizens attending house of prayer at least once every week, around four million worshippers less in comparison with the figures from a decade earlier.” This in a country with a population of about 60 million. At least it’s better than northern Europe.

How about Russia? Get ready for a shock, you Orthodox. Pew Research survey, 2014: 72% of Russians identify themselves as Orthodox, but how many attend church as often as monthly? Seven percent! in supposedly “super-Orthodox” Russia. (Some surveys say it’s even fewer.) This may or may not explain some things.

In Greece? In February 2017 Pew Research reported that “more than half say that religion is essential to their national identity. That’s 20 percentage points higher than any other European country.” I’ve read that church attendance is decreasing, but can’t find statistics. All I know from my very limited experience is that of the approximately 25 Liturgies I attended randomly in Greece (not counting Mount Athos) all but two churches were nearly full, and some were overflowing. One Sunday in 2012, I “church hopped” on Crete trying to find an empty church. All were full.

Just in passing, according to Pew Research in 2009, among Orthodox countries overseas which had the highest weekly attendance? Ethiopia with about 78%.

What is happening in America?

The United States is well known as one of the most churchgoing of countries. But here I am more interested in the trends.

Orthodox Christianity is so small in America that we rarely show up in national religious statistics. We’ll look at ourselves next week.

In what follows I haven’t been selective about the sources, since I find all tell the same story. So I’ve chosen charts that are more readable. (Or maybe it’s just my old eyes?) I’ll try to keep this as simple as I can.

1. This chart is a few years old, but it’s the clearest I’ve found to illustrate what’s happening. This shows not membership but percent of population. In that regard note that even “Evangelical Protestants” are not keeping up. Above all, note who are growing rapidly. Project current trends ahead for a few decades, and you can see…

2. Here is a chart of other religions. Islam and Hinduism are growing but still very small. Judaism is declining.

3. This meaures general “religiosity” based, it says, on “scientific surveys on worship service attendance, membership in congregations, prayer, and feelings toward religion [using] a computer algorithm to track over 400 survey results over the past 60 years”  – 1952 till 2012.

4. Weekly church attendance is likewise decreasing.

This chart shows that between 1993 and 2009 weekly attendance declined from 35% to 24%, while those who never attend has increased from under 10% to just over 25%.

 

5. Taking a long term view, since 1955: Protestant attendance has held steady at about 40%. (This, I presume, is because the rapid decline of mainline Protestantism has been compensated for by the rise of fundamentalist Protestantism.) However, weekly Roman Catholic attendance plummeted from 75% in 1955 to 33% in 2017!

6. Another indication of serious decline in the Roman Catholic Church: the number of nuns and priests.

7. Why are more people unaffiliated today? Gallup says public confidence in organized religion declined from 65% in 1974 to 36% in 2018.

 

This is part of the general American loss of trust in most of our national institutions. However, once organized religion was at the head of the pack, the most trusted of institutions. Now it’s barely in the middle:

Here is Gallup’s latest list:  Organized Religion at 36% is running behind Small Business (75%), the Military (72%), the Medical System (51%), the Police (48%), the Supreme Court (46%), and Public Schools (41%). +  We’re about even with the Banks (38%).  +  We are still ahead of Technology Companies (32%), Organized Labor (31%), the Presidency (29%), Newspapers (24%), the Criminal Justice system (24%), Health Maintenance Organizations (19%), Big Business (19%), Television News (18%, down from 46% in 1993), and, um, Congress (13%).

8. Why are so many “nones” now unaffilliated with religion?  Pew Research asked them. They give a variety of answers. In case you can’t read what’s below: 60% say they question religious teachings, 49% don’t like the social/political positions of their churches, 43% dislike religious organizations, 37% don’t believe in God, 36% find religion irrelevant, 34% don’t like religious leaders.

9. Who specifically are dropping out? This is especially worrisome. Younger people. The younger they are, the less formally religious they are. With “Millenials” (born 1980-2000) 29% claim no specific religion.