The Public Religion Research Institute has released its latest survey of religion in the United States and it continues the string of bad news for white evangelical churches:
The number of white people who identify as evangelical has declined by more than a third since 2006, and this is a big part of the reason that white evangelicals were so eager to jump on the Trump bandwagon in 2016. After spending the '80s and '90s as a potent political force, white evangelicals spent the next two decades losing both membership and influence. By 2016 they were in panic and despair, so when Trump showed up sounding like an old time tent preacher they were ready to swoon. And they did.
But it's done them no good. Since 2016 the number of white evangelicals has continued to drop while mainstream protestant churches have regained more than a quarter of the followers they had lost.
White evangelicals made a deal with the devil when they decided to become an arm of the Republican Party during the Reagan era, and reviving that deal with an obvious charlatan like Trump hasn't worked. Perhaps the answer is for them to try acting like a church, not a PAC. You never know. It might work.
The large jump in Mainline churches seems a lot more surprising then the continued decline of Evangelicalism.
I wonder to what degree new membership in Mainline churches is being driven by ex-Evangelicals joining up, versus drawing new members from other sources.
I agree. Could it be that people opposed to Trump were finding a community in the mainline churches? I've seen suggestions that some Catholics have left the church for the Episcopalians.
Unless we see more of this I'm willing to chalk it up to an error. Then again maybe a plague concentrated their attention.
The next couple elections are the last realistic shots the authoritarian core of their leadership have of achieving a white-ruled theocracy.
My late grade- and high school years were spent in a small southern town. Seeing Talibangical culture wither brings me joy, but they're dangerous when they're desperate, and they're working themselves into a frenzy.
2022 and '24 are going to be *lit*.
Becoming a church would require reading and practicing what Jesus taught. That ain't gonna happen.
The Catholic Bishops have been doing their best to push people out of their church too.
I wonder why Catholics weren't included. It would be interesting to see how they compare. I know my specific parish has grown over the last decade or so. (We just finished a multimillion dollar expansion of the actual church.) But I have no idea what the national trend is.
I assume that some of the growth of the mainstream protestant churches comes from converts of evangelical churches. I'm still a little fuzzy on what actual denominations constitute "evangelical".
Catholics certainly were included. Kevin just didn't delve into that question. Follow the link he provides right above the chart.
Thanks. Just clicked through. Catholics currently are 22% of the population. Seems strange that the survey breaks out white Catholics versus Hispanic Catholics and "other race" Catholics. What difference does it make? Catholic is Catholic. Then in the bar graphs that show growth/decline over time, they only include White Catholics.
Immigration from Latin America tends to help the Catholic Church.
Some places are building new churches, but a lot of the old Eastern European and Irish and Italian churches are closing down and consolidating.
This measures what people "identify" as. In other words, is this a real decline in the number of people truly affiliating themselves with evangelical Christianity, or people just deciding that's not what they want to be called (but still going to church, voting Republican, supporting anti-LGTBQ policies, etc.)? Sort of like a lot of conservative voters calling themselves "independents" because they're embarrassed to admit they usually vote Republican.
Yeah, there's a whole lot of people down with the whole Nazi program. They just don't like the word 'Nazi' is all.
So you're equating Christians with Nazis?
Much of Germany under the Nazis was Christian. The Nazi hardcore wasn't, because Jesus was a Jew, and they couldn't have that.
Thanks for the history lesson. What does that have to do with Christians in the US today?
@ Atticus
It isn't a "history lesson," it's just a bit of relevant history showing that Christians equated to Nazis in Germany. The lesson for Christians in the US today is obvious for those who learn from history and look at right-wing Christianity and Nazis in the US today.
Hope that helps.
Too many German church leaders supported the Nazi’s. Too many American church leaders support Trump. What’s the point of a religion if it won’t take a stand against evil?
Um, for those dumber than a sack of wet hammers, I'm pointing out the right's frequent disconnect between its avowed policy prescriptives vs how it wishes those positions in aggregate to be identified.
I would have thought a so-called 'English major' would have been able to parse my comment with a minimum of effort and misunderstanding ... but evidently I was wrong.
And we were just getting off the wrong foot too 😉
And more than just that.
It is not measuring the %age of people who identify as evangelicals or mainstream ( although your point there re identification is astute), it measures how people identify and are willing to say so to a pollster, and only those who will respond to the pollster in the first place.
So could be that evangelicals still identify as such themselves but, if asked by a pollster, fib and say mainline. Or maybe that a lot of evangelicals just do not respond to pollsters ( and in a proportion that cannot be offset by weighting).
I am just skeptical of most any polls as too many on the right, and a large number of all, just do not participate anymore.
This is true and has been noted elsewhere. Self-identification is an imperfect proxy for religious affiliation and even more so for practice. And "evangelical" is an ambiguous term that can be interpreted differently by different people. And of course polls are imperfect instruments for a whole raft of reasons. However, the multi-year trends seem consistent, which suggests the underlying conclusion is valid: the "evangelical" boom is fizzling slowly. And I for one don't consider that a bad thing, for many reasons.
A court just revealed the Air Force also contributed to declining membership of white evangelical churches.
Reference? Are people joining the Air Force in lieu of church? Or is this something to do with the Air Force Academy's well-known fundie christianist bullying program for cadets?
Judge Says The Air Force Is Mostly Responsible For A 2017 Texas Church Shooting. https://www.npr.org/2021/07/07/1013832724/judge-says-the-air-force-is-mostly-responsible-for-a-2017-texas-church-shooting
Ah... I see. Decreasing church membership, one by one.
I'm not surprised that the evangelical churches lining up behind a man who exemplifies the Seven Deadly Sins and has none of the seven heavenly virtues would dissuade any thinking member of their congregations.
Apparently, that's just 30% of them.
By not answering pollsters or not answering correctly for the purpose of deception social conservatives are behaving as if they were a secret organization, clandestine enterprise or organized crime.
They know that in context of the rest of society their presence is in every case harmful, so they want to eliminate the context. They want to be North Korea but with more Chick-fil-A.
(we'll see if the html tags work...)
They probably think of themselves more as the early Christian cells, back in the two and three digit years. Or the WWII antifascist (antifa!!) underground. Maybe the early American colonials who met in homes, coffee shops, and taverns to plot independence via armed insurrection.
Many do, and it dovetails neatly with the general paranoid outlook of authoritarians and the absurd cult of victimization that currently dominates the Republican Party.
If you read the Gospels it's striking how exactly Jesus and the apostles come off like a psychotically abusive cult of personality and covert organization.
But I think that's just part of the background in their minds, foremost is their victimized grandiosity and their frustration that however much they achieve it always seems to fall away into meaninglessness and be quickly characterized as wrong, because it is wrong, and because the mechanism of political conservatism is the act of constantly manipulating these characters in this way.
The issue becomes the amount of nonsense debt they build up over decades of such manipulation until the forces exploiting them can't control it anymore and some kind of violent revolutionary episode takes off.
Considering Jesus was made up after the 38 Alexandrian riots, by a Greek "jewish" writer surnamed "Paul" or a number of writers named "Paul", why should any Indoeuropean man believe in its beta male construct. The same Greek jews during code named matt, luke and Mark did the same with the 66-73 war based off "Paul".
Christianity is a made up farce. Not of middle eastern origin, but one made up by immigrants of middle eastern immigration.
And this makes it different from other religions how?
*Religion* - where you have to pay someone to say something .