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It’s so good to be with you. I do bring you greetings on behalf of Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City, your brothers and sisters in in Kansas City, and I just can say a wholehearted, “We love you.” Grateful for what Southwestern is doing, and thank you also for the invitation to give these lectures.
In this lecture, I want to talk about our new book, The Death of Religion: Nones, Others, and the Flourishing of Faith that I wrote with Byron Johnson, my friend and colleague and fellow church member when we lived in in Waco. And in that that book, we argue that contrary to reports of its imminent demise, Christianity is alive and well in America and around the world. However, it is true that some Christian denominations have endured terrible decline over the past half century, and it may be that some journalists and scholars conflate the near death of those, especially liberal denominations, with the fate of Christianity and churches generally.
And I’m going to get to a little notice story of Christian vibrancy later in my talk, but for the moment, I want to focus on the question: What are what are the leading causes of denominational death? It’s a bit of a grim topic, but I think it bears study. And the most salient story of Christian decline in American history ever has been the shocking collapse of the mainline denomination since the 1960s, and if you’re not familiar with that term, the mainline churches generally include seven white-majority denominations, including the United Methodist Church, the Episcopal Church, the Presbyterian Church USA, and the American or Northern Baptist churches and a few others, and these churches have often benefited from strong political connections and well-endowed institutions. Princeton Theological Seminary, for example, a Presbyterian institution which is separate from the neighboring Princeton University, Princeton Seminary has a larger endowment at more than $1 billion than most American colleges and universities do, and that’s just one example of the kind of financial resources that much of the mainline enjoys. But despite these financial resources, the membership of the mainline denominations has dropped precipitously since the 1960s. So, what happened? Where did all those people go?
Some of the cratering membership has to do with aging and dying congregants, many of whom had few to no children, and are now not being replaced by new adherents. But many of the former mainline adherents are surely among the growing masses of nones and others in the subtitle of our book. Now, nones. I’m guessing many of you have heard of the nones. This is not n-u-n-s, but n-o-n-e-s. These are people who tell pollsters that they have no religion, while the others are a largely unknown but vast group of mostly practicing Christians that have gone almost totally unnoticed in the media. More on the others a little bit later. So some people, probably you know, large numbers of people left the mainline for other Christian traditions. Some of them became nones, but in many cases, we just don’t know. But there’s no doubt that the Catholic, Evangelical, and Pentecostal cohorts in America remain relatively robust as compared to the mainline decline. Now, the details of each of these denominations’ decline are compelling, but obviously we wouldn’t have time to relate the travails of every single mainline denomination over the past six decades here. So instead, I’m going to focus on the Episcopal Church, which is arguably the denomination with the longest-standing cultural influence and power in America.
The Episcopal Church reached its membership apex in 1966, and then began a downturn that has accelerated through the early 2020s. In 2020, the reported Episcopal total membership stood at about 1.58 million, which is down from about 3.4 million Americans in the mid 1960s. So, in other words, the Episcopal Church’s total membership declined by more than half over the course of six decades, and that’s at a time when the total U.S. population grew by about 85 percent. And if you care about institutional membership and statistics, that is an extremely troubling statistic.
Now, there’s no definitive statistical or theological answer as to why the Episcopal Church deteriorated so significantly, and many conservative Christians say, “Well, of course they’re liberal, so they died.” I mean that there’s something to that story, but it’s obviously more complex than that. There are factors involved of low fertility or childbearing rates, ineffective or non-existent efforts at recruiting people into the church, a focus on secular, social, and political priorities, and a gulf between progressive denominational leaders and more moderate to conservative congregants. Those are all part of the mix. And in recent years, as if you know anything about the Episcopal Church, the disjunction between progressive leadership and their moderate to conservative congregants has produced a major schism in in the Episcopal Church, and this schism will undoubtedly perpetuate the numerical problems for the Episcopal Church, as many conservative congregations and dioceses have left the denomination to join the new Anglican Church in North America, the ACNA.
Now, new religious movements, new sects depend disproportionately on recruiting new members on evangelism, especially of family members, but also neighbors and coworkers, into the group for growth. But healthy churches always put a big emphasis on evangelism, and practical efforts at evangelism are generally a good sign of church health, but it’s also true that as religious groups reach a stable size, we often talk in religious sociology about the switch from sect to denomination. So when they reach denominational size, the biggest factor normally in a mature church’s growth pattern over a 20-year period is usually whether its members have children at a replacement rate, and obviously it also matters whether the church can retain those children as members of the church, but it goes without saying a church cannot retain children who do not exist.
And in our transient culture, an additional factor is whether young families moving into an area decide to attend a given church or to attend church at all. And this decision can often be influenced by factors like the presence of other young parents, effective children and youth ministries, and other family-related initiatives in the church. And so, in effect, generationally rich churches often get richer, attracting more families of childbearing age, churches bereft of young families, and this is true of liberal or conservative churches, churches bereft of young families and children may find it difficult to justify investing more in children’s ministries when there are no or very few children there.
Church leaders may struggle also to know how to influence members’ child-rearing decisions. Few pastors, I imagine, would ever directly encourage members to have more children just to fill up the membership rolls of the next generation. That would be a little weird. But different churches, as I’m sure you’re aware, certainly set different tones about family and child bearing in the church. Progressive and egalitarian churches often hesitate to suggest that motherhood is anything but optional for women in the congregation. Some churches certainly encourage women to pursue careers outside the home and do not want anyone to feel pressure to get married or have children. The most liberal churches will also see same-sex relationships as just as valid as and often more celebrated than heterosexual ones, though of course only traditional marriages—one might simply call them marriages—can produce children. Conservative churches often honor the traditional role of women as mother mothers and homemakers, even if they do not actively discourage women from pursuing a career, as certain fundamentalist churches might do. Conservatives, of course, also condemn same-sex relationships as violating the Bible’s teachings.
In any case, the membership of the mainline churches has closely tracked the overall fertility patterns of the white American population since World War II. The baby boom of the late 1940s and 1950s was a burgeoning time for the American birth rate and for most Christian denominations across the board, from liberal to conservative. But evidence would suggest that members of culturally conservative religions, and this is not even necessarily traditional Christian denominations, whether you know evangelical, Pentecostal, Catholic, Mormon, etc. already tended to have more children than mainline people did by the 1950s, so this was even happening during the baby boom. During the 1960s, the fertility rate among American whites dropped sharply, influenced by a variety of economic and social changes, including the widespread acceptance and availability of birth control, and the growing number of women working in careers outside the home. Declining birth rates were more pronounced among middle to upper class white women with college degrees, precisely the demographic that is overrepresented in many mainline churches.
As of the early 2000s, estimates suggest that the total number of children born to the average Episcopalian woman in the U.S. was about 1.5 children over a lifetime. You can’t have 0.5 of a child, but anyway, you know what I’m saying. And 1.5 children is far below the replacement rate of 2.1, which is the rate of childbearing required to sustain population equilibrium over time. Since the year 2007, the U.S. overall has seen an alarming crash in the overall birth rate too, from about 2.1 children per woman to about 1.6 in the year 2020, and that’s even before COVID, which disrupted this pattern even further. Now signs would also suggest that conservative churches’ birth rates have begun to drop as well, drawing conservative churches’ birth rates closer to the rates seen in the mainline churches, but that drop is mitigated somewhat by the role of immigration.
Recent immigrants offset some losses due to declining fertility, and recent immigrants are more likely when they arrive in the U.S. to attend Catholic, evangelical, or Pentecostal churches than they are to attend mainline congregations. Much of the U.S. population growth in recent decades has been more due to immigration than to a healthy birth rate, and immigrants to the U.S. (You wouldn’t pick this up in news coverage about immigration) but immigrants to the U.S. have, for many decades, tended to be disproportionately Christian, and especially those coming from Latin America and the Caribbean. And when I say Christian here, obviously, I’m talking about people who self-identify as Christians, not necessarily that they’re born again.
Practicing Christians among these immigrants have typically, again, attended Catholic, evangelical, or Pentecostal churches, not mainline churches. The vast majority of the Episcopal Church in the U.S. around 90% is white. By contrast, by the early 2020s, the Pentecost, the major Pentecostal denomination, Assemblies of God, approached minority-majority status, with 44 percent of the Assemblies God being non-white members. Membership in the Assemblies of God plateaued in the 2010s, as it did with the Southern Baptist Convention and other conservative denominations, but it is certain that the AG’s numbers would have declined much more in the 2010s were it not for immigrant families coming into the denomination. As Episcopal numbers dropped, the denomination was dogged by regular controversies over, again, the gap between national leaders who tended to be quite liberal and regular clergy and parishioners who were often moderate to conservative, and this is an important point to remember when you think about religion and politics in America. When we think about religion and political controversy, we’re apt to think only about evangelicals, due to the strong white evangelical attachment to the Republican Party over the past 70 years or so, and that story is real, and it has caused substantial problems in evangelical denominations, including the Southern Baptist Convention. But on balance, I would argue that the mainline has endured more damaging political controversies than evangelicals have, based simply on numerical decline, so evangelicals have had political problems and they’ve seen a kind of plateauing of growth. Mainline have seen political problems and they’ve seen catastrophic decline.
So just in that sense, it seems like to the extent that the decline is about politics, the mainliners have it worse. Although they faced earlier struggles related to civil rights issues in the 1960s and 70s, issues related to gender and sexuality became the most controversial problems of all for Episcopalians. Like most Christian denominations, the Episcopal Church had not traditionally ordained women as pastors before the 1960s, following the New Testament’s prohibitions on women serving in formal pastoral leadership. By the mid-1970s, radical Episcopalians had begun to ordain women as priests in direct violation of church policy, and we would say of Scripture, instead of precipitating a backlash against these radical dissenters, however, these unauthorized ordinations prompted Episcopal leaders to formally endorse women’s ordination by 1977. Women’s ordination then has become standard practice in the main line, but it’s also common among Pentecostals, as you may be aware. While only some self-described evangelicals ordain women, Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, as you may be aware, do not ordain women as priests. Most churches that ordain women find that they are inevitably forced to confront questions about ordaining gays and lesbians as ministers and performing gay weddings. This latter issue of gay weddings became especially acute once the U.S. Supreme Court guaranteed the right of gay couples to marry in the Obergefell v. Hodges decision in 2015.
Women’s rights and LGBTQ+ rights are integrally connected for many progressive Christians who believe that the privileging of masculinity and of heterosexuality in marriage and ministry, have enabled oppressive patterns in the church, and so the Episcopal Church viewed itself as a champion of social progress as it gradually liberalized its practices regarding women’s ordination and then homosexuality. The Episcopal Church remains numerically larger by quite a bit than the ACNA, its conservative schismatic group, but the ACNA also has its own terrible problems about the question of women’s ordination. Still, almost every way you look at the numbers, the Episcopal Church appears to be in nothing less than a death spiral. The Episcopal collapse, as we can see, has resulted from the combined blows of the fertility drop, the disconnect between liberal leadership and moderate to conservative laity, the ACNA schism, waning evangelism, and a failure to find new sources of growth, such as immigrants, and in our context, we might also simply posit that a denomination that repeatedly and formally adopts positions that contradict Scripture certainly has no reason to expect God’s blessings in terms of numerical growth.
But to return to the bigger picture, where did all the mainliners go? Well, some of them went nowhere because they never existed. In other words, fertility declined, and that is an issue I think that is not exclusive to the liberal churches, and so as we have watched the plateauing of conservative denominations over the past 10 or 15 years, and seen a fertility drop that is not dissimilar to the fertility drop that you see happening in the mainline churches, that bears noting that this is not exclusively a liberal phenomenon. So much of the downfall of the Episcopal Church and other mainline churches and the plateauing of conservative denominations simply entails children never born and aging adults who had few to no children pass away and are not replaced. It goes without saying, but people who are never born cannot participate in the American religious marketplace.
Of course, there are many millions of living people involved in the death or renaissance of American religion, too, including the nones and the others. Now, many of the nones’ parents once associated with a religious group, but they tell pollsters that now they identify with no religion in in particular, and we tend to think that many of the nones are people who a generation ago, especially in in the Bible Belt, would have said when asked, “Oh, you know, yeah, I’m a Christian,” even though they either never went to church or maybe they just went on Christmas or Easter, but really their faith played virtually no role in their life, and yet they still said that they were a Christian. Today there are just growing numbers of people who, when pressed, are able to be candid, I think, and just say, you know, the truth is, I’m nothing. And honestly, I don’t think that this is necessarily a bad thing for the church because those of you who are going into ministry, I think you will find increasingly in the coming years that when someone comes to visit your church for the first time, they are more likely now to know that they are not a Christian, rather than thinking they are a Christian, like I did when I was growing up in South Carolina, when I did not understand the Gospel at all, and I needed to have myself disabused into the notion that I was a Christian. So, in an evangelistic sense, I think this actually makes things somewhat simpler, even though obviously many of the nones are going to be harder in their opposition to Christian belief than perhaps a nominal Christian would have been. But anyway, we’ll see.
But the growth of the nones, which is undeniable over the past 15 or 20 years, I think really reflects more of a change in religious self-identification and self-understanding than it does a change in religious behavior. But the media would act as if all these people had been practicing Christians. They deconstruct and then they become nones. We don’t have any evidence suggesting that beyond anecdotes, so don’t believe that kind of catastrophic narrative.
In any case, there’s much more we can say about the nones, but we also offer data that suggests the presence of a religious wave that I would say is arguably more important than the nones, and that is the growth of the others. This is kind of a crummy name for this group, but they are quite diverse in the profiles that they fit. But one thing they share in common is that they’re never discussed in the media. Let me briefly explain. The most recognized effort to assemble congregational and denominational data in America has been led by a group called the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies. This wild and crazy group here, you know. Anyway, this group has produced decennial or every 10-year reports for decades, and they draw on data supplied by denominations. And these reports are extremely important and authoritative reports, though imperfect, as I’ll explain here in a second, because they provide an unparalleled snapshot of religious congregational life on a county by county basis for every state. It’s remarkably comprehensive, and the data is summarized in a national map that highlights the dominant religious groups in every county in in the country and offers a vibrant picture of America’s pluralistic religious landscape, and their reports are usually called the Congregational Census or the CC.
Researchers and journalists see the CC as the gold standard of denominational and membership numbers in America, and the CC always receives major national media coverage when it comes out, and it consistently serves as a major reference point for the religion media and scholars. So this is a big deal. However, county-level studies by colleagues of ours at Baylor reveal a much different and much more vibrant picture than the CC does.
Dr. Gordon Melton, one of our colleagues, and his research associates have meticulously scoured counties in three widely different parts of the country. From Bible Belt started with McLennan County, Texas, which is where Waco is, to a county in very secular Washington state, and so forth. So they studied very different parts of the country, and they looked for every operating religious congregation, not just Christian, by the way, but any kind of religious congregation they could find at all. They looked up Facebook pages, which these days, if you think about it, if there is going to be any kind of public presence for a congregation, it will likely be a Facebook page, often unmonitored Facebook page, by the way. And but if you’re going to find evidence that a congregation exists, Facebook is probably the best place to start, and then at the end of the study, they literally took to driving street by street through the county. They’re like the Google Maps car, you know, they’re just driving every single street in the county. And when they would see something that looked like a church or a religious congregation, they would stop and see what they could find out about it. And they published their findings in a peer-reviewed academic journal, and their findings concluded that CC undercounts the total number of American churches by at least 25% and maybe as much as 40%. Which, if you’re talking about the whole landscape of all the churches in America, that is statistically a staggering, one might say, grotesque undercount of the total number of churches in America. It’s mind blowing, and it represents the uncounted wave, massive wave of others.
So, as you can tell, there are significant limitations in all the data that’s discussed in the media, whether it’s surveys about the nones or the data collected by the CC. But these limitations are obviously never, never recognized or acknowledged. So, what’s the problem with the CC? I mean, I’ve tried to say this is an important study. We really don’t have anything else like it. So, how did they go so wrong in terms of the undercount? Well, the people who run the CC have known for a long time that they can’t get membership data reports from a number of large religious groups and denominations, including several large historic African American-led denominations, and so some of the denominations they don’t get information on are 100 years old or more. But there’s also there also appears that there are 1000s of non-denominational or new denominational churches that are not being counted at all in the CC.
Some of these you would guess are small churches that meet in storefronts, maybe they meet in somebody else’s church’s facility, but some of them are highly visible megachurches. The church that Antioch Community Church in Waco, which for many years was the largest church in Waco, for many decades was not counted in the CC, and it was the largest church in Waco. So some of these churches are really big that they miss. So that that’s quite an oversight in and of itself
So many of the large older American denominations have been on a downward trajectory since the 1960s. There are other older denominations. There are many new denominations, and also many, many, many non-denominational independent congregations. 1000s and 1000s of those that more than make up the losses from the mainline Denominations numerically, and most of the others are evangelical or Pentecostal congregations. They’re rarely liberal churches. I should note, though, that the theology of some of the others, especially the prosperity gospel and also oneness Pentecostal churches, in other words, non-Trinitarian Pentecostal churches, would be highly problematic for traditional small orthodox believers, so I’m not saying that you know all this is good news, but I am saying that there are many, many, many more churches and denominations and religious groups than the media ever recognizes, and almost all of those churches are at least culturally conservative. Sometimes they’re bad theologically, though.
Often, urban areas are the most vibrant areas for new congregations, and this runs somewhat against received missiological wisdom, which tends to see suburbs as the most vital settings for new churches, but the others tend to do the best in urban areas, the urban core areas. For example, in New York City, the sociologist and religion journalist Tony Carnes did similar work to Gordon Melton’s work, you know the Google Car stuff, and Tony Carnes tried to document every single extant religious congregation in all of New York City. A huge, overwhelming, multi-year project, and so just for one example, in one South Bronx neighborhood, Carnes initially heard, I suspect, based on CC data, that there were 44 churches in this neighborhood, and he walked the streets and found that there were actually 156 churches there. So triple the number that he was told. That’s an extreme example, but it points to the vast undercount in the Bronx, so hardcore urban area, vital space for new congregations, and so certainly you have this in Fort Worth, and you have it in Dallas.
I was coming back from breakfast this morning and noticed an others church across the street. You know, some miracles church. You know, a Pentecostal church, Spanish speaking. That’s who I’m talking about. And if you just have a mind to look for this or be a little more systematic, bring up Google Maps and search your neighborhood with terms like Pentecostal or Iglesia, and you will realize that the others are everywhere around you, especially in cities. So religion in America, we would argue, is alive, well, and significantly underreported. Many members lost by the older denominations have not switched to becoming nones or unaffiliated as we have constantly been led to believe, but more likely they moved or switched to become new affiliated with evangelical or Pentecostal churches.
And yes, again, some of the declining members are people who were never born because churches are not having babies at a replacement rate, and that again is often the case with conservative churches as much as liberal ones. And the conservative churches are vastly disproportionately attracting immigrants and the mainline churches are generally not. The nones’ narrative claims that the fastest growing segment of the religious landscape are people who have either abandoned religion, deconstructed, and maybe have become atheists and agnostic. And some of the data that comes out of the Pew Research Center, which I think, is intentionally confusing on those issues because when they say nones, they are always combining nones with atheists and agnostics. But here’s the thing: nones had an option to say that they are atheists and agnostics, and they didn’t say that. They said they were nones. And if you ever ask the nones what they believe, which most polls do not, but if you ever ask them what they believe, we find out that the vast majority of nones are at least theists. Now, theist doesn’t give you get you into heaven, but it’s a whole lot different from being an atheist. Surprising numbers of nones display spiritual practices like prayer. They’ve had encounters with angels, things like that. They’re certainly not materialists, and a small but statistically significant number of the nones attend church regularly. So why why do they say that they’re nones? Who knows? Who knows? We think some of them are these, “I don’t have a religion. I have a relationship with Jesus” people. You know some of you may be those people, right? But don’t say you’re a none if that if that’s your conviction.
Anyway, lots of confusion, but we are routinely presented, I think, with a grossly inaccurate and misleading picture of what’s actually happening in American religion. Lots of change, change all the time, macro change in American religion all the time. But that’s not new. That’s been happening since day one of American history. So casual assessments of American religion regularly appear without any reference to be a missing quarter or more of the entire U.S. religious landscape, congregations. Just to give you a few numbers, instead of 356,000. congregations, as reported by the CC in 2020, there are likely more than 450,000, maybe as many as 500,000 existing houses of worship in America. So, maybe 150,000 churches more than is conventionally reported, if those churches average 90 people a Sunday, roughly the reported average attendance of churches surveyed, this means almost 10 million American others who attend church regularly and who are not counted and they are never discussed. Again, that’s a conservative estimate. Our misleading religion narrative, we would argue, needs a dramatic rework to focus not just on the nones, but on the remarkable rise of the others. Thank you very much.
