The huge Pew Forum Religious Landscape Study was just released. The study was conducted in 2014 and the same study was also conducted in 2007 which allows us to see important trends in religious affiliations and beliefs. The full report can be found here: http://www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12/americas-changing-religious-landscape/
The study groups people into the following categories (in order of affiliation rank): Evangelical (25.4%), unaffiliated (22.8%), Catholic (20.8%), Mainline Protestant (14.7%), and Non-Christian faiths (5.9%).
The biggest headline is that the Christian share of the population has fallen from 78.4% in 2007 to 70.6% of the U.S. population. Most of the losses have come for Catholics and Mainline Protestants.
Christianity is still by far the most dominant religion in America and more Christians live in America than any other country in the world.
It’s interesting that Evangelicals have only lost 0.9 percentage points since 2007, but this means a gain of about 2 million because the population of adults grew about 18 million to a total of 245 million. Catholics lost 3.1 percentage points (about a 3 million loss) and Mainlines lost an amazing 3.4 percentage points (about a 5 million loss). These are huge losses in such a short time.
In my opinion, the reason Evangelical affiliation did so much better may be because younger generations who are religious are more interested in a relationship with God they can sense; Catholicism is more ritual-based and many mainline churches have rejected much of the supernatural dimension of Christianity and an interactive relationship with God is less real for them.
One important fact about Evangelicals is that there are many Evangelicals within Mainline churches. These churches include United Methodist, American Baptist, ELCA, and PCUSA. Pew categorized certain denominations as Evangelical, yet Evangelicals are better defined by their theology than by denomination. This makes it less clear how they are doing.
Yet, the fact is that affiliation with Christianity is not keeping up with population growth.
Another major headline is that the Unaffiliated category has grown very fast, by about 6.7 percentage points which is a gain of 19 million. This indicates that Americans are becoming less interested in religion and Christian fellowship. Yet 30% of the Unaffiliated state that religion is “very”or “somewhat” important to them. Since there are 56 million Unaffiliated this means about 17 million American adults are unaffiliated but consider religion important to them.
Another key finding is that the Millenial generation has a very high percentage of Unaffiliated.
Overall, Evangelicals have done better than other Christian groups but Americans in general are becoming somewhat less interested in being part of a group of believers, even those who consider religion important. Maybe the
“Bowling Alone” dynamic in America has really hit Christianity.
Christians need to look at the problems of weak salvation presentations, theologies that downplay the supernatural activity of God in our lives (e.g. churches that are anti-charismatic), lack of true community in churches, and the lack of an effective theology of spiritual growth, i.e., spiritual theology. But we also must remember that it is very normal for people to fall away from a dominant religion, and Americans have many pleasures that can take them away from God.
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