The "Dechurching" of America

As the Republican Party is intensifying the culture wars in order to pander and prostitute itself to the evangelicals, Christofascists and white supremacists that dominate GO primary elections, the numbers of those with no religious affiliation and who never go to church is surging across all demographics, but particularly among younger voters.  Personally, I see the decline of religion as a good thing given the hate, division and violence it has sown over the centuries.   Seemingly, the trend away from religion shows no signs of slowing even as the shrinking GOP base becomes more desperate and hysterical in its efforts maintain its dominance and control over the majority  of the population.  Indeed, this extreme minority's dogmatic racial, gender, political and sexual attitudes are what is in large part powering the exodus from Christianity. Yet these modern day inquisitors seem unable to grasps that they themselves are the cause of what they fear most.   A piece in the New York Times looks at what the author calls the "dechurching" of America.  Here are highlights: 

In previous newsletters about Americans falling away from religion, I’ve talked about why so many Americans’ religious identities now fall in the category known as “nones” when, just a half-century ago, nearly all Americans had some kind of affiliation.

But it’s not just how Americans identify that has greatly shifted. In their new book “The Great Dechurching: Who’s Leaving, Why Are They Going and What Will It Take to Bring Them Back?” Jim Davis and Michael Graham with Ryan Burge argue that the most dramatic change may be in regular attendance at houses of worship. “We are currently in the middle of the largest and fastest religious shift in the history of our country,” they postulate, because “about 15 percent of American adults living today (around 40 million people) have effectively stopped going to church, and most of this dechurching has happened in the past 25 years.”

[E]very group is trending away from traditional worship. As Davis, Graham and Burge put it: “No theological tradition, age group, ethnicity, political affiliation, education level, geographic location or income bracket escaped the dechurching in America.”

The data they shared with me suggests that “dechurching” is particularly prevalent among Buddhists and Jews, with nearly half not attending worship services regularly, and around 30 percent of most Christian denominations and around 20 percent of Mormons and Orthodox Christians.

But many said they did miss aspects of traditional attendance, and often these people still believed in God or certain aspects of their previous faith traditions. They’d sought replacements for traditional worship, and the most common were spending time in nature, meditation and physical activity — basically anything that got them out of their own heads and the anxieties of the material world. Kathy Keller, 60, who lives in Michigan and left the Catholic Church because of its child sex abuse scandals and intrusion into health care that adversely affects women, has had a fairly representative experience. She said that while she no longer goes to church regularly, she still believes in a higher power and prays occasionally. “I try to spend Sunday morning outside appreciating the glory of nature,” she said.

Others are trying to forge new kinds of religious paths for themselves. One example is the trend of mostly younger Americans who are “deconstructing” Christianity . . . . “deconstruction has a broad range of definitions and outcomes, from understanding more about a faith once accepted uncritically to full abandonment of religious belief.”

The process of deconstructing Christianity, . . . often begins with questioning the conservative racial, gender, political and sexual attitudes of the churches they were raised in — an approach that has particular relevance right now: Just last week, the Southern Baptist Convention voted to bar women from its pastorate.

Donnell McLachlan, 29, who lives in Chicago, has been sharing the story of his deconstruction on TikTok @donnellwrites, where he has nearly 250,000 followers, since 2021. He was brought up in what he describes as a small Black church on the South Side of Chicago in the Pentecostal and Apostolic traditions. Though he says the church did a lot for him and his family when he was growing up, he came to feel that it was a faith rooted in fear and judgment.

“I started to notice the distance between what we professed and what we actually did,” he told me, especially when it came to women, the L.G.B.T.Q. community and Black Lives Matter. For a while, he and his wife tried attending a different church that seemed more modern, but, McLachlan said, “I started to see a lot of the same patterns” of religious conservatism “that were just repackaged in a kind of shiny cool way.” . . . . McLachlan said he now describes himself as a “spiritual pluralist” rather than a Christian, though he still embraces some rituals from his Christian heritage, like prayer, gospel music and “drawing upon the love-rooted, justice-centered wisdom found in the Bible.”

Jill Fioravanti, 45, who lives in Maryland, is another example of a reader seeking a new kind of interfaith community. Fioravanti “was bat mitzvahed at a Conservative Jewish synagogue and was involved in Hillel at my university but became disillusioned when I could not find a rabbi who would conduct an interfaith marriage ceremony for me and my husband, who is Catholic,” she said.

One of the main qualifications readers seem to be looking for in their new spiritual communities is something that is less exclusionary than the denominations they were raised in. But it’s precisely the more “dogmatic” denominations and religious sects that are better able to keep adherents, according to Merril Silverstein, a sociologist at Syracuse University . . . . Mormons and evangelical Christians were able to recreate themselves more strongly across generations in their sample than Jews, mainline Protestants and Catholics, Silverstein said. Meanwhile, “the secular, the anti-religious or nonreligious people are producing nonreligious, anti-religious children,” Silverstein told me. It’s creating a new and more polarized religious landscape in our country than what we’ve had before.

I asked whether he thought the trend of falling away from regular attendance at traditional houses of worship would continue at its rapid clip. He said he thinks it eventually has to slow down, because so many people will become dechurched that there won’t be enough traditionally observant Americans left to keep up the pace. And he agreed with Silverstein that dechurched Americans will have “unchurched” or fully irreligious children. He summed it up this way: “I think the religious disaffiliation as a cultural phenomenon will continue.”