Is this bad news?

News organizations and religious commentators of all stripes have been paying close attention to a series of polls and studies that have come out lately showing a steep decline in American religious affiliation. The latest report comes from USA Today in an article called “Most religious groups in USA have lost ground, survey finds”. These findings are generally lamented as being a sign of the deterioration of faith in what was once a very religious nation.

The reports collectively paint a clear picture that, as a rule, traditional religious groups are losing adherents. The numbers of Baptists, Catholics and mainline Protestants have shrunk dramatically since 1990. To get a sense of this, the report notes that those who call themselves Methodists have shrunk from 8 million to 5 million. 3 million is not a huge number, but it is more than a 30% drop over the last 18 years. That trend doesn’t bode well for the future of the Methodist church, or other mainline/liberal denominations but the numbers are hardly better for the more conservative denominations.

For the church, and I mean the church in the broad sense of the redeemed elect sheep of Christ, is this all bad? As the social cost of being faithful goes up and the societal pressure to be involved in public religious expression goes down, is it not possible that we are seeing a sifting, as the chaff blows away in the winds of change and indifference, and those for whom faith is more than a mere show of external piety are what remains? After decades of capitulating to tradition and the culture at large, the organizational, “visible” church has progressively become more indistinguishable from the surrounding culture. Churches embrace marketing strategies, focus groups, executive models for pastors, church growth strategies, all in an effort to market a faith to people that by nature is not something that can be marketed. I am a pretty good salesperson for things I believe in, but as much as I believe in the Gospel, I can’t “sell” it, I can only “declare” it.

The hostility towards faith has grown louder and more strident in the last few years. Being an atheist is no longer stigmatized to the same extent it was a few decades ago. It is not only acceptable; it is pretty profitable as well as evidenced by the slew of “Religion stinks!” books that have filled bookstores! In fact, in many circles being an atheist is almost a prerequisite for membership. Take for example this person interviewed in the article:

Ex-Catholic Dylan Rossi, 21, a philosophy student in Boston and a Massachusetts native, is part of the sharp fall in the state's percentage of Catholics — from 54% to 39% in his lifetime.

Rossi says he's typical among his friends: "If religion comes up, everyone at the table will start mocking it. I don't know anyone religious and hardly anyone 'spiritual.' "

That is a telling statement. Among the self-described elite and intellectual in America, college kids who after a couple of years of philosophy classes have everything figured out, religion is not a topic for discussion, it a recipient of mockery. The visible church is to blame for a lot of these attitudes, having fed kids drivel for years couched in spiritual terminology that passed for authentic faith. Is it little wonder that when they get to universities and have their religion challenged, they find it shallow and wanting? Should we be surprised when our young people, marketed to all of their lives, get outside of the nest and find that the religion they have been taught is just one more marketing ploy?

None of this is to say that religion is dead in America. We still have a vague, amorphous religiosity in America which means that an awful lot of people who say they “Believe in God” and try to be good people still insist on political leaders who exhibit the right religious trappings and make the proper pious noises (i.e. ending speeches with “…and God bless America.”). What does seem to be changing is that fewer Americans feel compelled to swear allegiance to some sort of organization religious group.

I think the real question is not whether or not there are fewer Christians in America, but whether there ever were all that many to begin with. Are we to assume that America was full of Christians fifty years ago but now it is not? Or is it more reasonable to say that America was full of churchgoers fifty years ago?

The dividing lines are becoming clearer than ever. I liked this quip a lot:

"There's more clarity at the two extremes and the mishmash is in the middle," Keysar adds.

I don’t see that as a bad thing. There is a “take up your cross and follow me” cost to being a Christian, the Gospel is an offense to the unregenerate. When Christian faith is camouflaged in religious rituals, public pietism and vague “God-speak”, it can be hard to know where the faithful remnant ends and the religious pretenders begin. There are suggestions that the number of Christians in China will soon pass the number of Christians in America. I am not sure that this change has not already occurred. I am growing more convinced that most of what passes for Christianity in America is a farce. Between the easy-belieivism, altar call, Charles Finney style decisionism and the health, wealth & prosperity teaching of immensely popular false teachers like Joel Osteen, Creflo Dollar and Joyce Meyer coupled with the generally watered down state of the Gospel being preached (if it is preached at all) in many other corners of American churches, it is hard to argue with these numbers coming out of the studies. If anything, I would say that these surveys really underreport the extent to which Americans are abandoning the faith that they never really bought into in the first place.

Should we be concerned about these trends?