Is America becoming more secular?

Yes but no but yes but no. Some thoughts on the new book "The Great Dechurching" by Jim Davis and Michael Graham

Noah’s dove amid breaking clouds following the Flood in the stained glass window in the peak of the dome in the sanctuary of Wake Forest Baptist Church in Wake Forest, North Carolina, the church I was raised in and came to know Jesus Christ. I took this photo. Come back and look at it again after you read this whole thing: it’s going to make a WHOLE lot more sense… and it was put in place over a century ago and was in front of my eyes from when I was six years old onward. If you despair at the present… do not: you think the storm of the present will kill the world. I’m saying we’re 9 minutes from the break of day.

Cassidy Steele Dale writes to equip you with the forecasts, foresight skills and perspectives, and tools you may need to create a better, kinder world.

And one of those ways is to explain a change that’s already under way. Buckle up, it’s going to be bumpy, but have faith. Even if you’re not a person of any faith at all.

First things first: if you’re in ministry or work with, in, around, or near churches,get The Great Dechurching. Just do it. There will be something there for you.

Here’s why: the authors conducted one of the best surveys of people who have left church in the past 25 years and have laid those findings alongside some of the other best surveys of church life in recent decades. The data is as good as it gets.

The authors’ analytic frames for understanding that data, however, well… what I’ll say here and some future newsletters will be things you can use as a study guide or conversation in parallel with that book.

What’s the book about? What does it say?

The Great Dechurching is about why 15% of all Americans stopped going to church between the early 1990s and today and what the authors believe churches can do to bring those people (plus more) back to churches.

• From the early 1990s to now the Evangelical Lutheran Church lost 41% of its membership, the Presbyterian Church (USA) lost 58%, the United Church of Christ lost 52%, and the United Methodist Church lost 31%. The Southern Baptist Convention… I can’t quite tell but it’s lost members by the millions. Only the Assemblies of God and nondenominational Protestant churches are gaining members.

• On top of that, after the book went to print Gallup and Pew found that church attendance hadn’t returned to pre-pandemic levels and speculated that it may never return.

That’s not a bloodletting; that’s a bleedout. But I’m not worried yet. More seeming bad news first.

It’s likely to get worse — or at least appear to — because I expect the rates of church closures to speed up in the next few decades for the same reasons the authors found but also for financial, zoning, and urban planning reasons.

• The authors cite other studies that note that 70% of churches in the United States have 100 or fewer members — a number that’s apt to be financially unsustainable as their facilities age and the generations that have usually funded them age out as well. (Many of these may be “family chapel” churches — churches that mostly consist of members of 5-10 extended families.) In suburban and urban areas I expect that more congregations will close or merge with each other and sell their properties to construct new plants elsewhere. (If your denominational staff doesn’t have church closure consultants and/or real estate experts on staff or close at hand… )

• The next 20% of churches in the U.S. have about 101-250 members. Their futures will be a mixed bag.

• The last 10% have 250+ members… but 70% of all church attendees in the U.S. go to that last 10%.

What all this means is that — mathematically — the U.S. could lose 50-70% of its churches but not necessarily lose many members. What people would lose would be opportunities to go to church, meaning locations.

There’s an extra wrinkle to this: as American suburbs grew up postwar all of the major American denominations planted churches like crazy in as many neighborhoods as possible. That was the “If you build it, they will come” era.

But now is not then. Today this means there’s a weird sorta market saturation problem: as American church attendance has declined there’s now more churches than can be supported by the remaining attendees. From a (I say this loosely) business perspective, there’s too many damn Starbucks around to support the coffee-drinking population and gaining market dominance through ubiquity never was going to be sustainable in the long term. In this way American churches are like Starbucks.

Also, a rule of thumb I’ve used as a futurist is that when traffic is bad little local churches boom; when traffic is good big churches off the highway boom.

So the megachurch model is the result of ease of traffic, a business model that feels natural to Baby Boomers, the church growth movement that ramped up in the 1970s and a few other things.

Does this mean that megachurches are the future? Not necessarily but I’ll deal with that in a different newsletter later.

Right now I’m dealing with church membership decline and why I don’t necessarily think America’s future will necessarily be more secular.

I’m not worried yet for a few reasons.

1. Just because people stopped going to church doesn’t mean they lost their faith (something the authors confirmed repeatedly during their study).

2. Just because later there may be fewer churches doesn’t necessarily mean there will be fewer Christians. Another futurist rule of thumb I use: Don’t worry when folks worry that the world is ending but pay attention to WHO is worrying. The end of the world is usually just the end of a worldview… or the end of a spiritual approach, theology, church model, or family model. The people who are most scared are often the folks who can’t imagine goodness surviving the death of what they’re attached to. Just because they can’t imagine a good future doesn’t mean that a good future can’t be imagined. It’s hubris to conclude that God’s imagination is as equally limited as yours. Their worry is just a map of where their imagination ran out.

3. The world has changed so profoundly and repeatedly since 1990 that Americans’ church attendance broke against their schedules and energy levels… and their worldly questions, spiritual questions, and approaches to faith have moved away from what most churches offer and THAT underground hidden source of water has barely been tapped yet. More on that in a minute.

What changed and how?

The authors say Americans’ lives changed most profoundly from the early 1990s to today — the period of decline in church attendance so far — because of the end of the Cold War, the rise of the political-religious Right, and advent of the Internet. Those are exactly right and their outlining of those things are worth reading. (Yes, buy the book.)

My take on all that sits parallel to theirs.

During World War II, postwar, and Cold War eras the world in most Americans’ minds was divided into good guys and bad guys of one sort or another. So for many Americans their framing or interpretive questions were akin to Who is right and who is wrong? Who are the good guys and who are the bad guys? Whose side should I be on? Am I correct? Are we correct? How can we resist evil? These questions worked during that era and helped shape foreign policy and even theological approaches.

When the Cold War ended and a multipolar world emerged in its wake American and many foreign governments consciously decided to interconnect the world’s economies as rapidly and robustly as possible in order to reduce the odds of major interstate conflict (the idea being that countries whose economies rely on each other would be less apt to go to war with each other), expand their economies, and thus also reduce global poverty. This largely worked (but with some caveats that I explained in my Scenarios for American Democracy.)

(Bonus point: This is almost the entire reason why Al Gore authored legislation to open the U.S. military’s nuclear-war-proof intranet to public use. That’s what became the global Internet. Whether you like Al Gore or not, he’s always been a very sharp futurist. And for all the jokes about Al Gore misspeaking about having “invented” the Internet, he kinda did: he paved the way for the advent of the Internet. Al Gore is why you’re reading this right now and why you’re able to see photos online of your friends and family on your computer and why you cry a little bit when you do.)

For many Americans during that era — from the early 1990s to perhaps 2016 — their framing question became something like How do we all live together without killing each other? How can, should, and do we connect to others who are not like us? How do we become global citizens rather than parochial ones? All of the religious fundamentalist movements sharpened in reaction and some turned violent. One such movement yielded a few who flew planes into some buildings. Another yielded a few who stormed the Capitol.

That’s when the delta emerged: American churches were still in bipolar-world sin-and-salvation mode and more and more Americans moved into exploring and reckoning with religious differences — in full comparative-religions mode — and realized that spirituality underpins doctrines and that theologies are conceptual structures rather than laws of the universe. They were doing this because (1) the world situation required them to think differently about themselves and others, and because with the Internet (2) they could start figuring out how. They also figured that, because on the Internet no one knows you’re a dog, everybody found their particular dog-communities whereas previously they thought they were allllllllll alone.

The election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 — a domestic political (and religious) vertical shock and a global vertical shock — instantly changed many Americans’ framing questions. Now we’re in an era in which a central question for many around the world is How do we establish the resilience to withstand the shocks, failures, extremisms, sabotage, and self-sabotage that the globally-interconnected world and its reactionary extremists allowed? (Bonus point: Arguments for small government and arguments for greater reliance on market solutions will hold no water in this era, yet another core problem the GOP faces in this era.)

Here’s the kicker: American churches aren’t asking that question at all yet nor any question like it.

• In fact many evangelical churches are (1) still operating by the framing questions of two eras ago and thus (2) contribute to Christian reactionary extremisms. (Over-reliance/confidence on conservative evangelical megachurches as a model to emulate for the future would be… risky.)

• The exvangelicals get it half-right but they’re not there yet: they’re people who are only barely outside the damage and are still mostly reckoning with/looking back at the wound.

• The only segment of American Christianity that’s even blundering around in the correct neighborhood on any of this — even though they’re wandering around that neighborhood in the dark and driving up on people’s lawns because they can’t find their headlights — are progressive Christians… the very people who the Christian Right has repeatedly shot in the legs. The real hope for the future of American Christianity, once the flash-and-bang of the current phase of contemporary-worship-praise-song-evangelical-whatever is over, is with progressive Christians. And it probably always ever was. (As Russell Moore noted recently, when he reminded some conservative pastors of the contents of the Sermon on the Mount, was told by them that those were “liberal talking points” that “don’t work any more,” well… then who are the Jesus-Christians nowadays? If you were ever out there giving progressive Christians shit it’s now high time to sit up straight and lean in and start listening to them: they’re a hundred miles ahead of you and they’ve had the pedal to the metal in the name of the Lord for a looooooong time. They have spiritual wisdom that you do not yet have.)

Now let’s put all this together:

Why, beyond the mundane, are Americans leaving churches? And why am I not entirely worried yet?

Americans appear to be increasingly shifting from understanding the world and understanding God in “Knight” ways (bipolar, black and white) to understanding them in “Gardener” ways (systemic, growth). Knight Christianity is about sin and salvation, right and wrong, religious rules, and spiritual warfare. Gardener Christianity is about communion with God, spiritual growth, and care for others. (I lay out this distinction in my first e-book, The Knight and The Gardener which is here.) Most American churches are still Knight in orientation; most Americans are becoming Gardeners.

In part as a result of this, many American churches, particularly conservative evangelical megachurches, have set themselves up as refuges from/bastions of resistance to societal and theological changes rather than as agents of resilience and growth or as part of the societal system of care.

• I encountered this unexpectedly in the late 1990s while interviewing the city manager of a midsize American city. I asked why churches had lost influence in that city’s decision making over the previous decade. He said that the largest churches there, as they had become more evangelical, had stopped thinking about the city at all; they were only doing evangelism and otherwise hunkering down on their large tax-free campus. He said that there used to be a basic understanding that churches, in exchange for their tax-free status, would contribute to the health and well-being of the city and the churches there had largely abandoned that deal. Now, he explained, city planners aren’t hostile to churches like some Christians think; city planners just now think of churches as black holes or tax gaps in the city.

Now to go back to The Great Dechurching; the authors found again and again that just because someone stopped going to church didn’t necessarily mean they’d lost their faith. And what I’m saying is that many Americans aren’t becoming atheists; they’re becoming a different sort of spiritual animal that few churches speak to yet. They’re becoming Gardeners. The Holy Spirit is still moving within those Americans — there’s a great deal of energy in Americans’ souls — but churches are failing to see it or tap it because they’re so afraid that their memberships are dwindling.

Just because a light bulb goes out does not mean there is no electricity.

America is not losing its faith. It’s not becoming more secular.

It’s primed for the next Great Awakening.