ShareThisTwo massive surveys of the religious landscape reveal that fewer Americans today claim to be Christian, and that church attendance is slipping. Meanwhile, a commentator in the Christian Science Monitor predicts that the steady decline in mainstream Protestantism will be matched by the erosion of evangelical Christianity.
The American Religious Identification Survey notes that the percentage of Americans claiming no religious faith has doubled since 1990. During that period the percentage of Americans who are Christian has slipped from 86.2 percent to 76 percent.
Ninety percent of the decline comes from the Protestant population, overwhelmingly from the mainline denominations, which include Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and the United Church of Christ. Those churches shrank from 18.7 percent of the American population in 1990 to just 12.9 percent today. The only mainstream churches still growing are the Baptists.
Most of the growth in the Christian population consists of those Americans who identify themselves only as "Christian," "Evangelical," "Born Again," or "Non-denominational." In fact, researchers discovered that close to 40 percent of mainline Protestants now consider themselves to be evangelical. Survey director Mark Silk says, "It looks like the two-party system of American Protestantism --mainline versus evangelical -- is collapsing. A generic form of evangelicalism is emerging as the normative form of non-Catholic Christianity in the United States."
Nevertheless, a prominent evangelical warns that, "within two generations, evangelicalism will be a house deserted of half its occupants." Michael Spencer blames evangelicals for having identified their movement with conservative politics and hostility to secular culture. He foresees a growing secularization of American culture that will resist evangelical Christianity, judging it to be opposed to the common good.
He claims that, "massive majorities of Evangelicals can't articulate the Gospel with any coherence. We fell for the trap of believing in a cause more than a faith."
Meanwhile, the nation's Catholic population continues to swell, largely due to immigration, but regular church attendance among Catholics has declined.
Those who identify themselves religiously as Jews shrank from 3.1 million in 1990 to 2.7 million today. Mormons now constitute 1.4 percent of Americans. Although the Muslim proportion of the U.S. population has doubled since 1990, it stands at only 0.6 percent. The number of outright atheists has nearly doubled since 2001 to 1.6 million.
Revealingly, more than one in four Americans no longer contemplates having a religious funeral at life's end.
A separate survey of mainstream Protestant clergy by Public Religion Research reveals that an overwhelming number of ministers are actively resisting the secularization of American life and the marginalization of the Christian faith.
David Yount's new book is "Celebrating the Single Life" (Praeger). He answers readers at P.O. Box 2758, Woodbridge, VA 22195 and dyount(at)erols.com.
AMAZING GRACE
