Opinion: Behind Gallup’s Portrait of Church Decline

America’s religious life will be shaped not by secularization alone.

As Holy Week began this year, a Gallup Poll found that church membership in the United States had declined to less than half of the population for the first time. The headline grabbed attention, but it’s mostly unsurprising: In a country where 90% of the 350,000 congregations in the U.S. have a profile older than the general population, time brings an inevitable decline.

Christians have also suffered self-inflicted damage: Surveys show that the identification of many white evangelicals with former President Donald Trump drove many millennials away, as did the sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church over the previous decades. “Nones” — those claiming no religious affiliation — are growing, now roughly equaling the number of evangelicals or of Catholics in the U.S.

That all makes for nice sound bites, but it’s not the whole story, and there are realities behind Gallup’s numbers that deserve exploration. Read More

Also See:
The Hollowing Out of American Religion