We are in the midst of the greatest religious shift in the history of America.
Or so says a new book, written by two Evangelicals– Pastor Jim Davis and Michael Graham. Employing the research assistance of social scientists Ryan Burge and Paul Djupe, the group conducted a comprehensive study of some 7,000 Christian participants. Their findings, published in the August 2023 Zondervan book The Great Dechurching: Who’s Leaving, Why Are They Going, and What Will It Take to Bring Them Back?, go against the conventional logic of Evangelicalism’s critics and their more devout religious counterparts.
The lead-in premise of the book is that 40 million people who used to attend church once per month, are now attending just once per year. This shift is larger than the number of conversions during the First Great Awakening, Second Great Awakening, and the totality of the Billy Graham Crusades combined.
It’s no news that America has become significantly less religious and that fewer and fewer young people have been identifying as Evangelical. The Pew Research and Gallup polling over the years have been clearly showing these trends in real time. But the “why” hasn’t been so clear. As a result, a handful of convenient scapegoats tend to get blamed— church scandals, the politicization of the pulpit, crass pop culture commercialism, shallow teaching, etc…
As it turns out, the number one reason for the “great falling away” is much more mundane: people moved.
Roughly three-quarters of those who participated in the research claimed absolutely prosaic reasons for staying home on Sundays, which included moving/relocating to a new unfamiliar area, the inconvenience of Sunday morning, conflicts with kids’ sporting activities, or family changes like marriage, divorce, or having a new child. In other words, real life simply took a priority over church attendance.
They also found that those departing were NOT primarily doing so because of some sinister pull of Left-leaning politics (a common trope of Right Wing preachers like Michael Brown and his compadres at The Stream). News flash: most of the unchurched that were surveyed were not Democrats. Ryan Burge, the book’s chief researcher, said “Evangelicals are dechurching at almost twice the pace on the Right political flank than they are on the Left.”
Nor was an encroaching culture of secularism or the “indoctrination at Secular Universities” a reason for people staying home on Sundays. This study actually found that those with higher education tended to be more regular church attendees.
It’s worth noting that these dechurched also still maintain their own personal faith and have not become atheists. They have simply stopped viewing active church membership as an essential component of their lives.
This data is devastating to the Right Wing Prophets of Outrage, who have built a career on pumping the siege mentality among their audiences. It will be interesting to hear how the usual cast of Evangelical provocateurs will try and cast this data into some political light.
I stopped attending church almost 20 years ago. At the time of my departure, I still considered myself a Christian. My reasons for leaving were similarly mundane. I simply liked having a two-day weekend. Instead of a day of rest, Sunday was always a long, grueling day of labor. Especially with young children. I was exhausted. The first Sunday I stayed home from church was truly like heaven. I farted around the house all morning and it was glorious.
I never went back.
Even when I still believed, I quickly discovered that there was no church-shaped hole in my heart. And there still isn’t.
