Religiously unaffiliated

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'Cultural Christianity' is fading and that reality is linked to some other newsy trends

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'Cultural Christianity' is fading and that reality is linked to some other newsy trends

One of the trends I have been tracking a bit recently is the concept of “cultural Christianity.”

There’s really no settled definition of what it means, but I’ve always conceived of it as people who like the idea of being Christian without all the obligations or attachments of being part of a local church community. In other words — religion without all the hard stuff.

Once upon a time — especially in the American heartland — it really helped to be a member of a religious flock, to one degree or another. It was good for business. It offered positive social ties, especially if your pew was in a respectable mainline church. Those days are gone in many, many zip codes.

But here is the Big Idea for this post: There seems to be two competing forces in American politics and religion. The first is that we are becoming more religiously polarized — the rise of the nones on the left, but also the consistent strength of those conservative religious traditions on the right. However, a countervailing narrative is that despite that bifurcation of faith in the United States, Americans still have an overriding deference to religious expression — especially if it's the Christian religion. 

The starting point for this post is a graph with a strong political-news hook.

Democrats who leave religion behind, just walk from all of it. Among those who never or seldom attend religious services, just 10% say that religion is very important. That hasn’t changed in the last 14 years.

 However, among Republicans who never or seldom attend religious services, the share who say that religion is very important has risen from 17% to 27%.

Attention journalists: It’s this fusion of conservative political ideology and religious identity — without the behavior part — that is really worth watching, especially in GOP primaries where voters have more options (think, other than Donald Trump in recent years).


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Here is a strange question: Why doesn't the U.S. Census ask questions about religion?

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Here is a strange question: Why doesn't the U.S. Census ask questions about religion?

QUESTION:

“Why doesn’t the U.S. Census ask about religion?”

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

Most Americans may never have thought about this, an odd omission considering that religion is such an important aspect of society. Canada’s government, for example, has asked about religious affiliations since 1871.

But from the first once-a-decade U.S. Census conducted in 1790, the federal government has never directly asked all Americans about their religion (or lack thereof). Responses are anonymous, which should remove any sensitivities about answering such a question. The usual explanation is that “separation of church and state” forbids such questionining by a government agency, which is debatable.

Much of the history below draws upon an April 12  article about the Census by the Pew Research Center that has further detail for those interested, available by clicking here.

Instead of church-and-state entanglement, The Guy offers a different sort of objection to Census involvement. Religious affiliation or identity may be too complicated a matter for government nose-counters to deal with accurately.

Several non-government agencies with more expertise in this area collect standard data on Americans’ religion, with numbers that regularly conflict due to differing methods, assumptions and definitions.

One of the most important is Pew Research’s own Religious Landscape Study, last issued in 2014. www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-study/Groundwork for the next round has already begun. Pew’s precision on religious factions and identities is vital because Protestant categories like “Lutheran” or “Presbyterian” mask big differences among groups with that label.

That sort of specificity is also provided in the “U.S. Religion Census” conducted each decade since 1990 by experts in religion statistics.


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Black Americans are as likely to be 'nones' as other racial groups (but with a difference)

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Black Americans are as likely to be 'nones' as other racial groups (but with a difference)

One of the most difficult things to describe to the average person about religious classification is Black Protestants.

In 2000, a group of scholars created the RELTRAD classification scheme which divided Protestants up into three categories — evangelical, mainline and Black Protestant. Why are Hispanic and white evangelicals grouped together, but Black Protestants get their own separate category? What about Black evangelicals, Black Pentecostals and Black mainline Protestants?

It’s not an easy question answer, really. 

Paul Djupe and I tried to answer that a few years ago in a post at Religion in Public. The answer will not shock GetReligion readers.

In short: politics. But, it’s a bit more than just how they vote on election day. Anyone who has ever worshipped with a predominantly Black congregation knows that it tends to be a bit different than how the United Methodists and lots of other folks do things on a Sunday morning.

I’ve always been fascinated by the role that the church plays in Black culture and was wondering if the rising tide of secularization had been blunted in a bit among African Americans — or if they were seeing the same trend lines as other racial groups.

In 2008, Black Americans were noticeably less likely to report no religious affiliation compared to their White counterparts. About one in five Black Americans were nones in 2008. That’s no different than Hispanics and three points less than White respondents.

But over the last few years, that gap has essentially disappeared.


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Post-COVID realities have sped up some sobering trends in congregational life

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Post-COVID realities have sped up some sobering trends in congregational life

For the experts who examine trends in pews, the post-pandemic tea leaves have been hard to read -- with a few people going to church more often, others staying away and some still watching services online.

But it's important for pastors to note another sobering fact, according to one of America's most experienced observers of Protestant life. Here it is: The typical church has to keep adding members simply to keep membership steady. And it's becoming increasingly important to maintain a growing core of believers who are truly committed to faith and ministry.

"We used to have people we called 'social' Christians, even though that's an oxymoron," said Thom Rainer, founder of the Church Answers website and former dean of the Billy Graham School of Missions and Evangelism at Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.

"Today, these people feel that they no longer need that 'Christian' label to be accepted in business and community life," he said, reached by telephone. "COVID sped things up -- made trends more obvious. But the pandemic was the accelerator, not the cause of what's happening."

Surveys since 2020 show that a "steady share of Americans -- about 40% -- say they have participated in religious services in the prior month one way or the other," according to a Pew Research Center report. But other details are blurry, since the "share of U.S. adults who … attend religious services once a month or more has dropped slightly, from 33% in 2019 to 30% in 2022."

Meanwhile, Pew reported that 7% claim they are attending services in person more often, post-COVID, while "15% say they are participating in services VIRTUALLY more often."

It's important to factor new realities into patterns seen for decades, noted Rainer. For example, in a recent online essay he argued that, if a typical Protestant church has an average worship attendance of 100, it needs to add about 32 attendees a year just to stay even.

Here's the math.


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A Jewish book that Christian strategists (and reporters) should be reading right now

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A Jewish book that Christian strategists (and reporters) should be reading right now

Much of organized Judaism in the U.S. is “crumbling” and destined to suffer even worse decline in coming years, contends Rabbi Danny Schiff in his new book “Judaism in a Digital Age: An Ancient Tradition Confronts a Transformative Era” (Palgrave Macmillan).

Christian strategists face much the same cultural upheaval and should pay attention to this examination, alongside Jews and religion-beat journalists. Echoes of the “Mainline” Protestant plight are especially noteworthy. And consider the stakes for Judaism when the United States has 70% of the world Jewish population.

Schiff, a scholar with the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh, focuses on the two branches that dominated U.S. Judaism over the past century. Reform Judaism is devoutly liberal, with broad individual choice on belief and practice. Conservative Judaism is more tradition-minded — but has lately floated in Reform’s direction. The book pays less notice to the faith’s growing third main branch, Orthodoxy, because it is relatively stable as it resists modern pressures.

Here’s the situation in a numerical nutshell: As of 1990, 73% of U.S. Jews identified with these two main non-Orthodox branches. By Pew Research Center’s major Jewish survey in 2020, their combined following was down to 54%, while 32% of Jews reported “no particular identity” in terms of religion. (The Orthodox were a 9% minority that will grow due to higher birth rates.)

For Schiff, the years around 1990 were the end of an era when “partial emancipation” from past social barriers and prejudice turned to “hyper-emancipation.” Antisemitism, though still existing, was extinct in polite society.

A related sign was the prevalence of intermarriage with non-Jews, once relatively rare. By the 2010-2020 decade, 72% of marriages by the non-Orthodox were with non-Jews. Inexorably, that lowered the odds that children would follow in Judaism as adults. Added problems were widespread divorce, less marriage and lower birth rates. Finally, “barriers to leaving Jewish life are virtually non-existent.”


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NPR comes to hills of Tennessee and sees exactly the religion trends that you would expect

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NPR comes to hills of Tennessee and sees exactly the religion trends that you would expect

What do you know: National Public Radio came to my backyard here in East Tennessee to cover an important religion-beat story. And, well, NPR saw exactly what you would expect NPR to notice, while ignoring all of the details and questions you would expect this deep-blue news organization to ignore.

Once again, we are talking about a story that is totally valid, but its producers avoided the kind of diversity in sourcing that would have made matters more complex. Here’s the headline for the online text version: “As attendance dips, churches change to stay relevant for a new wave of worshippers.”

What’s missing in this story? It’s absolutely true that there are declining churches here in the mountains of East Tennessee, especially during COVID-tide. That’s an important story. The problem is that there are also growing churches in the region (yes, including my own Orthodox parish, which has grown at least 25% in the past three years) and that’s a detail that makes this story more complex. Here is the overture:

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — It's Sunday morning and a small group sits around a fire pit in a community garden under the limbs of an expansive box elder tree. Church is about to start. And it's cold.

"God our Father, we are just so thankful for this time that we have to share this morning," says Pastor Chris Battle, a big man with a pipe clenched in his generous smile. "And we really thank you for fire that keeps us warm even as we sit up under this tree. We just pray that you would bless our time together."

Three years ago, Battle walked away from more than three decades leading Black Baptist churches and turned his attention to Battlefield Farm & Gardens in Knoxville. They grow vegetables and sell them at a farmer's market. They also collect unsold produce from around the city and deliver it to people in public housing once a week.

Battle says he left because traditional church was not connecting with people. He felt they were turned off by the sermons, the pitches for money, the Sunday-morning formality of it all.

This brings us to the first of two thesis statements describing the big picture:

American Christianity is in the midst of an identity crisis. Attendance is in steep decline, especially among millennials and Gen Z who say traditional church doesn't speak to their realities.


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Yes, Southern Baptists are talking about '60 Minutes' (while Ryan Burge keeps doing the math)

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Yes, Southern Baptists are talking about '60 Minutes' (while Ryan Burge keeps doing the math)

One thing is certain, if you follow political scientist Ryan Burge on Twitter. You are going to read quite a few things that you agree with and quite a few things with which you will disagree.

Here’s the key to that statement: It really doesn’t matter who “you” are. You can be a liberal mainline Protestant and you will read things that please you and things that infuriate you. Ditto, if you are Southern Baptist Convention leader.

If you are a religious “none,” in Pew Research Center terms, then Burge is mapping your life and beliefs, one chart after another. If you are a nondenominational, independent evangelical/charismatic leader, Burge was one of the first researchers who grasped that your world is now the fastest growing corner of the marketplace of American religion.

Burge makes many Southern Baptists mad. He also makes many Episcopalians and liberal mainliners mad, even though Burge is, himself, a progressive Baptist pastor/thinker as well as a political science professor at a state university. I would imagine, however, that leaders on the right and the left are learning that they are going to have to study the trends shown in all of those Burge charts on Twitter (and in his books).

To be honest with you, I can’t remember when I spotted Burge’s byline and I’m not sharp enough, in terms of computer skills, to spot the oldest item in the nearly 4,000 items that show up in a Google search for “Ryan Burge” and “Terry Mattingly.” I’m guessing 2018 or so. However, Burge has been cooperating with GetReligion for several years now, with me retweeting, oh, hundreds of his tweets with a “Yo. @GetReligion” slug. He also has allowed me to re-publish some of the essays he has written for the Religion in Public weblog (and for Religion Unplugged).

I bring all of this up for two reasons.

(1) Many news consumers who continue to follow legacy media may have seen him featured last night in a “60 Minutes” feature about the Rev. Bart Barber, the new president of the Southern Baptist Convention.

(2) Burge and I recently agreed on the format for a new GetReligion feature that we will call “Do the Math,” in which he will take four or five of his data-backed tweets and then connect them to spotlight trends that journalists need to follow.


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There goes that Ryan Burge guy, again: Myths about evangelicals, Catholics and others

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There goes that Ryan Burge guy, again: Myths about evangelicals, Catholics and others

During my years as a journalism professor (now over), I must have told my students the following a thousand times: Pay close attention when one of your sources consistently offers information and insights that (a) fit the actual facts on the ground, yet (b) anger (or at least puzzle) people on both sides of the hot-button issues that make headlines.

For several decades, my classic example of this phenomenon has been political scientist John C. Green of the University of Akron, best known for years of consulting work with the Pew Forum team. A few years ago, I added religious-liberty specialist David French to that list. Sociologist James Davison Hunter, author of that “Culture Wars” classic? Ditto. How about the notorious scholar Karen Swallow Prior?

Then that Ryan Burge guy (@RyanBurge) started lighting up Twitter with chart after chart backed with data on religion and public life. He’s been a GetReligion contributor, in a variety of ways, for several years now and was a big hit when he Zoomed into a December religion-news program at the Overby Center at Ole Miss.

If you agree with Burge on everything, then you aren’t paying attention. That’s a compliment. Like Green, Burge is a man of the mainline-church world, but he’s consistently candid about the trends that he sees on left and right.

How he has another book out — “20 Myths about Religion and Politics in America” — and readers are sure to disagree with one or more of his myths. But the numbers he spotlights are always worthy of attention, especially for journalists who cover religion, culture and politics.

I’ll note some new Burge appearances on audio and video podcasts, as they roll out in the weeks ahead — starting with the one at the top of this post. He also did a Religion News Service Q&A the other day with Jana Riess that ran with this provocative headline: “Evangelicalism isn’t dying, and Catholics are going Republican.”

The first question is exactly what you’d expect, if you’ve been following Burge in recent years:

Your first chapter says that rumors of evangelicalism’s death are premature. Could you talk about that?


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