Why U.S. church membership has reached a modern low—Part II.

I wasn’t prepared for the feedback from last week’s column, in which I pontificated on a Gallup survey that found membership in U.S. houses of worship has reached a modern low.

Church membership has dropped from 70 percent as recently as 1999 to 47 percent in 2020, Gallup says, the lowest level since the polling organization started tracking membership more than 80 years ago.

I offered a list of educated guesses about why this is happening.

As my email inbox filled up with responses from around the country, I finally figured out the column, unbeknownst to me, had been picked up by Yahoo! News.

I had unwittingly pushed a hot button. Some of the responses were so interesting I decided I’d pass along a sampling, plus one more point of my own that I couldn’t work into last week’s piece.

▪ Several readers pointed out that I failed to mention an important contributor to falling church membership: the exclusion of women from leadership roles. Yes, that was a glaring, albeit unintentional, omission.

America’s two largest denominations, the Roman Catholic Church and the Southern Baptist Convention, bar women from their clergy, and the Baptists, particularly, have been quite pugnacious about it. Those organizations are far from exceptions, however.

Many women, including the evangelical Bible teacher Beth Moore, have gotten so fed up with what they see as their denominations’ condescension and misogyny they’ve severed ties with them and, in certain cases, with the church writ large.

▪ I argued that both the religious right and the religious left have become so enmeshed in secular politics they’ve sometimes ceased to be identifiably Christian. That politicization has alienated lots of Americans, I said.

If the mail I got was any indication, readers see politicization as a sin way more common to the religious right than the left.

Several defended what I’d described as some liberals’ annoying wokeism. But nobody defended the Christian right’s allegiance to Donald Trump and the Republican Party.

Multiple readers said they’d left their evangelical faith, or left Christianity altogether, because they felt conservatives had, in effect, made Trump their Lord and Savior.

Interestingly, a 2017 survey by the National Association of Evangelicals found that 89 percent of evangelical leaders said preachers shouldn’t endorse political candidates from the pulpit. A similar poll by Lifeway Research found that 79 percent of lay church members felt it was inappropriate for ministers to tell them how to vote.

▪ One reader, a historian, suggested the exodus from churches is possibly baked into the same American system that gave us religious freedom to begin with.

I hope I’m explaining this accurately. But I understood him to say that one genius of our system is that it stressed tolerance of others’ religious views.

No sect could declare itself enforcer of the true faith, to be obeyed by all. This made it possible for crazily diverse Presbyterians and Deists and Anglicans and agnostics and non-believers to dwell on the same street without killing each other.

The paradox is, this same tolerance, over generations, erodes each sect’s authority—even within its own walls. Tenets get watered down in a quest for open-mindedness and peace.

Eventually, your ideas become as valid as mine, which are no better than those of the person down the street. Whatever you feel is right is right. And if that’s so, there’s no reason to adhere to a particular church or creed.

“The very principle of tolerance (means) inevitably the end of orthodoxy, and then the end of belief,” the historian said, framing this as less of a definitive statement than an academic speculation.

▪ Finally, last week I should have put Gallup’s new report into a longer historical context. I ran out of space and left this out.

Despite the contention of religious advocates with an axe to grind, the United States did not begin as a pious, overwhelmingly “Christian nation.” Until the 20th Century, church membership was notably lower—and early on, it was far lower—than today.

For instance, in 1776, the year our forebears declared independence from England, just 17 percent of the population belonged to a church.

Membership in houses of worship slowly grew over the next 125 years, but it wasn’t until 1906 that membership reached a slim majority of 51 percent.

Then as now, various social and demographic reasons accounted for the lower numbers.

For one thing, early on, young single men greatly outnumbered women and married men. Even back then, young men were the least likely to be interested in religion.

For another thing, many Americans lived on isolated frontiers where there weren’t churches they could join even if they’d wanted to.

And so on.

The point is, for half our nation’s history, the United States was no more religious than it is today, and for much of that era was even less religious.

Paul Prather is pastor of Bethesda Church near Mount Sterling. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.