"Church membership was quite low in the 18th century when the US was
founded. Things change."
US Church Membership falls under 50%; Are Republicans, anti-Gay
Evangelicals driving Youth away?
"Since about 2000, Americans have begun abandoning religion in droves,
especially but not only the younger generations (Millennials and younger).
Now a Gallup poll finds that for the first time in seven decades, only 47% of
Americans say they belong to a church, synagogue or mosque. That figure
was 70% in 1999.
The United States from 1945 to 2000 was a peculiarly religious society for
an industrialized country, with substantially more Americans saying they
believed in God and belonging to a church, synagogue or mosque than in
the other G7 countries.
In a 2008 poll, only 3% of Americans said they did not believe in God. In
contrast, nearly a quarter of the French were atheists at that time, and over
a third of Czechs. Some 18% of British and Swedes were atheists then.
Typically, twenty years ago, about 8% of Americans would answer “none”
when you asked what their religion was. Obviously, 5% felt they had no
religion but weren’t sure there was no God– only 3% said the latter.
Gallup finds that the “nones,” Americans who express no religious
preference, have risen to 21% nowadays.
Since people without a religious preference are not all that likely to belong to
a church, Gallup reasons, about half of the fall in church membership over
the past 20 years can be attributed to the increase in the “nones.”
That increase is especially visible among Millennials (people born 1980-
2000) and Gen Z (people born after 2000). Only 36% of Millennials belong
to a church or other congregation. And the process of becoming
unchurched seems to be accelerating among the younger generations, with
a decrease in church members of 15% among Millennials in the past decade.
The decrease in church membership is not only a phenomenon of the
Millennials and Gen Z. And even people with a stated religious preference
have left their churches, especially Catholics.
Some 76% percent of self-identified Catholics belonged to a church in 1999.
That figure today is 58%. The particularly steep fall among Catholics is
surely tied to the revelations of church corruption and cover-ups of
pedophilia in the priesthood. We have seen drops in church membership
among Catholics in Germany and even Ireland for the same reason.
Catholics comprise about a fourth of Americans.
East Coast people, independents and Democrats have seen the biggest fall
in church membership over the past two decades.
In contrast, church membership has remained more common among
conservatives, Republicans, residents of the South, college graduates, and
married adults.
The Gallup poll does not in this instance attempt to answer the question of
why church membership rates have fallen off a cliff.
Two causes have been found in polling, though it is a complex issue and
surely multi-causal.
A 2014 poll found that among Millennials who had become unchurched, fully
one third of them gave as the reason a discomfort with the prejudice and
discrimination against LGBTQ persons in churches. There was a massive
shift in public opinion in the US about gays from the 1990s, and many
churches did not go along. Most Millennials saw nothing wrong with being
gay and had openly gay friends, and became uncomfortable with anti-gay
sermons or practices.
Another thing driving Millennials and Gen-Z away from religion is the
Republican Party’s alliance with the evangelical movement, such that
religiosity is identified in the minds of many of them with a Republican
identity. For Millennials who vote Democratic, there may be a tendency to
pull away from the church precisely because such membership has become
a marker of a Conservative ideology.
As Daniel Cox and Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux pointed out at
fivethirtyeight.com,, Michele F. Margolis, “How Politics Affects Religion:
Partisanship, Socialization, and Religiosity in America,” The Journal of
Politics 2018 80:1, 30-43, argued that the difference among the young in
the two parties is accentuated when they marry and have children. At that
point, she finds, Republican young marrieds often return to the church if
they had lapsed, because they want help in raising their children with moral
values. But in this generation, the Democratic young marrieds are not
returning to the church on having children and in interviews often say that
there are other ways of instilling morality in children than via the church.
Indeed, to the extent that churches preach anti-gay prejudice and their
congregations disproportionately supported the odious Trump, it may well
be that many such Democratic unchurched couples feel that the church
itself has become a center of immorality to which they do not want to
expose their children.
Cox and Thomas-DeVeaux mention yet another explanation that has been
proposed, which is that before the internet, people met marriage partners in
social settings and often there were mixed marriages, with one partner
religious and the other not. Children from such homes were exposed to at
least one religious parent and so might get interested in religion. That is, the
religious “nones” were diluted. But with the rise of internet dating, the
unchurched could marry others not interested in a church membership, and
such a couple would raise their children without a religious affiliation.
Both these latter theories suggest that Americans are becoming more tribal,
with a Democratic less-religious and a Republican more-religious tribe, and
that the two do not much intermarry.
That conclusion would explain a lot about our current political polarization.
As the church gets caught in the cross-fire of the two tribes, it has started
struggling to survive.
By the way, to have more than half of Americans unchurched is hardly
unprecedented. Church membership was quite low in the 18th century when
the US was founded. Things change."
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