Could a New Border Wall Accelerate the Decline of American Christianity?

In 2015, the Pew Research Center released the largest study of American Religious identity ever done in the United States of America, called America’s Changing Religious Landscape. The big discovery was that the number of American Christians had declined by 7.8 percent since the previous survey in 2007, while the number of Americans religiously unaffiliated had increased by 6.7 percent to 22.8 percent of the national population. The only bright spot for Christianity was that even though Evangelical Christianity had declined as a percentage of the national population (down 0.9%), it had grown in real numbers by 2.4 million adherents.

            There was a second important trend buried in the numbers and completely missed at the time. Hispanic immigration has propped up this declining American Christianity. The loss of Christian adherents would have been worse if it had not been for Hispanic immigration.

Evangelical Christianity owed its increase largely to Hispanic converts from Catholicism, and both Mainstream Christianity and Catholicism would have sustained bigger losses if it had not been for increases in Hispanic membership. These trends indicate that if the USA builds an effective border wall, immigration will further decline and along with it the number of Americans identifying as Christian.

            The first trend is that the three largest types of Christianity—Evangelical and Mainstream Protestantism and Catholicism—had big losses between the 2007 and the 2014 survey. Evangelicals lost 8.4%, Mainstream Protestants lost 10.4% and Catholics lost 12.9% of the their members.

Luckily, this was countered by newcomers joining these faiths. There were 9.8% new Evangelicals, 6.1% new Mainstream Protestants but just 2% new Catholics. So the final, overall numbers came out to a 1.5% increase for Evangelicals, but a loss of 4.3% and 10.9% for Mainstream Protestants and Catholics, respectively. The Pew report emphasized that many of these leavers left formal religious membership altogether. However, a significant number simply joined other types of Christianity.

            The second trend is that none of the three types of Christianity can sustain its numbers by generational replacement. That is, the children of these adherents are fewer than the number of adults. This is largely because of declining family size. For example, 30% of Evangelicals were born in the generation between 1928 and 1946, while just 21% were born in the Millennial generation between 1981 and 1996. As the older generation passes away and the younger generation ages, the total number of adherent will drop. The imbalance is similar for the other two forms of Christianity. Without an influx of new blood, all three types of Christianity will decrease in size.

            The third trend is that nearly 80% of the replacements for the losses in these types of Christianity comes from Hispanics. All three have had a five percent increase in ethnic diversity in the seven years between 2007 and 2014. That increase is 80% Hispanic for all three forms of Christianity. Indeed, for Evangelicalism, the increase in the percentage of Hispanics accounts for its increase in real numbers of members. If Hispanic immigrants or their children had not joined these three types of Christianity, all three would have shown significant losses. Catholics would have dropped 12.5% of its members in those 7 years (instead of 10.9%). Mainstream Protestants would have lost 9.2% (instead of just 4.3%), and Evangelical Protestants would have lost 6.4% (instead of gaining 1.5%).

            The fourth trend is that this Hispanic increase came in different ways. Most Hispanic immigrants arrive as Catholics. Catholicism’s 5% increase is part of the decades-long influx of Hispanic members that has kept the numbers of American Catholics fairly steady. It has also helped Catholicism to become the most ethnically diverse form of Christianity; 41% of Catholics are non-white and most non-whites are Hispanic.

            For the two forms of Protestantism, however, Hispanic membership has come from conversion. These are Hispanics who have been in America for a long(er) time and they convert to this still dominant form of American religion as part of the assimilation process. For the Mainstream Protestant denominations, the number of converts was not enough to prevent a decline in membership, but for Evangelical Protestantism it was. 

            What will be the impact of an effective wall between the USA and Mexico? These trends from the past eight years suggest that the number of Christians in the USA will decline faster than it has been. This will first be evident in Catholicism, but it will soon show up in the membership of the Mainstream Protestant denominations and then among Evangelical Protestant Christians.

February 2017 

The Repeating Cycle of Truth

Scientific exploration is designed for debate and working out differences. When studying a problem, different scientists approach it in different ways, studying different data with different methods and, lo and behold, they get different results. Remember when all cholesterol was bad for your heart and then, later, scientists discovered that some cholesterol was good for the heart?

It is not just that different scientists disagree. Sometimes one investigator will come up with conclusions opposite their earlier discoveries. It is good scientific procedure to announce and distribute the new results, but think for a moment of the personal experience. After years of publishing one set of conclusions, you start publishing ideas that contradict the previous ones. Embarrassment and soul-searching accompanies any such change, and colleagues will question the accuracy of your new work because of your previous positions.

In a religion, the same situation is more than embarrassing; it can be catastrophic. Religious pronouncements are often taken by the members as Truth, with a capital “T.” Issued by a god as a guide for belief or practice, such statements become hard and fast doctrines or rules that must be followed. Deviation from them can lead not just to embarrassment, but to expulsion from the religion.

Statements issued by a religion and its leaders in the past become Truth for the future. It becomes seemingly impossible to make a change in the present, even if it will produce benefits in the future. How can Truth change? If Truth can change, then it is not Truth. Right?

Because of this dynamic, it becomes difficult for religions to look to the future. They must always look to the past, and stay in line with their previous pronouncements. So, as the future comes toward them into the present, the Truths expressed in the past constrain their options for meeting it. The longer a religion’s past (i.e., the older it is), the fewer viable choices for future directions.

So, how does a religion change?

The Protestant Reformation provides a test case. The Protestant groups that arose during the 1500s and 1600s followed different paths, but two commonalities appear among the Lutherans, the Anglicans, the Calvinists and others.

First, each Protestant movement created a new religious organization. By becoming new, they were able to divorce themselves from Catholicism’s past and, just as important, from Catholicism’s organization.

Second, the new types of Christianity then changed the past. For example, they altered the foundational sacred text, the Bible, by removing 18 books and parts of books from the Old Testament. Once that was done, nothing could remain the same.

Of course, a new denomination cannot stay new for long. To maintain itself, a religious organization must institutionalize its Truth. It must pass itself on to each new generation and transmit its True practices and beliefs. And, so, the process continues. After a century or two, a religious group has built up enough past Truth to begin constraining its future.

To address the future, then, new religious organizations must form. Today there are more than 300 Christian denominations in America, and that is not counting the independent churches. My own small town of 30,000 people has more than 40 different churches.

In recent decades, the “new” evangelical denominations have been on the rise. They separated from “mainstream Protestants” (sometimes more than a century ago). They then changed the past by giving the sacred text, the Christian Bible, a new character, as eternally valid, unchanging and literal.

The evangelical alliance with the powerful political ideologies of the Republican Party has brought them and their Truth into prominence and increased their membership. And they have done this at the expense of the older denominations.

But time moves on and circumstances continue to change. Alongside evangelical denominations, the new mega-churches are becoming more widespread, especially in urban areas. As new, independent organizations they repeat the cycle by eschewing denominational pasts and the Truth of those traditions for the new.

This has enabled mega-churches to adopt new forms of worship, experiment with new ways of building community, and to propound new beliefs and ideas. Freed from the past, they can create their new Truth as they and their congregants see fit.

Are these radical changes? Perhaps, perhaps not. The important point is that they simply continue the cycle of religious change that has been going on for centuries. Truth may not change, but humanity’s understanding of it is continually renewed.