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‘Going to Get Worse Before It Gets Better’: Religious Membership Decline Prompts Sober Reflection

‘I just sat in the back pews and felt waves of peace wash over me’ (Photo: Mazur)

In one sense, the latest numbers from Gallup on religious membership in the U.S. are hardly newsworthy. The rate of membership has been dropping steadily since the turn of the 21st century, and the 3% decrease between 2018 and 2021 is simply par for the course.

But while the incremental drop isn’t especially significant, the threshold crossed in the process is. 

For the first time ever, fewer than half of Americans say they belong to a church or other religious community. The rate, which hovered around 70% for decades before beginning its gradual decline in 2000, is now only 47%.

Stephen Bullivant, a professor of theology and sociology as St. Mary’s University in the United Kingdom, described the sub-50% figure as a “symbolic marker.”

“This is one more little data point alongside a great many that are all, for the most part, pointing in a single direction,” said Bullivant, author of Mass Exodus: Catholic Disaffiliation in America and Britain Since Vatican II. “And that is the waning of Christian America.”

Bullivant pointed out that, although the rate of church membership began its noticeable decline around the year 2000, the factors that set those trends into play were generations in the making. Previous drop-offs in, for instance, rates of attendance at religious services or adherence to the moral teachings of one’s faith contribute to an overall weakening in religiosity, which grows in its transmission from one generation to the next.

Therefore, it’s unsurprising that the decline in church membership is largely manifested by a simple generational shift, as the less-religious younger generations gradually replace their more-religious elders. The Gallup study, for instance, found that only 36% of millennials (those born between 1981 and 1996) belonged to a church, compared to 66% of those born before 1947. 

The overall trends illustrated by the study seem especially exacerbated in Catholic circles. 

Since 2000, the rate of church membership has dropped twice as quickly among self-identified Catholics (18 points, down to 58%) than it has among Protestants (nine points, down to 64%). And although the sense of “membership” employed in this study differs from that used in Catholic theology, which emphasizes baptismal status, those figures are still sobering realities for Church leaders.

Read more at National Catholic Register

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