A PowerPoint presentation packed with graphs showing the decline of religious observance in America filled the fellowship hall at Madison’s Good Shepherd Lutheran Church Saturday morning. “I take no joy in showing you any of these graphs,” said Eastern Illinois University political science professor Ryan Burge. “This is me.”
For the past 17 years Burge has also been the pastor of an American Baptist Church in central Illinois, but it’s planning on closing this summer. “We had eight people in worship last Sunday,” he said.
UPDATE ON THIS STORY APRIL 2nd STORY FROM THE RELIGION NEWS SERVICE: The last service at the church in Illinois.
Pastor/Professor Ryan Burge’s First Person account.
“Polite Religion” is Burge’s term describing the seven mainline Protestant churches which used to dominate American public life. Leaders had the ear of the White House. No more. A half century ago 52 percent of the US were members of a mainline church. Today, he said, it’s one in ten.
Numbers vary for denominations such as Disciples of Christ (down 75 percent from late 1980s), Episcopalians (down 32 percent), and ELCA Lutherans (down 43 percent). The United Methodist Church has halved, from nine million members to 4.5 million since 1983, and has just experienced the largest church schism in US history.
Large endowments are the only thing keeping many mainline churches going as funerals have been outnumbering baptisms for years. “A lot of these mainline churches are not long for this world because there’s no one to hand the baton to,” Burge said. The last 45 years have been grim. The next 20 years, as the Greatest Generation and Baby Boomers age out, it will get even worse.
Mainline churches are just one part of the picture of American religion, which has become more and more tied to politics. “Evangelical Protestants are the most powerful force in electoral politics today,” Burge said. Evangelicals represent a more conservative part of the church but the term itself now seems to have more political connotations than religious. “It’s not the same as when I was a kid.” Evangelical denominations are also losing members.
The largest evangelical denomination, Southern Baptists, exploded after World War II with one million new members every four years for 30 years. But it slowed around the turn of the century and peaked at 16.2 million members in 2006. Now trending down, it’s lost over 400,000 members each of the last three years.
There are evangelical churches that are growing, such as the Assemblies of God, Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) and the Anglican Church in North America. Burge did not mention the Evangelical Free Church denomination, to which Blackhawk and Door Creek, two of Madison’s largest Protestant churches, belong.
Charismatic/Pentecostal churches, such as Assemblies of God, and non-denominational churches are still seeing significant growth. Many of the large non-denominational churches are like small denominations with multiple sites.
The Roman Catholic Church had about 25 percent of the American population in 1980 and still has about 23 percent. However, only about 25 percent of Catholics attend mass. “When Protestants stop going to church they say, ‘I’m not Protestant anymore,'” Burge observed. “When Catholics stop going to church they still say they are Catholic.”
Black Protestant churches have also been maintaining their attendance pretty steadily.
Much has been made of the rise of the “nones” in the last decade. Burge has written a book with that title, about people who have no religious affiliation. “It’s the largest cultural shift in American history,” he said. “It’s changing who we are and what we think.”
Politics is seeing the impact. Forty-five percent of Democrat voters are now non-religious. As older Democrats, who are more traditional, die off the party will be more and more influenced by the nones. “The Republican party is the party of White Christians,” Burge said. “The Democrats are the party of everybody else.”
Burge added more graphs to show that it was not just the church that was losing the confidence of many Americans. Many other American institutions have also lost the trust of the people. The reality though, he stressed, is that churches and the other institutions of daily life are filled with people who are doing their job well, helping people who need help, and doing their best.
Burge is bothered by the cynicism against the institutions that have kept our culture going. “Your grandparents used this to get through the Great Depression and World War II and you’re like, ‘Nah, we don’t need that anymore?'”
Many parents worry about their children losing their faith in college but Burge began the second part of his presentation with graphs showing people most likely to attend church these days are those with college degrees and its the less-well-educated who are the most irreligious. He lamented the loss of many of the social benefits that are disappearing as the mainline churches dry up.
While churches have been criticized for their lack of ethnic diversity (which is changing) Burge said they used to be very important for economic diversity, the best place for poor kids and rich kids to become friends. “You learned things that benefitted you for the rest of your life, especially those at the bottom end of the socio-econimc spectrum,” he said. “Now we have polarization and we don’t have that diversity and I think it’s killing us.”
Eric Holmer, a member of the staff of Good Shepherd church and emcee for the program, noted that the church has always faced challenges and met them differently as the situations demanded. He reminded those who attended, an overwhelmingly gray-haired group, that Good Shepherd church was started on the west side of Madison 60 years ago to serve the community and they needed to keep doing that.
Ryan Burge is is the co-founder of and a frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a general audience. Much of his information is online at the website Graphs About Religion.
FOLLOW-UP: GROWTH IN NONES IS SLOWING
