For some time now, surveys have revealed that Christianity in America is in decline. Gallup polling in 2023 found that the percentage of Americans who “identify as Christian” was about 68%, while similar polling in 1958 recorded a percentage of 91%. The decline has been at a fairly constant rate, though more pronounced since 2010. In 1965 70% of people reported that religion was “very important” to them; in 2023 only 45% did so. Church attendance has dropped: in 2000, 44% of Christians had attended church within the past seven days; in 2023 that percentage was 32%. Church membership is declining -- more and more people report that they are “unaffiliated”. The New York Times recently had a story about the rapid departure of young women from conservative evangelical sects – sects that had previously lost fewer adherents than those of the mainstream.
America seems to be following in the footsteps of Western Europe (especially Scandinavia), where a high percentage of the population has abandoned religion altogether, and of those who still identify themselves as “Christian” an equally high percentage are, in fact, “non-practicing” -- that is, they rarely attend religious services.
Why is this decline occurring? In Europe, a great many people simply say that they have “gradually drifted away” from religion. However, a considerable number of those non-practicing Christians mention their disagreements with specific moral doctrines, especially those having to do with abortion and same-sex marriage. I think that in this country as well, dissatisfaction with current Christian morality is an important cause of the religion’s decline.
When I speak of Christianity’s “moral doctrines”, I’m thinking not only of the Ten Commandments and Jesus’s idealistic vision but of the doctrines that Christianity has, over the centuries, adopted in response to the various moral issues that have arisen as time has passed – issues that the original Christians couldn’t even have imagined. Since the Christian church sees itself as obligated to inform the faithful of God’s judgment on those moral issues, its moral code has kept expanding. And, interestingly, God’s opinion usually turns out to be one that’s already been championed by some segment of society, a segment that happens to sustain the church or is in a position to benefit it. The divine right of kings, for example, became a Christian moral principle in the 16th century when kings ruled. Those kings appreciated the church’s cooperation in providing divine approval of their absolute authority. The church prospered.
After the Reformation, of course, Christians no longer spoke with one voice about who was best able to reveal God’s opinion on moral issues, or what method of discovering that opinion was most effective.
For Protestants, the average church member was thought to be capable of learning God’s opinion by reading and interpreting the Bible. That may have been true for some moral issues, but how likely is it that a 2000-year-old-plus document could provide an unequivocal answer to a question such as whether or not in vitro fertilization is morally permissible? In vitro fertilization, needless to say, is not mentioned in the Bible. Hence, to know what God thinks about it, one must make a
deduction from other beliefs that are, or are alleged to be, clearly expressed in Scripture. In some denominations, ministers or the church hierarchy have declared that the indisputable “word of God” on the issue is that all human life is sacred, so the Biblical Commandment forbidding murder must be applied to killing anything human, including a human embryo. Yet everyone realizes that there are obvious exceptions to that Commandment’s blanket “thou-shalt-not”; acts such as killing in warfare, or killing in self-defense. Why, then, couldn’t killing an embryo also be an exception?
Isn’t it apparent, when we look at the history of Protestant Christianity, that Bible interpretation is rarely indisputable; and that a) those who do the interpreting usually end up finding what they wanted to find, and b) that what they wanted to find was a divine judgment that agreed with their own beliefs, and c) that those beliefs were formed from a variety of psycho-socio-political influences, not just meditation upon the Biblical text?
Today, in southern conservative churches, Christian morality is formulated by Bible exegesis that’s a product of reactionary political thought. At the recent Baptist Convention, a majority of attendees voted to prohibit female ministers, even though the church already has the power to disaffiliate churches with female ministers, and has done so. The Baptists also reaffirmed their belief that God hates LGBTQ people, that God believes that all human life, from the moment that sperm enters egg, is sacred; and that a woman’s role in life is to have children, keep a household, and be obedient to her husband.
Other Protestant churches read the Bible differently. They find that God doesn’t make any such judgments about gays and a woman’s right to control her own life. Still, other churches have had internal disagreements on what God thinks. In the case of Methodism, that resulted in the splitting of the church into two factions which are now completely separate churches.
It's certainly the case, in my view, that the decline of Christianity in this country has multiple causes. Many people simply find religion irrelevant to modern life. Many regard Christianity’s fundamental assertion that there is a super-human, perfect being who rules the universe as impossible to accept.
Well-educated younger Americans find themselves unable to take many other Christian doctrines seriously. When they have learned of the evidence for, and the explanatory power of, evolutionary theory, and become aware, through the study of ecology, of the extraordinary interdependence of living creatures, it seems ridiculous to believe that humans were specially created by God and their lives are uniquely sacred to him, while the lives of all other creatures are rightfully subject to whatever treatment humans decide to give them.
Yet it’s also the case that major Christian denominations champion a regressive and faulty moral code and tell their congregations that it is a product of God’s eternal wisdom when it is actually the fallible and biased product of human contrivance. For many Christians, that is evidence that Christianity has lost whatever authority and relevance it may have once had, and no longer deserves their patronage.