Quitting Church: A Review of The Great Dechurching

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Jim Davis and Michael Graham, with Ryan P. Burge. The Great Dechurching: Who’s Leaving, Why Are They Going, and What Will It Take to Bring Them Back? Zondervan, 2023. 272 pp. 

Measuring church vitality is complex business. It’s no secret that mainline Protestantism and Roman Catholicism have been in decline for decades in the U.S. Evangelicalism has held steady for some time, but that is changing, particularly as the loss of members from the Southern Baptist Convention accelerates. The Assemblies of God is growing. The number of churches identifying as non-denominational is also growing, though how this converts into the overall number of attendees is unclear. The situation in Eastern Orthodox churches appears to show both positive and negative trends. According to an article in The Wall Street Journal, although the “practicing Eastern Orthodox population” in the U.S. has declined over the last decade, “about 13% of Orthodox parishes have experienced a ‘surge in vitality’ since 2020, measured not only by growth in membership but by other indicators including church attendance, financial giving, enrollment in religious education and participation in parish activities beyond worship.” 

What are we to make of all this? The religious landscape of the U.S. has definitely changed over the last several decades, but exactly what has changed, and how much, are not always clear. 

A Jolting Decline 

In The Great Dechurching, Jim Davis and Michael Graham explore the decline of church attendance in the U.S., with some help from Ryan P. Burge. The book consists of four parts. Part 1 is called “Meet the Dechurched.” It comprises two chapters, the first on what is at stake in the dechurching of America, and the second identifying the kinds of people most commonly leaving the church. 

Part 2, “Profiles of the Dechurched,” describes in more detail those who are leaving the church. The authors identify five categories of people, each of which is the subject of one chapter: cultural Christians, dechurched mainstream evangelicals, exvangelicals, dechurched BIPOC, and dechurched mainline Protestants and Catholics. 

In Part 3, the authors move from description to recommendations. The chapters in this section are (8) “Reasons to Hope,” (9) “Relational Wisdom,” (10) “The Missed Generational Handoff,” and (11) “Messages for the Dechurched.” 

Part 4 is called “Lessons for the Church,” and it comprises four chapters: (12) “Spiritual Formation and the Dechurched,” (13) “Confessional and Missional,” (14) “Embracing Exile,” and (15) “Five Exhortations to Church Leaders” (1. Don’t be surprised when people fall away; 2. Extreme responses hurt people; 3. Be patient; 4. Shepherd the flock; 5. Equip the saints). 

The writers set out their thesis with an alarming statement: “About 40 million adults in America today used to go to church but no longer do, which accounts for around 16 percent of our adult population. For the first time in the eight decades that Gallup has tracked American religious membership, more adults in the United States do not attend church than attend church. This is not a gradual shift. It is a jolting one” (3). They continue, “More people have left the church in the last twenty-five years than all the new people who became Christians from the First Great Awakening, Second Great Awakening, and Billy Graham crusades combined. Adding to the alarm is the fact that this phenomenon has rapidly increased since the mid-1990s” (5, italics original). 

Jolting indeed. 

Particularly vexing for those of us concerned with the dechurching of America is the elusiveness of a “main reason” for this phenomenon. Among the group the authors identify as “cultural Christians,” the reasons include “My friends were not attending” (18%); “Attending was inconvenient” (18%); “Suffering changed my view of God” (17%); “I wanted to express my gender identity” (17%); “I moved to another community” (17%); “Too restrictive of my sexual freedom” (16%); “Scandal involving clergy” (16%); and “I chose to worship completely online” (16%). In other words, the answers are all over the map. 

Additionally, while some people consider the rise of online “church attendance” to be a hopeful sign, the authors of this study do not. In fact, they suggest it may do more harm than good. A return to in-person worship and community, they argue, is crucial for proper Christian formation and discipleship: 

Many evangelical churches now call their online worship services “on demand,” and that is exactly what people are choosing to do. What is intended as a new front door is often having the opposite effect by helping the dechurched leave through the back door. Our research showed that physically going to a church in our consumerist digital age has become inconvenient, and many people have concluded that they have other priorities for their time and money (124).

The authors give us plenty of reasons for alarm, but they also give reasons for hope. In fact, this book is surprisingly hopeful. For some categories of the dechurched, the best solution is simply to invite them back. Many are likely to accept the invitation, even enthusiastically. For example, “51 percent of the dechurched evangelicals we surveyed said they think they will one day return to church. Eighteen percent are ‘very willing’ and 33 percent are ‘somewhat willing.’ This could be the single most unexpected and hopeful piece of date we found in our entire study. The opportunity before the church cannot be overstated. The question is, will we embrace it?” (120, italics original). It’s a good question. The answer is unclear. 

Limitations of the Study 

As helpful as this book is, it does have its limitations. One is that it disproportionately focuses on evangelicals. For example, chapter 6, “Dechurched BIPOC,” zeroes in on BIPOC Christians who have left evangelical churches. (BIPOC stands for “Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.”) Yet many BIPOC Christians do not attend churches we would normally associate with American Evangelicalism. I would be interested to know more about what is going on in predominantly African-American denominations. What is the rate of decline in National Baptist and Progressive Baptist churches? What about the Church of God in Christ? How are the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, and the Christian Methodist Church doing? Are any of these traditions growing? If not, why not? If they are declining, what are the reasons people give for leaving them? I suspect the answers would differ somewhat from the reasons BIPOC Christians give for leaving evangelicalism. 

I also wish the authors had offered a more thorough discussion of mainline Protestantism. One chapter treats both dechurched mainline Protestants and Roman Catholics, but both groups deserve more attention than they get. Why have the “Seven Sisters” (the United Church of Christ, the Episcopal Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church, the Presbyterian Church, the United Methodist Church, the American Baptist Convention, and the Disciples of Christ) fallen upon such hard times? Has the erosion of doctrine among mainline Protestants and liberal Catholics contributed to their decline? The authors note, “Both mainline and Catholic groups had a lower view of the Bible than any other group” (105). That is a provocative data point. What is its significance in accounting for the decline of these traditions? They continue, “Overall there does seem to be a high correlation between one’s view of the Bible and the other doctrinal questions. Those who had a high view of the Bible scored highly on other central doctrines. A lower view of the Bible seems to have eroded belief in many of the other theological positions” (105-6). Yet the authors do not offer much analysis of the ways in which a low view of Scripture and doctrinal heterodoxy come to bear on church vitality, or, more accurately, the lack thereof. 

On page 107, the authors cite a number of reasons given for leaving mainline churches. None is doctrinal, except for one: “I began to doubt God’s existence.” Other reasons include moving, inconvenience, and political disagreement. An unexplored question here is whether or not a stronger doctrinal foundation and a higher view of the Bible would have changed their priorities. Would a deeper understanding of God, the saving work of Jesus Christ on the cross, and the abiding presence and power of the Holy Spirit help to motivate people to find a church after moving? Would the inconvenience of church attendance become less of a factor? 

These questions point to a methodological limitation of the study: it focuses on responses people gave when asked in surveys why they left the church (e.g., church was inconvenient, moving, the desire for more sexual freedom). It does not, however, drill down into the theological presuppositions and attitudes behind these responses. To their credit, the authors seem to perceive intuitively that many responses relate to insufficient Christian formation. The sections on the missed generational handoff and equipping the saints, for example, encourage churches to take Christian formation more seriously moving forward. Put differently, the authors apparently recognize that with a response such as “I moved to a new community,” other factors are churning in the background.

Yet another limitation to the study is that it focuses almost entirely on the loss of faith among adults. The authors do engage the matter of secularization among young people in chapter 10, “The Missed Generational Handoff.” Otherwise, the loss of faith among children and youth goes largely unobserved. As Lyman Stone points out, however, to focus on adults is to miss a major factor—possibly the major factor—in the dechurching of America. Stone writes, “Most of the decline in religion is actually among children, and virtually all of it among people under age 22. Secularization, or what they call ‘dechurching,’ is happening among children and then trickling upwards into the general population as those children age.” Even more chilling is the fact that parents rarely realize this is happening: “As kids get older, they secularize in a way parents are not observing. Parents don’t perceive their child as being irreligious, when, in fact, their child has already lost their faith.” 

Despite these limitations, this book is definitely worth reading. In fact I strongly recommend it. It tells an important story, if an incomplete one. Every study has its limitations. Readers will benefit from reading this study, even more so if they read with an awareness of what it focuses on and what it does not. 

We All Serve Somebody 

We have not seen the full effects of secularism, dechurching, or whatever word we use for the loss of commitment to Christ in the U.S. People will always worship something. If they do not know and love God, they will worship politics or politicians, ideologies, power, strength, sex, self-determination, or some other idol. 

The effects of the great dechurching are playing out in unanticipated ways. While some might assume that the secularization of America will also result in its liberalization, a recent article in The Atlantic challenges that idea. 

[A]s church attendance declines even in the southern Bible Belt and the rural Midwest, history might seem to suggest that those regions will become more secular, more supportive of abortion and LGBTQ rights, and more liberal in their voting patterns. But that is not what is happening. Declines in church attendance have made the rural Republican regions of the country even more Republican and—perhaps most surprising—more stridently Christian nationalist.

The rise of both left- and right-wing ideological extremism has accompanied the loss of Christian faith in the U.S. As we lose sight of the one true God, the worship of false gods will shape our minds ever more profoundly. One way to look at religion is as “ultimate concern.” What aspects of our lives command our ultimate allegiance? What shapes our lives in thought, word, and deed? We are never truly our own masters. Or, as Bob Dylan put it, 

You're gonna have to serve somebody  

Well, it may be the Devil or it may be the Lord 

But you're gonna have to serve somebody.

David F. Watson is Academic Dean and Professor of New Testament at United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio. He serves as lead editor of Firebrand.