Thoughts on the Future of American Christianity [Firebrand Big Read]

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Ryan Burge noted in May that 2022 marked the largest single-year drop in membership for the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) in its history. Although still the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S., SBC membership is below 14 million, where it was in 1978. Over the past three years, according to Burge, the SBC has lost 1.3 million members. That’s a staggering number. It raises once again the question of the future of Christianity in America. 

Some journalists and scholars see this figure as another sign of the rise of the so-called “nones” and the decline of Christianity. Others have even suggested that these trends indicate America has caught up with secularization in Europe. Both of these analyses are incorrect. America is in a transitional period. Older forms of Christianity are dying. To put it more starkly, the old world that created the fundamentalist-modernist controversy is over. The break-up of the UMC was its final gasp.

What does the future hold? Five post-WWII trends give us some insight. They point toward three characteristics of the American landscape in the next three decades: a new Protestantism that is charismatic and traditionalist, a growing intensity in the culture wars, and the need for a new vision of Christian social and political engagement. These characteristics also highlight the challenge of politicization.      

The Mainline: Loss of People and Power

The first and most obvious trajectory of mainline Protestantism has been the decline of membership since the late 1960s, when the mainline hit its zenith at around 30% of the U.S. population. Data from the General Social Survey in 2018 show that mainline denominations occupied between 10% and 13% of the population. It seems to be holding around 10% for now. (Gallup’s P.R.R.I. poll is an outlier at 16.4%.) By totaling the raw numbers based on membership reporting, one gets a rough estimate of 14 million members in mainline denominations, which is down from over 30 million in the 1960s. 

The recent pandemic has accelerated this decline in some mainline denominations. According to Burge, if attendance and baptism numbers hold, The Episcopal Church could see its last members by the early 2040s. Kevin DeYoung sees something similar happening in the Presbyterian Church USA (PCUSA). More than 40% of PCUSA congregations have fewer than 50 members, and around 30% of the denomination is over 70. These two denominations are in the endgame now. When Robert Jones writes of the end of white Christian America, he is speaking primarily of this decline.

The second trajectory correlates to the first one. The decline among the mainline is partly the result of splits and realignments over doctrine. Most mainline traditions have generated conservative offspring:

• Presbyterianism—Presbyterian Church in America (1973), the Evangelical Presbyterian Church (1981), and ECO: A Covenant Order of Evangelical Presbyterians (2012);

• Lutheranism—Lutheran Congregations in Mission for Christ (2001) and North American Lutheran Church (2010);

• Episcopalianism—Anglican Church of North America (2009);

• Methodism—Global Methodist Church (2022).

These newer versions of mainline Protestantism are all confessionally conservative and missionally focused. The future means a larger form of conservative Protestantism that will be neither mainline nor evangelical. Moreover, with the exception of the Presbyterian Church in America, all of these new denominations ordain women. While the mainline is dying, a new form of Protestantism is emerging. The older categories of evangelical, mainline Protestant, and Black Protestant no longer hold. 

The third trajectory is the loss of cultural and political capital. The death of Reinhold Niebuhr in 1971 marked the beginning of the end in terms of mainline Protestantism’s cultural and political influence. A quick glance at the history of the Supreme Court illustrates this point. Despite the strong history of (mostly mainline) Protestants on the Supreme Court in the 20th century, currently the only Protestant is Neil Gorsuch. Gorsuch was raised Catholic but has attended an Episcopal Church for some time. Something similar has happened to the Cabinet of President Biden. The Episcopalian Pete Buttigieg is the only mainline Protestant, with most members, like most Supreme Court justices, being Catholic or Jewish. 

When mainline Protestantism was the de facto establishment religion in the 1960s, it commanded the public discourse and shaped the future. Yet, in an ironic twist, the rapid accommodation of cultural trends sowed the seeds of its own cultural and political demise. The loss of cultural and political capital has led to a vacuum of Protestant leadership. There are three results from this loss: the rise of Catholic and Jewish intellectuals, the rise of a secular left, and the emergence of an evangelical political class. 

The decline and realignment of mainline Protestantism means that it will soon become necessary to speak of Protestantism rather than evangelical or mainline. The conservative turn among splinter groups means that most forms of Protestantism will be theologically traditionalist. Given the missional push of many of these newer forms of Protestantism, the decline will level off over the next three decades and growth will begin again. Liberal mainline Protestantism will remain, but it will continue to merge with the secular left until it becomes indistinguishable as liberal seminaries morph into think tanks and older church buildings turn into community centers. 

The Evangelicals: Reformed Resurgence and Religious Right

If Reinhold Niebuhr’s death in 1971 represents the turning point for the mainline, Francis Schaeffer’s first publication, The God Who Is There (1968), marks the political coming of age of evangelicalism. As Molly Worthen argued, the late 1960s and early 1970s saw the rise of the evangelical guru. Alongside Schaeffer were men like Rousas J. Rushdoony, Tim LaHaye, and Hal Lindsey. Evangelicalism started to rise at the very time that the mainline began its decline, but we need to drill down to understand this phenomenon.     

First, Reformed worldview thinking became the dominant paradigm for developing an evangelical engagement with culture and politics. Stemming from the Scottish Presbyterian James Orr and the Dutch Reformed thinker and politician Abraham Kuyper, evangelicals such as Carl Henry, Francis Schaeffer, and Rousas Rushdoony criticized the presuppositions of secularism and sought to develop an alternative. Schaeffer and Rushdoony, in particular, took Cornelius Van Til’s presuppositionalism and applied it to the problems in the 1970s. This created a minority position of theonomists, who wanted to forge a Christian society, and a majority position among evangelicals who fought against secularism. They were aligned in what they were against but not in what they were for. Evangelicals who followed Schaeffer tended, on the whole, to reject Rushdoony’s theonomy. More recently, however, theonomy has resurged as a form of Christian nationalism. 

Second, this shift toward public engagement also contributed to the Religious Right, exemplified in organizations like Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition, Chuck Colson’s Prison Fellowship, and James Dobson’s Focus on the Family. If one examines each of these men, Reformed worldview thinking dominated how they understood political engagement. Even though Dobson was Nazarene, he fully embraced a more Reformed cultural vision for transforming America, as symbolized in the Puritan “city on a hill” motif. The Religious Right was a resurgent fundamentalism that aligned with the new evangelical elites through a focus on worldview thinking. The goal of this engagement was to cultivate an evangelical political class that would return evangelicals to the structures of power and cultural influence. The election of George W. Bush was initially viewed as the embodiment of this hope. 

Third, the strong push toward a Reformed cultural vision of political engagement also fed into the conservative resurgence within the SBC. While evangelicals were leaving mainline denominations, Southern Baptists were determined to take back their institutions. A new class of Southern Baptist leaders emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, largely shaped by Reformed theology, which came to dominate places like Southern Seminary in Louisville. The Reformed resurgence in the SBC and among other Baptists like John Piper and Ron Nash set the stage for the New Calvinism between 2000 and 2010 and the formation of The Gospel Coalition (2005).

Finally, a small group of evangelicals emerged who wanted more engagement on social issues. Men like Jim Wallis (founder of Sojourners), Ron Sider, and Tony Campolo tried to build a coalition that engaged social issues like poverty, homelessness, and women in the workplace.  Most of these men operated within an Anabaptist framework and tried to build on the work of John Howard Yoder. When Stanley Hauerwas developed the Yoderian interpretation of Anabaptism, many of those on the evangelical political left gravitated toward it. The problem is that this evangelical left has started to look more and more like the mainline and has become a doorway for the exvangelical movement.

What we see in the evangelical trend is the resurgence of a Reformed cultural and political vision that fueled the rise of the Religious Right. It led to several public battles with serious consequences. One battle was between the heirs of Kuyperian approaches. Was the theonomist vision of a new Christian nationalism the way forward, or maintaining the vision of a separate church that infused a Christian worldview into all sides of life? Another battle was between Kuyperians and those who preferred the Yoderian model of Christian public witness. This battle demarcated the Sojourners crowd from the New Calvinism of The Gospel Coalition, the older Religious Right, and the theonomists. Moreover, this second battle spilled over into the war between complementarian and egalitarian visions of gender relations within the church. When the Bush administration failed to deliver the hoped-for cultural transformation, it also meant the emergence of a more militant form of evangelical engagement that led to the endorsement of Donald Trump in 2016.

The Charismatics: The Pentecostalization of American Christianity

By the early 1970s, the Pentecostal-Charismatic movement had fully penetrated American consciousness. One could speak with confidence of a distinct charismatic movement in Catholic and Protestant churches, the Jesus Movement was in full swing, Pentecostals were beginning ecumenical conversations with Catholics, and independent Pentecostalism had arrived as a third force. The trend of Pentecostal spirituality moving beyond the borders of denominational Pentecostalism into other confessional streams continued at a fast pace through the 70s and 80s with significant results.

The first is the transformation of the Black Church. In 2003 the scholar Lawrence Mamiya suggested that 50% of all black Christians would embrace some form of Pentecostalism by 2050. He attributed this prediction to the rise of neo-Pentecostalism, a term he used to speak of the charismatic experience entering black Baptist and Methodist life. Mamiya had observed a transformation in the Black Church so massive that it would define it. The past two decades have proven that Mamiya’s prediction was too low. Not only is denominational Pentecostalism the largest wing of the Black Church, but independent Pentecostalism, such as T. D. Jakes’ ministry, the emergence of African Pentecostalism in the U.S., the creation of new charismatic denominations like the Full Gospel Baptist Church, and the entrance of Pentecostal spirituality into traditional black Baptist and Methodist churches have now transformed the landscape within the Black Church. Pew’s recent study of religion among Black Americans found that over half attended a church in which services included speaking in tongues. What Mamiya thought would happen by 2050 is part of the present reality.

When Henry Louis Gates, Jr. wrote The Black Church (2021) as a follow-up to the PBS documentary he directed, he wrote an epilogue, “On the Holy Ghost: The Beautiful and the Sublime, the Vision and the Trance.” For Gates, the vibrant worship of the Black Church was so suffused with the ecstatic that he did not even realize what Robert M. Franklin had called the gift of black Pentecostalism. Franklin grew up in the Church of God in Christ but had served as president of both Atlanta’s Interdenominational Theological Seminary and Morehouse College. He understood how deeply Pentecostalism had impacted the Black Church as a whole. The black experience in America will be impacted more and more by the Pentecostal experience. 

A second impact of Pentecostalization is the rise of non-denominational Christianity. While this form of Christianity is difficult to track, scholars generally agree that it represents the fastest growing segment of the church. This is partly because non-denominationalism fits the anti-institutionalism one finds in younger generations. Non-denominational churches represent the largest form of Protestantism, and many of these congregations are either charismatic or influenced by charismatic worship and experience. The entire movement of prophecy and the prophetic within Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity has occurred largely among networks and independent congregations. This is also the case for Pentecostal-Charismatic Christians publicly embracing forms of Christian nationalism. 

Finally, many older Pentecostal denominations continue to grow, although the pace has slowed in the past five years, with much of the growth occurring among ethnic communities like Latinos/as. If one counts from the same period as mainline Protestantism (1970-2019), many Pentecostal denominations grew over 50%. For example, the Assemblies of God went from 1.2 million to 3.3 million, and the Church of God in Christ went from 1.6 million to estimates of over 6 million (exact figures are hard to get). Still, one of the challenges for denominational Pentecostalism is the growth of non-denominational Pentecostalism, since some of this growth is from large congregations leaving Pentecostal denominations. Thus, while Pentecostal denominations are generally growing in new converts, they may report an overall slower growth rate or even, in some years, a loss.

What we see in this trend is the coming of age of Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity in the United States. Non-denominational P-C Christians have especially become politically active to match their rapid growth. The Christian nationalism flowing out of theonomists has its counter in the Charismatic Christian nationalism from network Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity. If there is a division within Protestantism in the future, it will no longer be between mainline, evangelical, and black, but between charismatic and traditional Protestants. 

The Cultural: Rise of the Nones and the Age of Authenticity 

While the data over the past five decades has revealed a rise in those who claim to be religiously unaffiliated, there remain significant differences over the total numbers and the explanation for the rise. Sociologists connected to Baylor recently argued that religiously unaffiliated are those who have no formal connection to a religious institution or who simply check “none of the above” when faced with a list of affiliations. Pew allows individuals to check atheist, agnostic, or “nothing in particular,” with the majority choosing the latter (almost 20%). This suggests that many fit the “spiritual but not religious” view of American religion. The tag “none” has been used since the 1960s as shorthand for this group. The numbers range from 20-21% of the American population to 30%, depending on the survey (Gallup, Pew, or General Social Survey). 

Scholars of religion who study the rise of the “nones” recognize that the different methodology utilized to identify this category leads to serious statistical discrepancies. While there is fundamental agreement about the rise of the “nones,” there remain differences on how many there are, the changes in this category over time, or the explanation for their rise. Moreover, there is agreement that the 1990s witnessed a sharp upturn in the numbers of those who self-identified as religiously unaffiliated. 

So, what happened? 

In The Nones, Ryan Burge registers caution about firm conclusions, noting that there is no single cause for the rise of the religiously unaffiliated. Instead, Burge and others usually refer to several variables, such as political ideology, a growing comfort with reporting disaffiliation, growing secularization, and demographic issues such as education, marital status, race, and gender. 

While Burge’s analysis of the “nones” is one of the most important, there are two problems. First, Burge’s claim that religious demography is a zero-sum game is misleading. While 25 percent of Americans are religiously unaffiliated, almost 14 percent of U.S. residents are foreign-born, an increase of four percentage points since the year 2000. This accounts for how the Catholic Church would lose whites to religious disaffiliation and yet maintain strong numbers. It also accounts for how Pentecostal denominations like the Assemblies of God and the Church of God grew over the past decade, since much of that growth is Latino/a. It turns out that religious demography is not zero-sum since immigrants have added to the American population. As I said earlier, Robert Jones’ End of White Christian America tracks the end of white dominance but not the end of Christian America, given immigration from Central and South America and the Caribbean. 

A second problem with Burge’s analysis is that he continues to operate with the older categories of mainline Protestant, evangelical Protestant, and black Protestant to understand Protestantism. This makes sense given his own journey from evangelical to mainline, but it fails to account for the Pentecostalization of American Christianity as a whole. It also fails to see that the end of white Christian America is really the end of mainline dominance. 

Stephen Bullivant explains the rise of the “nones” as the emergence of the “nonverts,” by which he means deconversion among largely white Christians, especially mainline Protestant and Catholic. Something similar happened among Catholics in South America, but the emergence of the Catholic Charismatic movement halted the slide. The same cannot be said for American Catholicism. Deconversion is key to understanding the “spiritual but not religious” dynamic that comprises most of the religiously unaffiliated.

With that said, there remain additional variables, such as changes in family structure flowing from the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, the loss of trust in political and social institutions due to the increasing scandals from Watergate to sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, and the increasing connection between politics and religion. Evangelical Protestants have had their fair share of scandals, and they continue to debate how to deal with cases of abuse. 

These issues have caused generations to deconvert and depart the faith, but it also means that they are searching for an authentic spirituality that is less political and more spiritual, less institutional and more relational. As Charles Taylor argues in A Secular Age, we are in the age of authenticity in which expressive individualism is the order of the day. Authenticity and self-expression mean that more Americans want to carve out their own spiritual path. What one needs, according to Taylor, is conversion stories like the saints’ lives in the Middle Ages. These stories show how individuality and community go together. 

What Taylor’s analysis explains is not only the transgender moment but also the Pentecostal moment. The rise of the “nones” will slow and then reverse as the mainline fades and a new Protestantism emerges. That new Protestantism will be charismatic even as it forges a path for men and women to be the ministers of the next Christendom.

The Secular: Secularity and Church and State

Beginning with Everson v. Board of Education in 1947, the Supreme Court started to invoke a strict separation between church and state. Just one year later, Justice Hugo Black wrote that the first amendment had “erected a wall between church and state” that must be kept impregnable. The Jeffersonian metaphor of a wall of separation was utilized to buttress a strict separationist doctrine that dominated American life for the next forty years. 

From the outset, Christian thinkers challenged strict separationism. Reinhold Niebuhr claimed (rightly) that it would accelerate the trend toward secularization. The high tide of this new doctrine was the 1960s under Chief Justice Earl Warren. Strict separationism interpreted the Establishment Clause as meaning that the state cannot endorse any religion, religious practice, or a religious institution, although it was not consistently applied because of long-standing traditions such as praying before the opening of legislative bodies.

By the late 1980s, strict separationism started to be challenged as a form of judicial activism. Founded in 1982, the Federalist Society worked to reform the judiciary. Slowly the Supreme Court started to abandon strict separationism. This trend in court rulings accelerated after the creation of the Alliance Defending Freedom in 1994 and, especially, under the second Bush presidency. 

Inspired by the work of Marvin Olasky, George W. Bush embraced compassionate conservatism as governor of Texas in 1995. Compassionate conservatism required faith-based initiatives as part of its overall strategy to deal with poverty and welfare. This meant replacing a strict separationism with a view more attuned to religious pluralism. The Establishment Clause did not rule out religion per se, or even government partnership with religious institutions, but government endorsement of a particular religion. Over the past five years, we have seen a number of Supreme Court decisions that walked back strict separationism in favor of a more moderate view that returned to endorsing religious pluralism. 

The result of this trend has been a battle between strict separationists and those endorsing religious pluralism. Since the second Bush administration (2001-2009), the battle between these positions has intensified to the point that Michelle Goldman wrote a book calling Marvin Olasky, George W. Bush, and those in that administration Christian nationalists. As a secularist, Goldman watched the alliance between evangelicals and Catholics in horror and interpreted their agenda as an attempt to turn America into a Christian nation. In fact, they were challenging the strict separationism that had fueled the kind of secularism Goldman privileged. Following Karen Armstrong’s comparison of American fundamentalism and Islamic fundamentalism after 9/11 in the second edition of The Battle for God, Goldberg agreed that both movements represented a war on secular modernity.

At the same time Goldman was accusing the Bush administration of Christian nationalism, Neo-Pentecostal voices were using the seven-mountain mandate to call for top-down reform, which was itself a version of theonomist dominionism. This represented a dramatic shift in how Pentecostals and Charismatics sought to transform the culture. The post-Trump years have witnessed a standoff between the religious right and the secular left around a host of issues, the central one being who will control the political levers of power. This battle will continue with or without a Trump figure.

Steven Miller refers to the 1970s as the beginning of the “age of the evangelical” in part because of popular movements like the Jesus people, the rise of contemporary Christian music, and the religious right. His analysis reveals how and why evangelicals grew to almost 30% of the population by the time Bush became governor of Texas in 1995. It was through bottom-up movements. The shift in strategy during the George W. Bush administration (2001-2009) has had the opposite effect. It has led to the politicization of the category of evangelical, which has resulted in a departure, as revealed in the 2022 figures from the Southern Baptist Convention. The ongoing politicization of evangelicalism will lead it down the same path as the mainline in the next three decades.

The Future of American Christianity

The five trends of post-WWII Christianity all point toward a period of transition from the old forms of Christianity forged during the breakup of the British Empire and the new forms emerging in the global south and in the United States. While mainline Protestantism was never state-sponsored, it was the de facto religious establishment. This is no longer the case. We are witnessing the death of the older categories of mainline, evangelical, and black Protestant and the emergence of something different. 

When mainline Protestantism dominated the landscape, it became the midwife to the secular left through endorsing a strict separationism in the 1970s. The sexual revolution of the 1970s fueled the deconversions of mainliners and Catholics who now make up the majority of the “nones.” This has resulted in the largely white secular left and the alliances between media and educational institutions in the new technology economy. They continue to fight for a strict separationism in order to maintain a strong public secularism. Invented largely by Michelle Goldberg, the new category of Christian nationalism has become a way to politicize any form of religion that resists strict separationism as nothing more than a fundamentalist attempt to take over. The internecine warfare between the religious right and the secular left will diminish both.

The attempts by some Catholics and Protestants to reassert older forms of cultural engagement from Catholic integralism to Christian nationalism are doomed to failure. The older church-state models are dead on arrival. Instead, the surge of populism is part of a quest for a bottom-up transformation that begins with the people locally. If the new Protestantism that is emerging can keep its focus on mission among the people, then it can weather this transition. 

Dale M. Coulter is Professor of Historical Theology at Pentecostal Theological Seminary and serves on Firebrand’s Editorial Board.