the cost of partisanship

Every Fall, in the seminary courses that I teach, we take a good look at the American Religious Landscape Survey. For obvious reasons, it’s pretty important for a newly-ordained clergyman to have at least a notion of what he’s getting himself into when he sets out with the Gospel into the American scene.

It should go without saying that the American religious scene has always been something like the Wild West. Things have always been changing, indeed, but not like they are right now.

Ever since the 1990’s, the fastest growing religious group in America isn’t religious at all. These are the “nones.” As in “no religious affiliation,” or “unaffiliated.” This group has been growing by leaps and bounds. 

Its rise has been shocking to religious observers like me. In 2019, the Pew Research Center reported that the unaffiliated rose from 17% in 2009 to 26% in 2018. That is an almost unheard of increase in less than ten years -- a scary rise by nine whole points, which should have been most unsettling to anyone in the religious community.

I felt like Chicken Little two years ago, telling all my evangelical and mainline, Orthodox and Roman Catholic, friends that the sky was falling for sure.

Well, the sky doesn’t seem to be falling -- at least, not falling so quickly, and not falling for everyone. 

This past Thursday (July 8), the Public Religion Research InstituteIn released its brand new 2020 American Religious Landscape. 

Some things are not surprising. Christians of color and non-Protestant Christians (e.g., Orthodox like me) have pretty much held their own with little increase or decrease in the last 20 years. 26% of Americans identify themselves are “Christians of color” (like African-American and Latino protestants). This is a slight increase from 23% in 2006. 22% of Americans are Catholic, and 0.5% are Orthodox (I know that’s tiny, but at least it’s held stable).

But there are two big surprises.

First, the “unaffiliates” are not growing so fast anymore. They seem to have stabilized at 23% of the American population. The shocking growth from the 1990’s to 2020 has settled down from a wildfire to a campfire. 

Still, no one should take too much comfort in this. An enormous 36% of the crucial young adult age group (i.e., 18-29 years of age) put themselves in this “none” category -- and this should be  at the top of anyone’s list of concerns for the religious future of the nation.

The other surprise is bigger. 

For the first time (I think ever), the population segment of white evangelicals is shrinking. "Since 2006,” PRRI reports, “white evangelical Protestants have experienced the most precipitous drop in affiliation, shrinking from 23% of Americans in 2006 to 14% in 2020." 

This is new, arrestingly new. For decades -- since the 1970’s -- it’s been a truism that conservative evangelicals have bucked the tide of religious decline in America. In 1972, sociologist Dean Kelly wrote a famous book called just that: Why Conservative Churches are Growing. He concluded that while mainline Protestant churches were concerned about popular political issues, conservative evangelical churches were concerned with Biblical demands upon life, relationships and responsibilities.

But this started to change remarkably in 2015. The evangelical segment started to decline rapidly (from a more gradual decline in 2006). At the same time, mainline denominations (like Episcopalians, Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians) started to increase.

This is something I never thought I’d say. According to this landscape report, there are more Americans who are white mainline protestants (16%) than there are Americans who are white evangelicals (14%).

What accounts for this? There is no new big influx into the mainline churches. Most of their gain seems to be coming from those who had left the mainline community for the evangelical community years ago, but who are simply returning to the church of their upbringing.

The decline of white evangelicals seems mostly to result from the larger changing demographics of America. This is obvious. There is an irreversible change from a white majority to a plurality of ethnicities in the country. This is happening no matter what one thinks about immigration or voting policies.

But there is another factor that has contributed to the decline. When Dean Kelly wrote his book in 1972, the evangelical community was focussed upon concrete “Biblical lifestyle issues.” Since then, the focus has broadened to involvement in political, partisan issues and the “culture wars” -- the very sort of involvement that Kelly had blamed for mainline decline 50 years before.

Now it seems that the chickens have come home to roost. The Pew report of 2019 observed that it was just because of explicit political partisanship that many young adults are leaving the evangelical community, most likely landing squarely in the “unaffiliated” category.

I’ve always told my seminarian students, especially in preaching class, that they should never hesitate to talk about ethical and moral issues from the pulpit.

But they should never, ever, endorse a candidate or preach partisanship. 

And this has turned out to have been good advice.

Comments

[Fr. Jonathan Tobias]

I should add here, in the case of Orthodox clergy, that what has happened demographically to the evangelical and fundamentalist community should be taken as a forewarning:

This is what happens to a religious community when they align themselves with authoritarian and nationalist partisan causes. Too much of the "culture wars" is really oriented toward these causes, and not out of a concern for the righteousness of the Kingdom of God.

There is real peril in making these alignments (which some of us clergy seem to have little hesitation in so doing). We Orthodox have centuries of experience with the problem of church-state collusion -- experience that has turned out negatively.

And now we're seeing this old historical theme being played out in America before our very eyes.