McNewspaper today has a nice second look at the American-Christianity-in-decline story trumpeted by Newsweek earlier this month. Authored by Stephen Prothero, celebrated chair of religious studies at Boston University, the column notes that the deeper data in the recent ARIS survey does not so much show that American Christianity is in decline as it does that it is in realignment.
Specifically, Americans in growing numbers tend to refer to themselves as "spiritual" rather than Christian and are in greater numbers aligning with non-denominational churches. Similarly, the weight of Roman Catholic demographics is shifting from the Northeast to the Southwest, concurrently going from white to Hispanic.
Probably the most interesting statistic is that membership in nondenominational churches has grown from 200,000 in 1990 to 2.5 million in 2001 to over 8 million at present.
In sum, the long decline of America's historic "mainline" denominations continues, and its nominal Christians are not naming the name of their nominalism as often as they used to. Meanwhile, refugees from both groups are landing in new churches without denominational affiliations. We add our surmise that many churches are deliberately playing down, if not hiding, their denominational identities to join this trend.
2 comments:
As the USA Today story sort of noted without directly noting this comes down to labels. If you're married to a particular definition of words like "evangelical" (as, I would note, Imonk most definitely is, see his latest post here) then you're probably going to be disappointed in what the future holds. OTOH, if you're more interested in talking about the kingdom of God (Christians alone, but not the only Christians anyone? What? I can't pander to my audience for cheap pops?), and defining it as Jesus did, and individual Christians as Paul did in 1 Cor. 15.1ff then things don't look quite as bleak.
I wonder if people are simply shifting from a denominational church to one without a denomination?
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