According to a new Gallup poll conducted last month, eight out of ten Americans are “Christian in one way of another.”
Hmmm? Before Christians get too excited about those numbers, let’s break down the stats.
That 82 percentile not only encompassed Protestants (51 percent) and Catholics (23 percent), but included “other Christian faiths” (8 percent) that many would categorize as unorthodox or simply non-Christian.
And those numbers are down from a 1948 Gallup poll when Americans were 69 percent Protestant and 22 percent Roman Catholic.
In a 1937 Gallup poll, three-fourths (73 percent) of Americans said they were church members. The number remained virtually the same through the turn of the century. Since 2000, however, that number has dropped to between 63 and 65 percent. (Wow, that’s a 14 percent decline in membership in just seven years!)
But simply being a “member” of a church is very different than actually attending church. Of the two-thirds who claim church membership, only one-third said they attended once a week; 12 percent they attend “almost every week.”
The number of Americans labeling themselves “Christian” is down from 91 percent to 82 percent in little over fifty years. Church membership is down from 73 percent to 66 percent over the same time. And only one half of those claiming church membership actually attend church once a week.
Despite the increasing numbers of mega-churches and TV ministries, the number of Protestants and Catholics in America has declined 19 percent. However, overseas, especially in Africa, South America and even Communist China, Christianity is flourishing.
So, why the decline in of the church in North America and increase in other areas of the world? I have some theories, but I’d like to hear yours.
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January 4, 2008 at 19:40
Very simple question really. Here are some answers.
1. Televangelism
2. The dollar hunt
3. We don’t talk to our children about God
4. Too much freedom, too little responsibility for our kids
5. Church is not “classy”, esp for the young adult
6. We’ve left “Jerusalem” without completing the work there and gone on to “Judea, Samaria and the ends of the world”
7. Most of us just don’t care afterall I’m not called
8. It’s the Pastors job. “Afterall, I didn’t go to Bible-school”
9. Excuse me!
January 5, 2008 at 01:46
i beleive were not being the example as christ would have us do. and he said in this time there would be a following away,and most people would rather stay in there flesh than the spirit, but alot of churchs dont teach the new believers.how to walk.they would rather heve milk, than meat..the word of the living god…jesus is still lord… and he loves us and the devil hates us.
January 5, 2008 at 14:04
Christians are not worshiping the Lord and Saviour Jesus the Christ in spirit and in truth as He taught the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s Well. The majority of people are apostates or backsliders in today’s church congregations. People are not been taught how to have a relationship with Jesus, instead is called religion.
January 5, 2008 at 15:47
I haven’t been to church in many months. Why? I work at a job that runs seven days a week, and my current schedule includes Sunday 8:00am to 6:30 pm. I try not to remain on a Sunday work schedule for too long, but someone has to do it, so I take it every so often. Many employees have proposed rotating schedules, but management doesn’t want to be bothered. Its every Sunday or no Sundays.
It would be nice to return to all work ceasing on the Sabbath, but, having for many years depended on public transportation to get to church, I need the city buses running on Sundays and holidays myself. How many of us would want to have NO stores or restaurants to go to on Sunday???
There are better ways… with our increasingly diverse nation, employers could be required to assign Christians first to Saturday and Friday work, Muslims to Saturday and Sunday, Jews to Friday and Sunday… Buddhists and Hindus could fill in as appropriate also. It would not be unconstitutional to require employers to accommodate any well-established weekly day of rest and worship.
But then, its probably true that a lot of people don’t especially care. I am dubious about churches making themselves too “culturally relevant” by catering to whatever is this year’s fad. Maybe churches need to firmly offer what is good about what they already have, and let people come in when they’re ready. What do numbers really measure anyway? I bet a larger percentage of church goers one hundred years ago slept through the sermon!
January 5, 2008 at 17:10
I think many people that feel their Christian are being misled by “the Church”. It is my view that the Church is more of a man-made institution that represents what man thinks God wants. The church has become very complacent through its unwillingness to tackle the deep issues. God wants us to love and accept Christ as our savior. If you look at many of the TV evangelists they are simply misleading people and trying to make money. There are true Christians out there but I think the church is doing them a great disservice at this point in time. What it comes down to is the ability to follow your heart. If you do this you can’t go wrong because Christ will guide you if you are truly listening. The spirit is within all of us it is up to us to accept or deny and we do this with each choice we make on a daily basis. As you can see I am very cynical and skeptical of mainstream “religion”. I do believe in Christianity but I think that Christianity and the Church to become two separate things in of themselves. We are living in very sad times and people need to be careful that they are not being led down the wrong path. The bottom line is God knows and in the end debating semantics only makes Satan happy detracts from what we are supposed to which is spread the gospel and pray for those around us and I’m not talking about lip service.
January 5, 2008 at 19:01
IMO, many Christians do not like being labeled Protestant or Catholic. Many I know, including myself, prefer just to be called, “Christians.” Sticking on denominational labels immediately puts you into a box and gives people a reason to reject anything you have to say.
Also, do not forget that over the years we’ve had an influx of people from non-Christian nations, such as India, Asian nations, and Islamic nations. Since many of them have birth rates greater than ours, it could be one reason for the dilution in the percentages of those proclaiming Christianity.
The only way people are going to spread the gospel is if their relationship with Jesus Christ becomes absolutely paramount in their lives. When I fell in love with my husband, his name came to my lips without any hesitation.
January 5, 2008 at 21:13
Because of more and more freedoms, it may just be a more accurate picture of reality than when the poll was done 50 years ago. I don’t think that though the polls showed 91% people who classified themselves as christians, show the true believers who would stand up for what they believe in a crisis. That would be very hard to get in a statistics poll. Even in Asia, how many answering the poll would tell the truth? In some countries if they expressed openly what they believe inside then they would be killed. Other countries they would only be ostracized, not get a job or not get married, so it is really hard to tell who are really christians and who are merely christians by name.
January 6, 2008 at 03:41
It’s hard to get someone to come into a “family” of believers when all we do is argue back and forth about who’s right and who’s wrong. Take the prosperity gospel… I get hounded by more Christians than I do nonchristians about what I believe. If they’re working for the same thing then leave them alone. 90% of what they preach is the same exact thing you hear in every other church, it’s that 10% that get people going.
What I’m trying to say is instead of focusing on the lost, we’re more focused on being right or “righting” someone else.
January 6, 2008 at 11:11
Quite simply, no man comes to the Father unless he is drawn by the Spirit.
There is talk about people having an ability to decide whether they would believe. Truth is unless God by His grace draws us, we can not come to faith.
When we do come to God by virtue of faith in Christ’s shed Blood, then the chains fall off. Our will is no longer in bondage but free.
If as believers we will walk circumspectly, others too may fear the Lord.
January 7, 2008 at 09:28
We have become a nation of many words and very little actions. We spend too much time saying this and that, but little time “eating with sinners” like Christ did. As a co-pastor, I have a hard time getting to people from the pulpit. It’s becoming increasingly difficult. There are too many messages being preached and many people are becoming skeptical about everything that is being said. That’s why in our church we are planning to spend time outside of the church. Coffee houses, malls, home visits. You know, “eating with sinners”. People will see who we really are and what the real message is.
January 7, 2008 at 10:31
I believe American Churches are in decline.
Why? Selfishness in the Church
A large number of pastors’ use the pulpit in competition preaching their hearts out in an attempt to gain or retain membership. That’s ok, but they use this forum to point out the imperfections of other pastors isolating themselves from the designed purpose of the Church. There is strength in numbers! We need to get back to the basics.
Additionally, there are many people with the “God title” so to speak… using the worship place for their own gain ignoring the real issues before them.
Church attendance is in decline in my opinion… because we have removed the true and living God, and replaced Him with something to please the members. To be blunt, when you enter many churches today, there are times when you need to look around to make sure you’re in a church. My phase is “God doesn’t rest in the mist of mess.”
January 7, 2008 at 11:14
In one word, ‘faithlessness’. That has always been the problem. From Genesis and Eden to Revelation and the Laodiceans, unbelief has always resulted in spiritual anemia and withheld blessing. Faithlessness leads to apostasy. Apostasy results in irrelevance. No amount of seeker-sensetive marketing and ‘conversation’ is going to change that.
The ‘new church’ is saying, “Don’t worry about what you believe, worry about what you do.” Hasn’t the liberal church been saying that since H.E. Fosdick? What’s new about that? Nothing. How has that 90-year old experiment re-vitalized ‘the church’? It has only weakened it.
The BBC produced an interesting documentary on the use of psychological manipulation in the guise of ‘public relations’ since the 1920’s. They trace the public relations moment from Freudianism to the Clinton era. The PR philosophy in a nutshell is, “Give the people what they want, or train them to want what you intend to give them.”
Or, “it all depends on what your definition of ‘is’ is.” In postmodern context that seems perfectly reasonable, right? There was a time, however, when most people would have been deeply disturbed that such a philosophy is driving American business and politics. Not so today, because the catalyst has become the product (fruit). The product is the reality.
I believe that philosophy has been at work in American churches as well. The result is that people are not inclinded to be the Church, or want to have anything to do with church. The PR philosophy works well in the world, but has a destructive effect in the one area that is supposed to be ruled by Christ. He is not going to bless faithlessness.
January 7, 2008 at 12:23
Basically, the weight of overwhelming evidence against religion generally, but particularly against the unverifiable real world claims of specific cults and sub cults, is finally beginning to tell.
It is simply absurd to for example choose creationism over evolution for example, or demonise homosexuals in the teeth of the evidence for its natural occurrence.
The pace of change has simply outstripped the capacity of religion to adapt, except in developing world where a large pool of ignorance persists.
January 7, 2008 at 12:32
Our Churches have become social clubs trying to please the area we are located in with special programs/musicians who can ‘perform’/great motivational speakers, etc.
We have forsaken the basic gospel message that Christ died for our sins and that salvation is a free gift to all who repent & believe.
Also, we are to be a light shining in this dark world. When you are in a group & can’t even tell a professing Christian from any other non-beleiver, God help us. We must live our lives in holiness through the power of the Holy Spirit in us.
Praise God!
January 7, 2008 at 15:02
As much as I normally enjoy Jim’s writings, he’s off on this one.
When people start from the standpoint of America being a “Christian nation” (which it isn’t and never has been because the only “Christian nation” is the church), then we’re eager to push these poll numbers as high as possible in order to prove that 80 or 90% of America is still “Christian.”
Being a Christian, though, is not about merely about “believing in Jesus” (even the Devil believes that Jesus exists) but how many disciples/followers/apprentices of Jesus do we have? And that’s where we’re failing.
January 7, 2008 at 20:58
My suspicion is that, in reality, nominal Christian numbers are down. Mainstream protestant denominations, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Methodists and Catholic church membership has been shrinking for years. No surprise here.
We are a much more polarized society. The division between red states and blue states are deeper and I think we have become more polarized spiritually as well.
I’ve read that the explosive growth of the church in South America, Africa and communist China is being fueled by pentecostal religious expression. I would guess that is the healthy, growing segment of American Christianity as well.
As much as I believe that the dollar hunt, and Televangelists are evil and destructive, I would not assign blame there. Instead I think that sizable numbers of honest people are dissatisfied with Churchianity, with a nebulous faith, platitudes, rituals and fuzzy theology divorced from history or reality.
We are awash in a Tsunami of materialism that is sucking in nominal christians. Yet at the same time, I believe there is a real hunger for spiritual reality, for real knowledge of Jesus. And whenever the life of the risen savior is expressed in the power of the Holy Spirit, those churches are bursting at the seams. The Holy Spirit is irresistible.
At the time of the harvest the separation of the tares and the wheat becomes more obvious because the wheat heads are heavy with grain and are bowed down while the tares, which superficially look like wheat, stand erect because they have no fruit.
Anybody have any real statistics on how that kernel of 6-10% of active, born again Christians are faring? Objectivity here? Bueller? Bueller?
February 1, 2008 at 19:19
I am the child of an Episcopalian priest and I have been atheist since I was a child. I have never seen any reason to change my view. So unlike those who indulge in hand-wringing over the decline in religious persuasion, I see it as a good thing. I am only sorry I shall not live long enough to see christianity in terminal decline.