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Saturday, June 24th, 2023

The Largest and Fastest Religious Shift in America Is Well Underway

Author:     Jessica Grose
Source:     The New York Times
Publication Date:     June 21, 2023
 Link: The Largest and Fastest Religious Shift in America Is Well Underway
Stephan:  

For several years now I have been tracking a major trend in the United States (see SR archive): the transition of Christianity into christofascism through the linkage of fundamentalist and evangelical church communities with the Republican Party. It has been accompanied by something that is going on not just in the U.S. but throughout Europe, people in droves simply walking away from church affiliation altogether, dechurching, it is often called. This is particularly devastating in the Southern Baptist and Methodist communities. Why is this happening? Well obviously, in large part it is because of the politicization of Christianity to a point where although the words are religious and Biblical, the reality has nothing to do with Jesus’ teachings. I think it also is a result of the anti-LGBTQ posture of the evangelical and fundamentalist communities, as well as their militant male dominance posture.

Illustration by Eleanor Davis

In previous newsletters about Americans falling away from religion, I’ve talked about why so many Americans’ religious identities now fall in the category known as “nones” when, just a half-century ago, nearly all Americans had some kind of affiliation. (It’s complicated and multifaceted, but to summarize, it’s largely a combination of Christianity’s association with far-right politics and the fact that being unreligious has become more socially acceptable over time.)

But it’s not just how Americans identify that has greatly shifted. In their new book “The Great Dechurching: Who’s Leaving, Why Are They Going and What Will It Take to Bring Them Back?” Jim Davis and Michael Graham with Ryan Burge argue that the most dramatic change may be in regular attendance at houses of worship. “We are currently in the middle of the largest and fastest religious shift in the history of our country,” they postulate, because “about 15 percent of American adults living today (around 40 million people) have effectively stopped going to church, and most of this dechurching has happened in the […]

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