This is Not a Surprise

So many young white evangelicals are leaving the church that for the first time, mainline protestants outnumber their fundamentalist brethren.

This is no surprise.

Over the past two decades, the Talibaptists have focused increasingly on hating people who are different, partisan politics, and sexual purity, and perceived sexual purity, which leaves little room for any real morality.

Right wing evangelical Christianity is an exercise in spiritual vacuity:

White Christian decline has slowed. Mainline Protestants now outnumber white evangelicals. New York is home to several of the most religiously diverse counties in the U.S.

These shifts and findings are among some of the notable revelations documented in a sweeping and exhaustive survey of the U.S. religious landscape by the Public Religion Research Institute.

The 2020 Census of American Religion, released on Thursday (July 8), is based on what researchers called an “unprecedented” dataset that includes hundreds of thousands of respondents surveyed between 2013 and 2019.

Clergy and other faith leaders will be perhaps most interested in PRRI’s finding that religiously unaffiliated Americans, or “nones” in religion demography parlance, have lost ground, making up just 23% of the country. The complex group — which includes atheists, agnostics and some people who say they pray daily but don’t claim a specific faith tradition — peaked at 25.5% of the population in 2018.

White Christians, meanwhile, have expanded their share of the population, particularly white mainline Protestants. That group sits at 16.4%, an increase from 13% in 2016, whereas white evangelicals — who PRRI delineated from white mainliners using a methodology researchers said is commonly utilized by major pollsters — now represent about 14.5% of the population, down from a peak of 23% in 2006. White Catholics now hover around 11.7%, up from a 2018 low of 10.9%.

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Further complicating the political calculus are the ages of each faith community. White evangelicals are now the oldest religious group, with a median age of 56. White mainliners and Black Protestants share the same median age — 50 — with white Catholics skewing closer to evangelicals at 54.

The youngest religious Americans are Muslims, with a median age of just 33. They’re followed by Hindus and Buddhists (both 36), unaffiliated Americans (38), Hispanic Protestants (39) and Hispanic Catholics (42). Jewish Americans (48) and members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (47) make up the middle of the pack alongside Jehovah’s Witnesses (49) and Orthodox Christians (42).

I am reminded, as I frequently am, of the musings of Shelby Spong, who asked, "Has religion in general and Christianity in particular degenerated to the level that it has become little more than a veil under which anger can be legitimatized?"

It appears that among younger people raised in evangelical homes, people who have friends who have come out to them and married same sex partners, this is not enough to stay with these organizations.