The Decline of Christianity in America

And Why it's Embraced by the Faithful

Photo by Leon Brooks (Public Domain)

Introduction: The Source of American Piety

The United States has a unique religious tradition. The formally neutral posture our government takes concerning faith, along with the holy zeal among the U.S. population, has produced a religious apparatus quite unlike the rest of the world. Despite passionate insistences of many of the more religious factions across the nation, The United States Constitution itself is a fundamentally secular document. Oft-cited mentions of God and a “creator” in the Declaration of Independence by theists hellbent of demonstrating that the United States was founded as a Christian nation fail to recognize that such references are compatible with a number of faiths, including Deism, which was a predominant faith among the Founding Fathers of the United States of America. The fact that the U.S. government is, at its core, a secular one, is aptly demonstrated by the following document, the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli, drafted and signed at the close of the First Barbary War.

“As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion, as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religious or tranquility of Musselmen, and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.”^[1]

Yet despite the essentially secular character of the United States government itself, however, religious faith within its territory has developed, adapted, and strengthened to the point where many would consider accepting the Christian faith as a key element in their American identity. In fact, a 2017 poll reported by the Pew Research center reported that about a third of Americans believed that being Christian was a core part of national identity.^[2] At the very least, they would consider Atheism wholly incompatible. In his book, The God Delusion, the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins points to one poll conducted in 1999 that found that only 49% of Americans would vote for an otherwise qualified candidate if he or she were an atheist, a much lower percentage than any other religious affiliation.[3]

The unique resilience of the Christian faith in the U.S. over the twentieth century is even more remarkable when juxtaposed against the steady decline of religious faith among their European counterparts. Even today, as Church attendances in many European countries steadily decline and religious practice itself is reduced to a sort of “pleasant social pastime”[4], religious zeal in the U.S. remains fervent and continues to be influential in our culture and politics.^[5]

What? The U.S. Becoming Less Religious?

However, the endurance of the Christian faith in the United States seems to finally be losing its grasp on the country, to the point where Christians are projected to lose their majority status within the next few decades.^[6] There is a good deal of speculation on why religious faith, which held fast for so long over the course of the 20^th century while religious belief in places like Western Europe steadily declined, is finally started to flag in recent decades. One hypothesis points to the American attitude toward the Cold War as an explanation for the resilience of Christianity as opposed to Europe. Unlike our European counterparts, American politicians framed our conflict with Soviet Russia as a struggle between the “Christian West and the godless communists.” This trend began early with Harry S Truman and was carried along throughout the Cold War right up to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Political efforts to frame the struggle against the USSR as a Christian fight was corroborated by religious leaders such as Billy Graham, perhaps America’s most influential evangelist off all time.^[7] The United States took a position that conflated atheism with communism and even anti-Americanism, a logical fallacy that led Americans to view religiosity as synonymous with patriotism and national identity, thus insulating them from the steady secularization that was going on in other countries in the West until the 1990s, when the Cold War finally ended.

It is a reasonable hypothesis, and one that deserves due consideration. Historically speaking, however, the very health of religion in the United States may – paradoxically – be due to the very fact that the U.S. government, especially in its earlier years, steered clear of meddling in religious affairs. Unlike European countries, where religious faith went anemic in the face of official religions and national churches, religious faith in the United States remained as a distinctly public activity. Detached from the toxic effects of intermingling with the interests of power and avoiding any alienation from practitioners, religion flourished and synthesized seamlessly with the surrounding culture. New adherents enjoyed enough latitude to take a rather eclectic approach to the emerging evangelical Christianity, where calls for teetotaling and moderate poverty were ignored, and the focus on the acceptance of Christ and salvation was brought to the forefront. Religion in the South in particular, thus, manifested as a source of individual and group pride, where one could relish in their privileged status as one of the “saved”, while the people of the South maintained their materialistic and slave-holding traditions. In fact, the embracement of Christian evangelism in the American South functioned as an effective reinforcement mechanism for core cultural maxims and institutions that predated its arrival.^[8]

This gave Christianity the opportunity to weave itself into American culture to the point where it could become a central part of the Orthodox American identity. The United States Government may not be founded upon Christianity, but its culture possesses a firmly rooted Christian heritage that constitutes a central part of the traditional idea of American identity. In his essay, “On the Jewish Question”, Karl Marx referred to the United States as, “The country of religiosity.”^[9] Christian faith is fervently held in the American South, famously referred to as “the Bible Belt”. Movements like the rise of the Christian Right in the 1980s and today’s emergence of Christian Nationalism find rich soil for their respective ideologies in a nation where over a third of its citizens believe Christianity is a core part of the American identity.^[10]

Yet, recent trends have shown that Christianity in the United States is finally falling in decline. The root cause of this is unknown, but this probably simply linked to the growing numbers of parents taking a secular approach to raising their children, a trend which rose in the 1990s at the tail-end of the Reagan-Bush era. Such a shift is possibly interlinked with the Christianity’s obsolescence as a political weapon against the spread of Communism. This has led to a growing number of “nonverts” people who were raised without a religious upbringing, and who overwhelming choose not to adopt a religion later in life. According to a 2021 survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, just 63% of Americans self-identified as Christians, down from 75% a decade before.^[11] Based on this trend, Christianity is likely to lose its majority status in the U.S. within the next few decades.^[12]

Today’s Would-Be Martyrs

The general decline in religious faith may seem a welcome trend to many secular people in the U.S. However, if we analyze the data, trends in religious belief leads us to the conclusion that the overall Christian character, while less ubiquitous, will likely be expected to become far more fanatical, more dogmatic, and more divorced from reality than it had been in decades. For one, the actual drop in the overall Christian population has finally aligned with the age-old perception of hardcore Christians that faith is on the decline –a “great apostasy” that heralds the End of Days.^[13] While this trend may seem as a step toward a more rational world to most, hardline Christians see this as the signal to issue a rally cry.  

Furthermore, trends in memberships numbers in given denominations suggest that the average fanaticism of a typical Christian will strengthen. This is because the average decline in Christians is mainly observed among less extreme, mainline Christians, while their more extreme evangelical counterparts have risen in numbers. Mainline Protestant Christians have long tempered the flames of religious fervor in the U.S., as they tend to take more casual approach to faith and lack the preponderance of blind reverence and ignorance to fall into trap of fanaticism. The shift of hardline Christian factions to the forefront of the nation’s religious milieu, however, anticipates the end of this relatively mild religious temperament.^[14] While the prevailing zeitgeist of the day is stimulating a secularization of moderate Christians, hardline believers are responding by doubling down on their convictions, interpreting the shift as the harbinger for renewed oppression, an era which they believe will, in fact, strengthen and “purify” the Christian faith.^[15] As the accomplished author and scholar Gene Edward Veith aptly points out,

“One of the greatest paradoxes in Christian history is that the church is most pure in times of cultural hostility. When things are easy and good, that is when the church most often goes astray. When Christianity seems identical with the culture and even when the church seems to be enjoying its greatest earthly success, then it is weakest. Conversely, when the church encounters hardship, persecution, and suffering… then it is closest to its crucified Lord, then there are fewer hypocrites and nominal believers among its members, and then the faith of Christians burns most intensely.”

History corroborates this statement, largely because Christianity is an essentially adversarial religion. In other words, Christianity is an ideology designed to fight against something. It needs an enemy, and it only really exists in reference to some form of existential threat. Without it, it falls into crisis, loses its identity, and sheds its original character. Therefore, while its adherents claim to have found God, they are always seeking the Devil, whether it be in real threats, such as communists, or imaginary, such as the Satanic Panic of the 1980s. This, of course, shapes the nature of the Christian perception of courage and sacrifice, and nothing is nobler in the Christian faith than to lay down one’s life for the cause.

The Cult of Martyrs

The history of the Christian religion is indeed marked by a trend of real persecutions and imagined threats, when real dangers are not present. This is best exemplified by the Christian Cult of Martyrs. Early persecution under Rome gave later Christians a pantheon of martyrs to revere, and it is maintained, to this day, that “martyrdom is the power of the gospel”. Fascinatingly, this did not stop persecution. Rather, the established Churches and associated authorities continued persecution of so-called “heretics” well after Roman persecution ended and did so alongside their reverence for those martyred by Pagans in earlier times. The hypocrisy is palpable, but is necessary to uphold their delusions of victimhood.^[16]

Nihilism and the Collapse of Civilization?

This rise in religiously fueled mobilization is furthered by the aforementioned misconception that the Christian faith is central to Western civilization. Conservative thought often takes the position that, if this keystone element were removed from the foundation of Western civilization, it would all come crumbling to dust. This is closely tied to the false dichotomy that religious faith is integral to moral human behavior, whereby they think that, lacking religious belief, humans become immoral nihilists, a state inimical to the survival of any organized society. As recent as 2022, a Pew Research Center poll reported that one third of Americans retained the belief that belief in God was essential to moral behavior. This view was most strongly represented among evangelical Christians.^[17] This absurd mindset, while blatantly falsified by the relative low crime rates and good behavior of citizens in many more secular Western nations, i.e. France, Norway, Iceland, is upheld by the anecdotal testimonies of “born again Christians”, who so often claim that their lack of faith led them down a road of self-destructive hedonism, from which they were then saved by the grace that came with accepting Jesus Christ as their Lord and savior.^[18] This erroneous mindset, combined with the rising degree of zealotry within the U.S. Christian apparatus, suggests that the Christians in America are poised to become a compact, vocal, and influential force in American politics and society in coming years.

Conclusion

Do not expect that these benighted radicals can be won over through rational argument. For these people, their mind is made up, and any attempt to talk them out of it is viewed as diabolical efforts to undermine their faith. Christianity is essentially the religion of the persecuted, the underdogs, and the outcasts. Because of this, the lower the chips, the bolder the plays, and worse the team is doing, the harder the cheerleaders cheer. This means that it is very likely that the Christian religion in America will become more fanatical, dogmatic, and aggressive in coming years. It is too soon to see what this means for politics and the spirit of America, but the rise in evangelical fervor radiating from a shrinking yet intensifying religious element is sure to make a lasting impact on coming events.

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[1] https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/1797-treaty-of-tripoli/#:~:text=Article%2011%20of%20the%20treaty,war%20or%20act%20of%20hostility

[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2017/02/01/what-it-takes-to-truly-be-one-of-us/

[3] Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, pg. 4

[4] Dawkins, pg. 41. Dawkins refers to English Church attendance as, “little more than a pleasant social pastime.”

[5] U.S. adults are more religious than Western Europeans | Pew Research Center

[6] America's Christian majority is shrinking, and could dip below 50% by 2070 : NPR

[7] https://academic.oup.com/british-academy-scholarship-online/book/37458/chapter-abstract/331628479?redirectedFrom=fulltext

[8] https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-ushistory1ay/chapter/culture-in-the-old-south/#:~:text=While%20the%20South%20contained%20important,swept%20the%20along%20southern%20backcountry.

[9] On The Jewish Question by Karl Marx (marxists.org)

[10] How Countries Around the World View National Identity | Pew Research Center

[11] About Three-in-Ten U.S. Adults Are Now Religiously Unaffiliated | Pew Research Center

[12] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/09/13/modeling-the-future-of-religion-in-america/

[13] https://evidencetobelieve.com/end-times-sign-a-falling-away-from-the-faith/

[14] In U.S., Decline of Christianity Continues at Rapid Pace | Pew Research Center

[15] Persecution and Suffering for Jesus Christ - C.S. Lewis Institute (cslewisinstitute.org)

[16] Why Did Christianity Succeed? - The Martyrs | From Jesus To Christ | FRONTLINE | PBS

[17] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/20/many-people-in-u-s-other-advanced-economies-say-its-not-necessary-to-believe-in-god-to-be-moral/#:~:text=Most%20Americans%20say%20it's%20not,34%25).

[18] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/our-humanity-naturally/201103/misinformation-and-facts-about-secularism-and-religion#:~:text=Citing%20four%20different%20studies%2C%20Zuckerman,relatively%20non%2Dreligious%20countries.%22