No Longer the Majority

A study from the Pew Research Center found that, for the first time in history, Protestants are no longer the majority in the United States: only 48% of Americans belong to a Protestant church. Since 2007 the percentage of Americans who belong to Christian churches has declined from 78% to 73%. The number of religiously unaffiliated Americans (the "Nones") has increased from 15.3% to 19.6%.

Most of the decline in church membership has been in white Protestant sects (evangelical and mainline), which have fallen from 39% to 34%. Historically black Protestant church membership is unchanged. Membership in the Catholic church is also unchanged, in large part due to immigration from Latin America.

According to the study, a major factor in the growth of the religiously unaffiliated is generational replacement: that is, old folks are dying off. Among younger Millennials, 34% are religiously unaffiliated, as compared to 9% of those born between 1928-1945 and 5% of those born between 1913-1927.

Now, not all unaffiliated people are atheists and agnostics (though those numbers have increased by half, to 5.7%). Most nones still believe in God, and most of them (74%) were brought up in a religious tradition. But the number of people who admit they have doubted the existence of God has almost doubled, to 18%, since 1987. In addition, the number of people who believe that the Bible should be taken literally has declined to 31% from 38% circa 1980.

Not surprisingly, based on their age cohort, more than 70% of the nones favor same-sex marriage and believe that abortion should be legal. They don't, however, all harbor identical views on the size of government, so they're not necessarily all in the same political boat.

Yet this downward trend in religious affiliation is happening at the same time the religious right and the Republican Party are doubling down on their opposition to science and reason. Just last week Georgia Rep. Paul Broun called the theory of evolution and the Big Bang theory "lies straight from the pit of hell." Broun, who sits on the House Science and Technology committee, thinks that the Earth is only 9,000 years old. Even if you don't believe in the Big Bang or evolution, biblical archaeology tied to straightforward observations of alluvial, volcanic and glacial deposition tell us that the earth has to have existed for far longer than 9,000 years.

But perhaps the biggest reason that young people are becoming unaffiliated is that major institutional religions are drowning in hypocrisy. The Catholic Church has paid hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements for child sex abuse, yet continues to pretend there's not a serious structural problem with an all-male celibate priesthood (they basically couldn't get rid of those bad priests because they had no one to replace them). There's an endless string of Protestant pastors who've had affairs with all manner of women and men and have multimillion dollar media empires built on the backs of old ladies who send in the last pennies from their social security checks

The Republican Party has hitched its wagon to hotbutton social and race issues (cast in the guise of "illegal immigration") pushed by southern white Protestants. Unless they reform their agenda soon, Republicans are about to fall into a demographic chasm so deep that no amount of gerrymandering and manipulation of voting laws will be able to win elections for them.