The decline of religion in the US continues unabated

Abandoned Church — Picture by Darren Kirby — image available under the Creative Commons CC0 License

The American blogger and writer with a keen interest is science, skepticism, critical thinking, and many other weird and whacky topics, David Gamble, recently not only looked at Ryan Burge’s second book, “20 Myths About Religion and Politics in America” that will release in March of 2022. That book contains 20 little chapters that contain 2k words and 2-3 graphs, dispelling some myths about Burge’s corner of the social world. He is a guy who teaches at Eastern Illinois University. There he is an Assistant Professor of Political Science. His research primarily focuses on the interaction of religiosity and political behaviour.

He also looks at the Pew latest update on the religious landscape in the US published on 14th December 2021. For the non-religious, it appears to be very good news.

The decline of religion in the US continues unabated.

For David Gamble it is rather obvious that Christians are still the majority, but with a decline from 78% in 2007 down to just 63% now,

being a majority will one day no longer be the case if the ongoing trend continues.

What could be surprising for many is that the decline is not so much by the American Catholics, but more by the American protestants.

It is true that the number of people who identified as Catholic did decline between 2007 and 2019, but it has since then recovered to about the 2014 levels. Overall, end-to-end it is a relatively flat line.

The really big decline has been amongst protestants.

For us in Europe that may be not such a surprise. The storm over Catholic clerics abusing children and the associated cover-up of that abuse is already gone over and does not play a part anymore.

Gamble remarks

The abuse saga very much points the finger at the institution itself and is not just about a few bad apples. Because of a coverup that involved moving abusers from parish to parish, it granted them sufficient cover to continue the abuse. The discovery that this was happening on an almost industrial scale might lead you to conclude that many would abandon Catholicism.

The research figures show a sharp decline in how people feel about religion. At the question

How important is religion to you?

the answers were as follows

Very — Now just 41%, down from 56% in 2007

Somewhat — Flat, 25% now, 26% in 2007

Not too much/ not at all — Sharply up, was 16%, now up to 33%

We can imagine that in the years of Trump so many Christians could see how pastors gave their support to that president who did not mind doing blasphemous acts and telling lies constantly without becoming red or apologising for what he said.

Over the last 14 years …

Atheist has grown from 2% to 4% — not a huge leap

Agnostic has grown from 2% to 5% — again, moderate growth.

Nothing in Particular however has leapt from 12% to 20% — that is a big spike in numbers.

In other words, the protestant decline has fed mostly into the “Nothing In Particular” category.

I speculate that “Nothing In Particular” is a rejection of organised religion, and not a leap to actual non-belief. These are people who may still believe in God, and no longer wish to be associated with any form of organised religion.

Looking around these days to see what is on offer, can anybody blame them.

Please read more about it:

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