The misunderstood reason millions atlantic

In pretty short order, the article was widely shared on social media.

Nearly everyone I grew up with in my childhood church in Lincoln, Nebraska, is no longer Christian. Forty million Americans have stopped attending church in the past 25 years. As a Christian, I feel this shift acutely. My wife and I wonder whether the institutions and communities that have helped preserve us in our own faith will still exist for our four children, let alone whatever grandkids we might one day have. This change is also bad news for America as a whole: Participation in a religious community generally correlates with better health outcomes and longer life , higher financial generosity , and more stable families —all of which are desperately needed in a nation with rising rates of loneliness, mental illness, and alcohol and drug dependency. Open navigation menu.

The misunderstood reason millions atlantic

Nearly everyone I grew up with in my childhood church in Lincoln, Nebraska, is no longer Christian. Forty million Americans have stopped attending church in the past 25 years. As a Christian, I feel this shift acutely. My wife and I wonder whether the institutions and communities that have helped preserve us in our own faith will still exist for our four children, let alone whatever grandkids we might one day have. This change is also bad news for America as a whole: Participation in a religious community generally correlates with better health outcomes and longer life , higher financial generosity , and more stable families —all of which are desperately needed in a nation with rising rates of loneliness, mental illness, and alcohol and drug dependency. Timothy Keller: American Christianity is due for a revival. The Great Dechurching finds that religious abuse and more general moral corruption in churches have driven people away. This is, of course, an indictment of the failures of many leaders who did not address abuse in their church. But Davis and Graham also find that a much larger share of those who have left church have done so for more banal reasons. The book suggests that the defining problem driving out most people who leave is … just how American life works in the 21st century. Rather, it is designed to maximize individual accomplishment as defined by professional and financial success. Numerous victims of abuse in church environments can identify a moment when they lost the ability to believe, when they almost felt their faith draining out of them. Consider one of the composite characters that Graham and Davis use in the book to describe a typical evangelical dechurcher: a something woman who grew up in a suburban megachurch, was heavily invested in a campus ministry while in college, then after graduating moved into a full-time job and began attending a young-adults group in a local church.

If people are already leaving—especially if they are leaving because they feel too busy and burned out to attend church regularly—why would they want to be part of a church that asks so much of them? The hardline ones have softened considerably on Communism as a huge affront to their Real True Christian ideals.

Millions of Americans are leaving church, never to return, and it would be easy to think that this will make the country more secular and possibly more liberal. After all, that is what happened in Northern and Western Europe in the s: A younger generation quit going to Anglican, Lutheran, or Catholic churches and embraced a liberal, secular pluralism that shaped European politics for the rest of the 20th century and beyond. Something similar happened in the traditionally Catholic Northeast, where, at the end of the 20th century, millions of white Catholics in New England, New York, and other parts of the Northeast quit going to church. Today most of those states are pretty solidly blue and firmly supportive of abortion rights. So, as church attendance declines even in the southern Bible Belt and the rural Midwest, history might seem to suggest that those regions will become more secular, more supportive of abortion and LGBTQ rights, and more liberal in their voting patterns. But that is not what is happening. Declines in church attendance have made the rural Republican regions of the country even more Republican and—perhaps most surprising—more stridently Christian nationalist.

Nearly everyone I grew up with in my childhood church in Lincoln, Nebraska, is no longer Christian. That's not unusual. Forty million Americans have stopped attending church in the past 25 years. That's something like 12 percent of the population, and it represents the largest concentrated change in church attendance in American history. As a Christian, I feel this shift acutely. My wife and I wonder whether the institutions and communities that have helped preserve us in our own faith will still exist for our four children, let alone whatever grandkids we might one day have. This change is also bad news for America as a whole: Participation in a religious community generally correlates with better health outcomes and longer life, higher financial generosity, and more stable families--all of which are desperately needed in a nation with rising rates of loneliness, mental illness, and alcohol and drug dependency.

The misunderstood reason millions atlantic

N early everyone I grew up with in my childhood church in Lincoln, Nebraska, is no longer Christian. Forty million Americans have stopped attending church in the past 25 years. As a Christian, I feel this shift acutely. My wife and I wonder whether the institutions and communities that have helped preserve us in our own faith will still exist for our four children, let alone whatever grandkids we might one day have.

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Williams: This really is a different pro-life movement. As each year gets harder, they drop one more nonessential service or pleasure they once enjoyed. That number is rising by the year. Older generations often cite those causes as well, along with the scandals and abuses that Dechurched graciously concedes as valid reasons for disaffiliation. A staggering 87 percent of employees are not engaged at their job, according to Gallup. Put another way, we cannot simply talk about marriage and the sexes and gender roles; we must talk about the place where those things are acted out. Indeed, in their new book, The Great Dechurching , Jim Davis and Michael Graham draw on new survey data to show that dechurched evangelicals—especially those who retain evangelical Christian beliefs—remain Republican, with conservative views on most issues. Comment Reblog Subscribe Subscribed. Quick Links. Rather, it is designed to maximize individual accomplishment as defined by professional and financial success.

Millions of Americans are leaving church, never to return, and it would be easy to think that this will make the country more secular and possibly more liberal. After all, that is what happened in Northern and Western Europe in the s: A younger generation quit going to Anglican, Lutheran, or Catholic churches and embraced a liberal, secular pluralism that shaped European politics for the rest of the 20th century and beyond. Something similar happened in the traditionally Catholic Northeast, where, at the end of the 20th century, millions of white Catholics in New England, New York, and other parts of the Northeast quit going to church.

Many have shifted their lives to find identity and meaning in jobs and work — workism as the article calls it. The decline of churchgoing in America, it seems, has not eviscerated Christianity; it has simply distorted it. Could I help you find a therapist? In pretty short order, the article was widely shared on social media. To be people and communities gathered together by the grace and mercy of God who loves us freely and ferociously. So far as it goes, we can probably say that complementarianism served its intended purpose. Unfortunately, asking how Christians might have contributed to a situation wrecks that narrative. Search The Atlantic. Send authorization code. More by Captain Cassidy. Some years back, an equally hardline evangelical brought them up, so I looked into them. My own analysis of General Social Survey data has suggested that white southerners who identify as Christian but do not attend church are overwhelmingly conservative in their attitudes on race and social welfare just as church-attending southern white Christians are.