Blaze News investigates: American de-Christianization: Why it's happening and what it will mean for the republic

America appears to be fast undergoing a process of de-Christianization. This phenomenon will have profound social, spiritual, political, and legal implications for the country.

Scholars and others who have investigated various aspects of American disenchantment and religious disaffiliation have provided Blaze News with penetrating insights into what is taking place; what is driving or at the very least exacerbating this trend; and what consequences lie in wait for an un-Christian America.

Barring some miraculous revival or a generational reversal, it appears that radical transformation may leave it unrecognizable and worse for wear.

Background

Some scenario modeling has indicated that the number of Americans of all ages who are Christian may shrink significantly over the next few decades — from what is presently less than 65% to as little as one-third of the population by 2070, assuming that many of the mainline and evangelical churches will continue losing followers to the ranks of the religiously unaffiliated.

The Public Religion Research Institute published the results of a survey of over 5,600 American adults earlier this year, indicating:

Around one-quarter of Americans (26%) identify as religiously unaffiliated in 2023, a 5 percentage point increase from 21% in 2013. Nearly one in five Americans (18%) left a religious tradition to become religiously unaffiliated, over one-third of whom were previously Catholic (35%) and mainline/non-evangelical Protestant (35%).

The Pew Research Center indicated last year that roughly 28% of American adults fall into the unaffiliated camp populated by agnostics, atheists, and nothings in particular — a cohort referred to as "nones."

Around the same time, Gallup found that only 45% of respondents would say religion is, in their own lives, very important. When Gallup asked Americans this question in 1965, 70% said religion was very important.

Church attendance and church membership among Americans also appear to have dropped precipitously in recent decades.

Between 1940 and 2000, the percentage of respondents who told Gallup they belonged to a formal house of worship bounced around 70%, then took a nosedive following the advent of the new millennium: 45% of respondents told Gallup last year that they belonged to a church.

Not just another bust

The U.S. has seen many a boom and bust in Christian religiosity.

Despite many betting against its return — including Thomas Jefferson, who figured traditional Christianity for worm f­­ood — the faith has repeatedly found its way out of the grave and into a new era of packed churches.

There is, however, something anomalous and possibly cataclysmic about this current bust that has even longtime critics contemplating what civilizational blessings will be lost along with Christianity as the dominant religion and what, ultimately, will become of civilization should the fate foretold come to fruition.

Shortly after British atheist Richard Dawkins admitted that "it would be truly dreadful" to replace Christianity with any other religion and for his country to lose its "beautiful parish churches," Derek Thompson, a self-identified agnostic at the Atlantic, said of the PRRI survey results, "I wonder if, in forgoing organized religion, an isolated country has discarded an old and proven source of ritual at a time when we most need it."

Thompson added, "It took decades for Americans to lose religion. It might take decades to understand the entirety of what we lost."

While America is already losing beautiful parish churches, it is not altogether clear what else this isolated country stands to lose should the disaffiliation highlighted in recent polling data continue and Christianity shrink as a cultural, political, and spiritual force within its borders.

Heretical Christianity's sacrifice regime

Dr. Joshua Mitchell is a professor of political theory at Georgetown University, where he also served as chairman of the government department. Mitchell is the author of several books, including, "American Awakening: Identity Politics and Other Afflictions of Our Time."

When asked by Blaze News whether Christianity is actually in decline or whether something else is afoot, Mitchell indicated that what may appear in the polls is better understood as a kind of heresy.

"The churches gave up on that difficult combination of God’s judgment and God's love," said Mitchell. "Americans no longer wanted to talk about sin."

Mitchell told Blaze News that over the past two centuries, "we became very uncomfortable with the idea that human beings are sinners, and we moved to just one-half of the Christian claim, which is that God is love. Americans and everybody else, however, still need a way to figure out what I call the moral economy of stain and transgression, but the churches no longer provided it."

"St. Paul says this: The Christian claim is a scandal — Christ was an incarnate God who came to take away the sins of the world. Both are staggering claims," said Mitchell. "So here is the problem: Human beings have this sin that only God can save them from. The development of what’s called 'liberal Christianity' was an attempt to be Christian and not be embarrassed by the scandal of the cross and the scandal of sin."

'Identity politics, like the earlier incomplete religions, can only be vanquished if Christians reclaim their scandal.'

"When the churches disregard sin, you don’t get rid of the idea of sin and guilt and unpayable debt. You relocate them," added Mitchell.

Part of the appeal of various 20th-century social movements, such as those associated with civil rights, the LGBT agenda, and feminism, was their promise of a way to think about "purity and stain that was no longer an option in the churches."

"White people — I detest the term — came to be stained because of the history of slavery in America. Black Americans and, after them, women (victims of patriarchy and misogyny), gays and lesbians (victims of hetero-normativity) all have taken on the mantle of innocent victimhood. Conservative blacks, I should add, have long fought back against being called victims, but today in America, the only way you get a hearing is if you can wear the crown of innocent victimhood," said Mitchell.

"So when the Pew Charitable Trusts notes that American church attendance is going down, I say, 'You don't know where to look,'" said Mitchell. "If we call religion 'institutionalized Christianity,' well, then of course the numbers are going down. But if we call religion 'the search for a way to think through purity and stain, innocent victimhood, and historical sin in order to find atonement,' then in America today we're having a religious revival."

Mitchell characterized the phenomenon under way as a "great awakening in America without God and without forgiveness."

"We're the most religious people we've ever been because every single day, people are getting up and figuring out whether they're innocent victims or whether they're transgressors," continued Mitchell.

This popular system of ascribing guilt and assuming innocence — identity politics — is effectively a form of "heretical Christianity" that has become America's "established church," suggested Mitchell.

Adopting a term he indicated was previously used by Alexis de Tocqueville, Mitchell suggested that when Christianity first began to falter, the consequence was not secularization but rather the rise of a series of " incomplete religions." The leading examples are the French Revolution, Marxism, the post-colonial theory that dominates the pro-Hamas student protesters today, and, of course, identity politics, which we see everywhere.

We didn't move from Christianity to a secular world. We moved from one incomplete version of Christianity — complete with a designated innocent victim and a moral economy that says who's purified and who’s damned — to the next. Identity politics is the latest iteration of an incomplete religion.

"We're living in a time of heretical Christianity," said Mitchell. "My argument is that Christians have been fighting heresies from the very beginning, and they battled and won [against] the heresies by asserting the claim that's the scandal to reason, namely: Christ was crucified for our sins. Identity politics, like the earlier incomplete religions, can only be vanquished if Christians reclaim their scandal."

Mitchell indicated that if identity politics is left unchecked, then it will overturn the rule of law and has already shown signs of doing so.

"I'll just use this example. You will recall the rioting — the 'summer of peace'? 'Mostly peaceful protests'?" said Mitchell, referencing the BLM riots cheered on by Democrats that inflicted at least $1 billion in damage, claimed the lives of between six and 20 people, and left over 2,000 police officers injured. "Well, much of it was a violation of the law. But within the framework of these incomplete religions, these derivatives of Christianity, your actions are at the higher spiritual level, because you're an innocent victim. That is why if you break the law, it doesn't matter."

"There's a higher spiritual economy that recognizes transgression of a different sort the law can't recognize," continued Mitchell. "So you might be a so-called innocent victim and, you know, burn down a building, but you're justified in this higher spiritual economy because you have special standing in the spiritual economy. This spiritual justification shreds the idea of the rule of law that applies to everyone equally, because in these incomplete religions, everybody isn't equal."

Noting that it has already taken root in America, Mitchell indicated that this identity politics "hierarchy of purity and stain" could ultimately displace equality under the law altogether.

While the current target of this regime appears to be white, heterosexual Christian males, Mitchell indicated that the heretical incomplete religion of identity politics will ultimately move on to the next perceived transgressor until all options are finally exhausted: "This could go on for hundreds of years. This is the beginning of something, not the end."

Along the way, the incomplete religion will likely seek the extermination of its complete origin.

"Heretical religions will always try to destroy the institution from which they came," said Mitchell.

Noting that analysis of this trend is often sociological and concerned with the material side of the equation, Blaze News asked Mitchell whether he suspected one of the drivers here may be a manifest evil.

"I am a social scientist who studies the 19th century. I'm a Tocquevillian scholar. I put great stock in sociological and political analysis up to a point. But my Christianity tells me that there are spiritual forces of darkness here that we cannot fight without divine assistance," said Mitchell. "African Christianity, in a way, has it over the West because in African culture there's a deep awareness that there are demonic forces at work."

"Without Christ, there is no rescue from the demonic forces," continued Mitchell. "We have to proceed, then, in two ways. We have to do what we can politically and socially, but with the full understanding that there are forces at work here that are dark and that nobody will ever understand. And for that reason, prayer is probably equally important to anything we might do."

While recommending an "all-of-the-above strategy" — which includes prayer, reclaiming the "scandal of the cross and the problem of the brokenness of man," and having church leaders get their houses in order — Mitchell told Blaze News that a course correction "is not going to happen until people realize that fault lies within, which is the most astounding historical eruption into time, this Christian-Hebrew thing that says 'fault is within.' That astounding historical insight erupts into time with the Hebrews and the Christians. The West is inconceivable without this eruption. We are losing that insight today, which means we are not becoming more secular; rather, we are relying on an incomplete religion according to which fault is always external, in which your sins are always somebody else's fault."

Losing identity, not belief

Professor Mark Movsesian teaches contract law, law and religion, and federal courts at St. John's University. Extra to serving as director of the Mattone Center for Law and Religion, he is on the board of Cambridge University's Journal of Law and Religion and co-hosts the " Legal Spirits" podcast.

When asked whether recent polling reflects real trends under way as it pertains to the de-Christianization of America and the rise of the "nones," Movsesian noted at the outset that there may be some issues with the surveys (e.g., low response rates; discrepancies between respondent definitions about religion, with some equating their faith to a relationship with Christ).

However, Movsesian indicated that the General Social Survey executed by the University of Chicago, which has a high response rate and is regarded as the "gold standard for sociological research," has clearly indicated a major increase in recent decades of persons indicating they have no religious identity, and these results appear to match up with the polling data from Pew and other polling outfits.

"It does seem to me that religious disaffiliation is a trend," Movsesian told Blaze News. "Now, we have to understand what's meant by that."

"It's not that these people are becoming atheists. The number of atheists — who flat-out say, 'I don’t believe in God,' 'I don’t believe in the supernatural' — that number has been consistently in the single digits, like 5%, 4%, for a long time. So that's not what's going on," said Movsesian.

Instead of necessarily rejecting God, Americans are abandoning religious institutions.

"We have to understand what's meant by religious disaffiliation. It's not a loss of belief. It's a loss of identity with a specific organized faith," said Movsesian, adding that this comes amidst a broader trend of Americans "checking out of these institutions which were once part of American life."

When it comes to nailing down what exactly is to blame, Movsesian indicated there are numerous factors, not the least of which is religious intermarriage.

'Disaffiliation seems to be from people in the middle.'

"If one parent is in one religion and the other parent is in another religion, which is quite common in America, the kid tends not to be in any religion," said Movsesian. "Because the parents say, 'Well, you can decide for yourself what you want to do,' and oftentimes the kid doesn't do that."

The children of "nones," like those born to inter-religious couples, are also unlikely to pick up Christianity or another other traditional religion inside the home.

Other drivers of this trend include divorce, social media, the "clerical sex abuse crisis," and the sexual revolution. In the case of the latter, Movsesian indicated that some people have been turned off by religious institutions' moral teachings, concluding, "'My church is telling me that this is wrong. I don't want to be in this church any more.'"

When Blaze News raised the possibility that this may be just be the latest bust in a long-standing cycle, Movsesian highlighted the example of the colonial period, when the "number of nones would have been very high because there were not a lot of churches. This was a frontier society and you just didn't have a lot of churches to belong to."

"So rates of religious disaffiliation have been high in America before," continued Movsesian. "And of course, you know what happens at the end of the colonial period: the first Great Awakening. So maybe we're due for something like that. I mean, we had two or three Great Awakenings in America. Maybe another one is coming."

Movsesian was not, however, overly optimistic about an inbound awakening.

When it comes to disaffiliation, the professor made clear the religiously lukewarm are the ones sloshing around.

"Disaffiliation seems to be from people in the middle," said Movsesian. "If you ask people, 'How intense is your religious identification? Is it very serious for you?' … That percentage has not changed at all. That percentage — like 37%, 39% of Americans who say 'religion is very important to us' — that has stayed the same."

Those who previously told pollsters that religion was only somewhat important to them now appear to be joining the ranks of the nones.

"So you're seeing a kind of polarization right there: the people who don't care at all and the people who are very into it. That might be a sign that those people who are very into it, if they can make a push, they might be able to get some people back."

"It's not like these people are atheists. It's not like they just don't believe in anything," said Movsesian. "I mean, there may be some way to get to people who have some sense that spirituality is important, the transcendent is important."

Movsesian stressed that what the disaffiliated largely reject is "authority, religious authority — someone who says, 'Okay, this is the way to go. This is the path.'"

While nones reflexively reject authority and tradition, that is no guarantee against de-churched conformity.

"There are some people who will just go down their own path. Henry David Thoreau, right? 'I will find my own path.' But most people aren't Henry David Thoreau," said Movsesian. "Most of us are middling people and so we're going to receive something. We're not going to come up with our own thing. And a lot of what you see among the nones looks sort of similar."

Blaze News asked Movsesian about possible legal consequences of de-Christianization, inquiring further whether a recent study he previously discussed may provide a hint.

'Law follows culture more than culture follows law.'

After reviewing various religious liberty decisions in federal courts, Gregory Sisk, a legal scholar and professor at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, and Michael Heise, a law professor at Cornell, indicated in a 2022 paper that "a decrease in religious affiliation may not inevitably be accompanied by a secularist opposition to acknowledgment of religion in the public square or the robust participation of religious persons and entities in public life."

"What they said is that judges who are nones, they would expect them to be very strong on the Establishment Clause — they’d want to get rid of all the religious symbols on public property and so on, and Greg and Michael didn't find that," said Movsesian. "If you're a none, you probably don't care that much about religion. You're just kind of checked out. So the idea that there's a cross on public property, it's not going to bother you terribly much."

Movsesian indicated that nones in the judiciary may, however, be prickled by the perception of special treatment for Christians and for other religious Americans.

While a handful of irreligious judges have been indifferent to religion in the past, Movsesian would not rule out the possibility that a de-Christianized America could be hostile to religious citizens, noting that even the seemingly laid-back none judges alternatively care about exemptions afforded to those who, for instance, do not want to serve a gay wedding on religious grounds.

"The fact that more and more people are unfamiliar with institutional religion, with organized religion, with religious communities, I think you're going to see more fights when it comes to religious exemptions," said Movsesian.

As for American law in general, Movsesian said, "Law follows culture more than culture follows law. So if the culture becomes disaffiliated and religion is not important to large groups of people, then of course the influence of religion on the law is going to be less."

Modernism's prize

Dr. Ryan Cragun is a professor of sociology at the University of Tampa and the coauthor of " Beyond Doubt: The Secularization of Society."

Cragun suggested to Blaze News via written responses that the "massive religious decline" under way can broadly be attributed to "modernization" — what he and his co-authors described in "Beyond Doubt" as a "transition from a traditional, rural, non-industrial society to a contemporary, urban, industrial or post-industrial society."

While he generally credited "modern ways of thinking" with causing problems for religion, he also highlighted generational changes, clerical scandals, and corruption as factors for the decline in American religiosity.

"Younger generations are increasingly liberal and more likely to question traditional religious teachings, especially when these teachings conflict with modern values such as gender equality and LGBTQ+ rights," wrote Cragun.

'As religion declines, humans are returning to more "human" ways of living.'

Cragun indicated that perhaps more impactful than American youth pursuing paths of least resistance are the breaks in lines of cultural transmission.

"The real key here is the 'transfer' of religion from parents to children," wrote the sociologist. "There has been a radical shift in how people parent their kids in that parents give their kids a lot more autonomy today than they did 40+ years ago. Because kids have more autonomy, when they are asked if they want to continue to go to church, many kids are opting out of religious services. In many Western countries, the 'mechanism' of religious decline is generational change."

Cragun suggested further that financial misconduct and sexual scandals within religious institutions have served to damage the credibility of organized religion and have likely served as a repellant.

In terms of the consequences of religious decline, Cragun appeared to see only upsides.

"I would argue that as religion declines, humans are returning to more 'human' ways of living that don't involve the supernatural and human exceptionalism," he wrote.

Satanic Temple co-founder Lucien Greaves did not similarly adopt a triumphant tone in his response to Blaze News, noting that the decline is "at least partially a result of religion's increasing politicization" and emphasizing that "it is apparent that religion can play an essential role in enriching, contextualizing, and guiding communities."

Working under the assumption that "religion doesn't make society function," Cragun noted that the decline of religion will not produce "meaningful changes in donations to charities, volunteering, health, happiness, marital satisfaction, tolerance, kindness, valuing family, morality, etc."

Cragun did, however, highlight a political impact: "The decline in religious participation has led to a weakening of the influence that religious institutions have over policy and public life. This can be seen in the increasing support for policies that conflict with traditional religious teachings, such as same-sex marriage and reproductive rights."

In response to the question of whether there are substitutes (i.e., for religion), Cragun answered, "This is the wrong question. This assumes that religion is a core or essential part of what it means to be human or for societies to function. That is not true."

"Religion is just one way people have found to accomplish some of the things humans enjoy or prefer, including explaining some aspects of the world, providing a community, giving people some moral perspectives, etc.," continued Cragun. "But religion is not and never has been necessary for any of these things. In other words, nothing 'substitutes' for religion because religion is not the default way of being."

The pagan empire

John Daniel Davidson, an Alaska-based senior editor at the Federalist, is the author of " Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come."

Citing the "wealth of survey and sociological data that we have built up over years," Davidson told Blaze News that Christianity is indeed declining in America. Unlike past busts, which largely took place within the context of a highly religious and religiously homogenous society, Davidson noted that this decline, long in the making, has "coincided with a kind of cultural revolution and a societal transformation."

Previously, Christian groups may have splintered off from one another, but this time around, Davidson indicated, "people are just kind of dropping out entirely."

Like Movsesian, Davidson emphasized that the resulting nones are not necessarily atheists or cold hard materialists. In some cases they are "spiritual, not religious."

"They are consciously disassociating themselves from formal religious structures, namely in America and the West, in Christianity, and instead are drawn to new forms of religion, which are really old forms of religion — paganism in a modern context," said Davidson.

'Once you cut liberalism off from its source, it will wither and die. And once liberalism withers and dies, what you have is brute force.'

Davidson indicated that the neo-pagan ethos, which has come to dominate public life in America, "is a kind of inversion of the Christian ethos, which is to say a rejection of transcendental truth, of a transcendent god, of objective morality, or even of objective reality and an embrace of relativism, an embrace of subjectivism, an embrace of the divinization of the here and now: the immanent versus the transcendent."

Davidson underscored that paganism — not secularism, rationalism, or materialism, which he regards as outgrowths or aberrations of Christianity — is the only real alternative to Christianity and that this old and real enemy "is coming back to fill the vacuum, refuting that humans are made in the image of God; that they have innate dignity and worth; and that human rights are an inheritance of Christendom."

"So the pagans say, 'All men are not created equal.' They don't have equal rights, so therefore there's no need to have consent of the governed. There's no need for me to respect the weak, for example, because human beings are, by nature, unequal. That's why all pagan societies were slave societies across vast expanses of time and geography and culture."

There's apparently no basis for tolerance either, certainly not of violations of the public morality, which is distinct from private religion under pagan regimes. It is for this reason that those Christians who silently pray near abortion clinics in the increasingly pagan U.K. are hauled away by British police, he suggested.

Contrary to Cragun's suspicions about the post-Christian world to come, Davidson indicated that liberalism and its other extensions celebrated by secularists won’t survive in the pagan empire.

"Liberalism is going to go away," said Davidson. "Its source of vitality comes from a Christian society, from a Christian worldview, and it depends, for its coherence, on that. So once it's cut off — you don't get the culture without the cult. Once you cut liberalism off from its source, it will wither and die. And once liberalism withers and dies, what you have is brute force, a society that's organized not around the idea of human rights, but a society that’s organized around brute force."

Tocqueville, invoked earlier by Mitchell, indicated that the breakdown of religion would "prepar[e] citizens for servitude" in such a despotic state. Tocqueville stated in "Democracy in America":

When religion is destroyed among a people, doubt takes hold of the highest portions of the intellect and half paralyzes all the others. Each person gets accustomed to having only confused and changing notions about the matters that most interest his fellows and himself. You defend your opinions badly or you abandon them, and, since you despair of being able, by yourself, to solve the greatest problems that human destiny presents, you are reduced like a coward to not thinking about them. Such a state cannot fail to enervate souls; it slackens the motivating forces of will and prepares citizens for servitude. Then not only does it happen that the latter allow their liberty to be taken, but they often give it up.

A silver lining in this dark cloud is that "those who remain faithful Christians, who are going to be keepers of the flame, so to speak, will become more potent. They'll become more powerful in a sense because there won't be any social benefits or prestige associated with being a Christian," said Davidson.

The beleaguered church, too, would be reduced to the faithful and the defiant.

'If that means persecution, then so be it. Let's return to an era of persecution.'

According to Davidson, this coming pagan empire's attacks on Christians may ultimately be its undoing: "Historically, the only thing that has broken the stranglehold of paganism over any society was its encounter with Christianity because Christianity posits a radically different way of seeing the world. It's from this smaller but more potent, faithful Christian community in the West, Christian church in the West, that I think the neo-paganism era that we're coming into now is going to be shattered."

Though he suspects "we're going to win," Davidson acknowledged that there will be bad times first and that the current generation may not see the earthly victory in their lifetimes. Nevertheless, it is incumbent upon them to fight for their children and grandchildren "in hopes that they might be able to reclaim the Western Christian inheritance that was lost on our forebears' watch."

"Find ground that you can win on and fight on that ground," said Davidson. "At the same time, you protect your family and you protect your church, and you build up the community around you to weather the storm. But then you don't just keep your faith in those private spaces. You take it out into the street."

"If that means persecution, then so be it. Let's return to an era of persecution. The blood of the martyrs is the seeds of the church," added Davidson.

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