Secrets of the Vanishing Church

Plough’s Caitrin Keiper recently talked with researchers Lyman Stone and Ryan Burge to talk about their reporting on long-term trends in Christian belief and practice.

Plough: Give us a statistic from your world that more people should be aware of.

Stone: One thing grounded in statistics that people are aware of dimly but don’t really carry in their head is that the stuff you do at home with your kids really matters.

Consider the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, which is a publicly funded government project that has lots of religion data. When we follow up the same cohorts of people across decades, we see that the intensity of religious activity that occurred in their childhood home is strongly predictive of whether they remain in their parents’ religion or at their parents’ level of religiosity over time. That is true even if you control within religious attendance group or within subjective importance of religion of parent.

For a parent who attends church regularly and says religion is very important, the amount of religious activities they’re doing at home with their kid – such as leading prayers and talking about the faith – still predicts a 25-percentage point difference in the odds that the child as an adult is still in the faith. It’s a massive range. You see this anecdotally where you’re in church and wonder where the kids went who were here every Sunday. What happened? Why did they all leave the faith? Well, because their parents really caring about religion and being in church all the time was all they did. Just bringing the kids to church is not enough. Ultimately religion is a product of the hearth. It just is.

If nothing happens at home, kids don’t stick around. But for kids who attend church regularly and whose parents lead religious activities at home more than three times a week, in the most recent cohort we have data for, retention rates for through age thirty are over 90 percent.

The effect size is so big in the quantitative cohort data that we have. It blows my mind that churches are not bullying parents way harder on this. We should really have a lot more shame and guilt heaped on parents to disciple their kids at home. They don’t feel guilty enough.

Burge: I don’t know that parents need more guilt per se! But you’re right, being raised in a religious household is the strongest predictor of whether you’re religious as an adult or not, above everything else. I’ve done multiple surveys about this, asking the questions every possible way, like what were your parents growing up? Protestant, Catholic, evangelical, other, none? Father, mother? How often did you go to church when you were a kid and a teen?

What the data show is that the idea that many people swing from one side of the religious spectrum to the other is demonstrably false. Most people who grow up in a deeply religiously committed household don’t end up becoming angry atheists as adults. That is very rare.

Stone: And most people who grew up in angry atheist households don’t end up as religious fundamentalists. They might shift one step to the right or left.

Burge: People tend to focus their attention on outliers. Our brains do not tend to think statistically. We are much more compelled by anecdotes than we are by data. We want to think that we’re the outliers. But, statistically, you are the average person. That’s how statistics work.

For most people, if they were raised religious, they will still be religious as adults. And if they were raised nonreligious, they will remain nonreligious as adults. They might move a step back or forth on the religious continuum, but they will not become outliers.

Radical conversion is so rare and random that you can’t predict it. There are always outliers, and they often comment on the graphs I publish that what I show doesn’t apply to them. I’m glad to hear it, and certainly you can always transcend the median and the mean, but the median and the mean are the median and the mean for a reason.

Photograph by Adam Ján Figeľ / Alamy Stock.

I think my life as an example of outrunning the mean in one sense. I didn’t come from much. My dad dug ditches for mobile pipelines and my mom cut hair, and now I’m a professor. So, it’s possible to outrun the mean and the median, but it’s also important to know what the average is. Most people have to be average to make it the average.

Religious mobility is the same way. Most of us are going to die with more or less the same religion we were born with, but some of us are going to have a transcendent radical transformation and change our religious affiliation at one point in our lives. That is awesome, too, and both those things can be true at the same time. We need to keep the context in mind.

Stone: From what I’ve seen, the biggest factor in radical conversion is if a person marries someone who reported being very religious (and it goes the other direction as well). Marriage is the big thing that alters people’s religious identification one way or the other.

There’s a tendency to see this as a shallow conversion, like they don’t truly believe but just did it to get married. But as someone who converted around the time of my marriage, allow me to speak a word in defense of converting for a hot babe.

I would say that people didn’t fall in love with Jesus first because of his teachings, right? They fell in love with him because he fed them and healed them and did good things. That is, they fell in love with a man and then they came to believe what he taught. In a similar way, I think most of us have had the experience of a disagreement with our spouse – a disagreement that with anyone else would be a nonstarter. You wouldn’t even listen. But when it’s your spouse, you have to listen. And sometimes, you’re persuaded. There are cases where only your spouse could ever have changed your mind on something because you love your spouse and love made you listen. I think that’s what’s really going on with “romance conversions.”

Often humans are not persuaded by rational things. They are only able to listen to the argument once the person who’s making it really matters to them. Love is a key door through which people encounter new ideas and can take them seriously.

Burge: Belief isn’t necessarily what brings people into church. When we ask people what their belief in Jesus was when their church attendance went down from one life stage to the next, their belief barely changed. They didn’t stop going because they stopped believing.

They still believe. It’s just that something else happened in their life to make them stop going. There’s this idea that people will believe and then they’ll start behaving. But this is backwards. They start behaving and then they start believing over time. That’s the pattern.

Stone: Isn’t one of the best predictors of a major decline in your odds of attending church that you moved to a new city?

Burge: Yes, for The Great Dechurching (2023) we asked people, “Why did you stop attending church?” They said things like, “I moved, I had kids, I got married, I got a new job.” Largely, they did not say, “I stopped attending church because I was concerned about social, political, or theological issues.” That was incredibly rare in the data. Most people left because their life changed. They didn’t blow up over something; they just slid out the door slowly over time.

Stone: There’s a policy angle here. Blue laws, which are laws restricting what businesses can operate on Sundays, have a known effect of increasing religious attendance. A recent study tracked the relationship between declining religious attendance and “deaths of despair” by drugs, alcohol, or suicide. It found that the uptick in deaths of despair was preceded by declining rates of church attendance – and that those rates were affected by when states repealed their blue laws. If you allow stores to sell alcohol and be open on Sundays, fewer people attend church.

The effect sizes aren’t massive, but it’s interesting because it is a little nudge. The data seems to indicate that once the mall is open on Sunday morning fewer people go to church, and when fewer people go to church, that has knock-on effects. It’s a case where small changes in social logistics meaningfully alter the health of religious life.

Burge: Here’s what I wish more people knew: If you actually go touch grass and go to a local congregation, you know what you’re going to find? They talk about Jesus and helping the community and being a better person and salvation, and then you go eat a meal together and you go home. This experience is still widely available, but as a social norm it’s become less common.

Plough: Ryan, your book talks about the hollowing out of mainline churches that, among other things, had this community function. What’s your take on why that’s happening?

Burge: I call it the iron law of church growth: if you walk in a church and there’s more gray hair than there are babies, you’re in trouble. And even in a five-year window or a ten-year window, you can’t overcome that problem. The mainline was in that situation twenty-five years ago.

I’ve been trying to push mainliners to think seriously about church planting in an evangelical way. The Episcopalians are a great example. They’ve got a ton of institutional money that goes back generations: put that money into church planting. If you put a twenty-five-year-old seminarian in one of those congregations where he’s the youngest person by fifty years, not only is the church going to die, but his zeal for ministry is also going to die with it, because there’s not a lot of hope there that that congregation is going to revitalize itself. What if you gave that person some seed money and said, start a new Episcopal church?

Plough: Do you see that happening successfully anywhere in the mainline now?

Burge: What’s the alternative at this point? The mainline is in a lot of trouble, and if you die with $2 billion in an endowment, guess what? You’re still dead. I’ve tried for years to make that point clear, and for many of these denominations, it seems like it just doesn’t matter. They’re going to keep doing what they’re doing until they have no money or no people left, which is exactly what’s going to happen for many of them in thirty to fifty years.

So why not go out swinging? Try something new.

Stone: The point about the mainline getting old is true, and it’s worth reflecting on why that happened. Why did the mainline get old? It’s because they didn’t have a lot of babies.

And why didn’t they have a lot of babies? Partially because they adopted beliefs and values that were consistent with a smaller family size. They became more tolerant of the broad category of sexual nontraditionalism – sex outside of marriage, delayed marriage, eventually LGBTQ identity and behavior, abortion, things like that. These denominations developed low fertility rates in response to specific choices about social positions.

Of course, fertility decline comes for us all eventually; the conservative denominations are now hitting their wave. But it is worth reflecting on if churches ate their seed corn. As you would expect from the fact that most people don’t make huge conversions, denominational growth or decline in the long run is mostly predicted by fertility. And fertility behaviors in the long run are mostly predicted by a denomination’s position on a set of social values around sex and family. There is a real substantive inevitability that “liberal religion” is not long-run sustainable. Now, it might be that “conservative religion” isn’t sustainable either because you just can’t sustain a conservative sexual and family ethos in a modern world. I hope that’s not the case, but we’ll see.

Burge: Retention is easy, conversion is hard. Having kids and keeping them in the faith is the easiest way to keep your religion viable for generations of people. Trying to convert people to religion is insanely difficult, no matter how much money you throw at it, no matter how much training you give. I mean, Latter-day Saints do more evangelism than anybody else, and their evangelism rates are pitifully low. Those Mormon missionaries who go on two-year trips have an average of two to four total conversions in their entire two-year mission. You are not going to convert your way out of a fertility crisis. The numbers don’t work that way.

The Holy Spirit exists, but we can’t model it. The demographic reality right now is that for most religious groups, fertility and conversions are down, and the future doesn’t look good.

Plough: What do you make of the reports of revivals here and there?

Burge: What you see is a slowdown in the rate of secularization. Generational replacement is the strongest force in demographic reality. The fact of the matter is that people born in the 1990s or later, 45 percent of them are nonreligious, and among Boomers, it’s more like 18 percent.

When the Boomers die, they will be replaced by people who are 45 percent nonreligious, which means the aggregate level of secularization in America is going to have to rise from 30 percent unless 15 percent of Gen Z find Jesus in the next fifteen years. It’s not impossible, but it’s very unlikely. I tell people, you would not need me to tell you if that was happening because you would see it, you would feel it, you would know it, it would be an unavoidable fact of American life. Almost every church in America would be significantly larger in ten years than it is today, and we’re not seeing that. There is nothing structural in the data that says that we will not be more irreligious in ten or fifteen years compared to today by any metric – behavior, belief, or belonging – unless something dramatic happens. We are still headed toward more secularization, but at a slower rate than what we saw the last fifty years, because this will be more about generational replacement than about deconversion.

We saw a lot of deconversion the last thirty years. We likely won’t see as much of that in the next fifty years. But when older generations are replaced by Gen Z who are less religious, overall levels of religion in America will still go down.

Stone: I’m broadly in agreement, with a couple caveats. What has happened in the last five or six years is a bit of a pause in the freefall. Like, Wile E. Coyote fell off the cliff, and then he grabbed a twig sticking out from the cliff – that’s where we are right now.

When you get an aggregate pause, what it means is there are always some places that are above average and some places that are below average. When the average is very negative, even most of the above average places are declining. But when the average is stable for a few years, that includes a lot of places that are growing, and as a result, you have stories of growth. You get a profusion of anecdata, saying, “Our church is growing these past years.”

Is there a general growth? No, the generality is stagnation, because other places are still declining. But you do see a lot of congregations saying, “Wow, we’re really seeing a revival here,” and that’s not incompatible with the fact that there’s no aggregate growth.

Secondly, there’s the visibility of growth. What really happened in the last few years?

Covid. Churches shut down. I don’t have hard data on this yet, but I believe my congregation is now a bit above our pre-Covid attendance numbers. What is interesting about this is that very few of the people who left during Covid came back; we have a whole new group of people. And I don’t think that we’re alone in this.

Talking to other pastors, there has been a lot of member turnover in the last five years with Covid-related disruptions. What we have seen is an accelerated pace of reshuffling in the last couple of years, which has caused churches to see a lot of new faces, and so they feel like there’s growth. In particular, a lot of the losses have been among women, while a lot of churches are seeing gains of young men. This is interesting because it used to be that men were much more secular than women. Now it’s close to parity in some data sources.

A lot of churches have spent so many years worrying about the problem of missing men and feeling bad that all the wonderful young women in their church have no nice guys to marry at church. They’re so familiar with that problem that now that men are coming back, it seems like problem solved. Meanwhile, they don’t notice that secularization among young women is accelerating. And now the group that they all thought was safe and fine is rapidly collapsing.

Plough: Something that hangs over the sociological discussions of both fertility and religion is that you can defend the social benefits till you’re blue in the face, but that isn’t why people make those decisions. People aren’t deciding to make a human being because it’ll help solve the Social Security crisis, and people don’t put their faith in God for the social utility index. Those individual choices come down to more transcendent, personal reasons.

Stone: I mean, I think people do go to church for instrumental reasons. I’ll give you an example. When we were missionaries in Quebec, one of our most effective evangelism programs was a Google ad campaign we ran for people in Montreal. When they would Google things like “I’m lonely” or “I’m sad,” it would put up an ad for our church saying, “Hey, would you like to talk to a pastor?” We got so many emails, and ultimately several people converted and joined the church and became active members who tithed and ran for church offices.

This was wildly successful. People really did just say, well, I have a material problem – I’m unhappy or something’s bad in my life, or I just need to talk to someone. They saw the ad for our church and clicked on it. And in some sense, they got a service – that is, they talked to a pastor about their sense of existential dread at the universe. And then they started attending church because they realized that this is actually a service delivery model that churches have: we talk you through the impending fear of doom and your own mortality.

So, I think people do actually do things for instrumental reasons sometimes.

This is how I think about it: I’m a Lutheran about the real presence. Christ is really present in, with, and under, and it doesn’t really matter how – he just is. So, I don’t really think that we should distinguish greatly between material versus transcendent interests. We believe things because they are materially useful and things are materially useful because they have some kind of substantive, meaningful, transcendent content that God allowed them to have.

Burge: Wow. To me, I’m just trying to change the way the topic is discussed. A small difference in the way the chattering class understands something can have ripple effects. I just want to be able to yell from the rooftops, even if you’re not religious, religion matters to you. You say you’re done with religion, but religion is not done with you. It’s working in your life in some way, shape, or form. It’s shaping government, policy, culture. It’s shaping how your neighbors and friends think about what they value and love. It’s still going to have an impact on us in the coming decades, whether we like it or not.

Americans’ faith in Christianity is going from 90 to 60 percent within a few decades. And what does that mean? How does that affect the average person? Twenty years ago, it was cool and edgy to say that religion declining is good, but now we’re seeing the reality of that and it’s looking pretty bleak.

My Sisyphean understanding of my job is to try to move the needle two clicks to one side to get people to rethink things. And maybe some people who were on the fence about having kids will have kids, or who were on the fence about going to church will start going to church.

And for those people, I believe that would make their lives demonstrably better. If it happens in an aggregate way, then it could have a positive impact on communities and society. But at least I’m trying to move us in a more empirically rigorous way.