Holy Week and Passover 2021 are off to an ominous start for the country’s major religions, Save Jerseyans.
Gallup is out with new survey results revealing that only 47% of American adults were members of a church, synagogue or mosque in 2020. Overall membership had been steady between 1937 (when Gallup started asking the question) and 2000, averaging around 70%. Then it dropped like a rock.
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COVID-19 related church closures clearly aren’t the proximate cause given the duration of church membership’s downward trajectory.
“The decline in church membership is primarily a function of the increasing number of Americans who express no religious preference,” explained Gallup in its report. “Over the past two decades, the percentage of Americans who do not identify with any religion has grown from 8% in 1998-2000 to 13% in 2008-2010 and 21% over the past three years.”
Age remains the biggest variable behind the trend which will likely surprise no one. Millennials and, it seems, Generation Z members simply aren’t joining up.
“Church membership is strongly correlated with age, as 66% of traditionalists — U.S. adults born before 1946 — belong to a church, compared with 58% of baby boomers, 50% of those in Generation X and 36% of millennials,” the report continued. “The limited data Gallup has on church membership among the portion of Generation Z that has reached adulthood are so far showing church membership rates similar to those for millennials.”
Gallup says 31% of millennials and 33% of adult Generation Z members report no religious affiliation.
So what’s left when God is gone from not just the public square but the public’s hearts and minds as well?
The problem is a profound one not just for America’s religious tradition but for the fate of its politics, too. Check out Shadi Hamid’s recent ‘America Without God’ essay in The Atlantic. He correctly points out that waning religious sentiment is a major driver of our increasingly ugly political climate.
“Can religiosity be effectively channeled into political belief without the structures of actual religion to temper and postpone judgment?” wrote Hamid. “There is little sign, so far, that it can. If matters of good and evil are not to be resolved by an omniscient God in the future, then Americans will judge and render punishment now. We are a nation of believers. If only Americans could begin believing in politics less fervently, realizing instead that life is elsewhere. But this would come at a cost—because to believe in politics also means believing we can, and probably should, be better.”
Regardless of your own political affiliation (or lack thereof, Save Jerseyans), this trend is obviously a problematic one for our increasingly angry, balkanized country.
Say a prayer for your nation this week regardless of what you believe. We could use it.
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Save Jersey’s Founder and Blogger-in-Chief, MATT ROONEY is a nationally-noted and respected New Jersey political commentator. When he’s not on-line, radio or television advocating for conservative reform and challenging N.J. power-brokers, Matt is a practicing attorney at the law firm of DeMichele & DeMichele in Haddon Heights (Camden County).
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