Recent polls show that fewer Americans than ever are attending church. According to the studies cited in a number of US media outlets on Wednesday, the hitherto firmly Christian nation is beginning to doubt its relationship with organized religion as a result of pandemic lockdowns and generational attitudinal swings.
According to a Gallup survey done earlier this year, 81% of Americans (more than four in five) hold the belief that God exists. That’s still a huge majority, but it’s also the lowest proportion recorded since the survey started asking the question in 1944, when 98% of Americans said they believed in God.
Similarly, according to Gallup, the percentage of Americans who attend a church, mosque, or synagogue is at an all-time low and made up a minority of the population (47%) for the first time last year. The reduction is likely to continue, according to the pollster, as a result of an increase in those who identify as having no religion, a group whose population has equaled that of Catholics or evangelical Christians since before the Covid-19 outbreak.
CLICK HERE FOR AN AD FREE EXPERIENCE AND ACCESS TO VIP ARTICLES
However, social views aren’t the only factor to blame. According to an analysis by ABC News, church attendance fell by 45% between February 2020 and 2022 as most state governments prohibited in-person gatherings in honor of Covid-19. Only around one in five (22%) Protestant pastors informed Lifeway that attendance at their services was close to the numbers from January 2020, despite some churches’ attempts to offer virtual services or even have the faithful gather in their parked automobiles outside.
According to study done last year by the Survey Center on American Life, Americans with a college education are more likely to be members of a church, synagogue, or mosque, while younger individuals are more likely to identify as non-religious than their elders. This is a symptom of a larger tendency among the less educated, who, according to the pollster, have fewer close friends, less social support, and are less likely to be married. This trend is toward social isolation.
However, not all religious organizations have recently suffered a fall in membership. According to the US Religion Census, the number of members of so-called non-denominational churches, which include Protestants who don’t belong to recognized organizations like Southern Baptists or Methodists, has increased by 9,000 in the past ten years. As a result, these churches now have five and six times as many members as the Presbyterian and Episcopalian churches combined.
