The Future of American Christianity is Non-Denominational
After the Nones, there's no bigger story than the Nons
A few months ago, my wife and I were driving into St. Louis and were about ten miles away from downtown in a suburb on the Illinois side of the river. We drove by this large commercial building next to the interstate that had a fairly nondescript sign with a single word on it, “Ascend.”
She looked at me and said, “Is that a church?” I honestly had no idea. So, she Googled it. Guess what Ascend is? It’s a marijuana dispensary. Illinois just legalized marijuana for recreational sale a few years ago and there are lots of new stores opening up all over the state. That’s the world we live in right now, not entirely sure if that new big warehouse by the highway is selling recreational drugs or preaching Jesus.
That little anecdote is indicative of a much bigger trend happening in American Christianity. The First United Methodist Church is out, Elevation is in. There are very few new Southern Baptist Church buildings springing up across the United States, but there are at a ton of Journey/Lift/Resolution churches being planted every week across the country.
Obviously, the rise of the Nones is the biggest story in American religion right now, but the second most important shift in the landscape is the unmistakable rise of the Nons. The only religious family that has grown over the last decade is non-denominational Protestant Christianity. There’s little reason to believe that their ascendance will slow at any point in the near future.
If the future of American society is a shift away from institutions, there’s no bigger beneficiary of this trend in the religion space than non-denominational evangelicalism.
In 1972, less than 3% of all American adults indicated that they were non-denominational. That share has only risen from there. In the 1970s and 1980s, the growth rate was undoubtedly small. It took until 1996 for the share of Americans who were non-denominational to surge past five percent. But from that point forward that line has only gotten steeper.
They got to 7.5% of the population in 2004. They reached ten percent of the sample by 2012. The most recent data says that nearly thirteen percent of all adults in the United States are non-denominational Protestant Christians. There are more non-denominationals in the U.S. today than mainline Protestants.
Here’s a key part of that story, though. This is not a situation where “a high tide raises all boats.” Instead, it’s non-denominational Protestants are gaining new members hand over fist, while other denominations are losing folks by the tens of thousands.
A lot more data about denominational decline can be found here:
Just How Bad Is Denominational Decline?
“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” - James Baldwin One mistake that I make all the time is assuming that someone else has probably done the work that needs to be done to get the answer that I want. This post was driven by looking for an answer to a pretty simple question:
You can see that even in the GSS data. In 1984, about 13% of Protestants were Southern Baptist, and another 12% were United Methodists. Those are easily the two largest Protestant denominations in the United States. Non-denominationals, were just about 5%.
In 2018, the picture is entirely different. Now, just 7.5% of Protestants are United Methodists and another 10% are Southern Baptists. While, the share who are non-denominationals has now risen to nearly 22%. Using this measure, it would appear that there are more non-denoms that United Methodists and Southern Baptists combined.
Other data sources aren’t so sure about that, though. The 2020 Religion Census took great pains to count the number of non-denominational folks in the United States. That’s no easy task given the diffused nature of this religious expression.
In total, the Religion Census managed to captured a total non-denominational population of just over 21 million. That makes them the second largest religious tradition in the United States, only trailing the Catholic Church at nearly 62 million. For comparison, the Census counted 8 million United Methodists and 17.6M Southern Baptists, which a lot more than show up on their member rolls.
More on the SBC’s tremendous drop in members can be found here:
The 2022 Data on the Southern Baptist Convention is Out
I grew up Southern Baptist. Went to church every Sunday as a kid - morning and night! We were committed. Baptized in an SBC church. Went to SBC church camps. Then, I left when I went to college and never really came back. My story is not at all unique. But that doesn’t mean I still don’t have a connection with the Southern Baptist Convention. I track th…
But, it’s worth thinking about just how many non-denominationals there are in comparison to other groups that are not the Southern Baptists and United Methodists. There are more non-denoms than: LDS + Muslims + ELCA + AoG + Jehovah’s Witnesses + Natl. Miss. Bapt. + LCMS + TEC + Natl. Bapt. Convention. Those are all major traditions in their own right but are just dwarfed in size by non-denominationals. And, again, most of those denominations are declining in membership rapidly now.
Just how dominant non-denominational Christianity has become moves into sharper focus with looking at the data spatially. I calculated the largest religious tradition in all fifty states, based on total number of adherents.
Given the previous data about the overall size of the Catholic Church, it should come as no surprise that it is the largest tradition in 37 states that really span the country from coast to coast. The Southern Baptists are the largest in nine total states, and those states are in the Bible Belt - a region that runs from Oklahoma to the west and North Carolina to the East. The LDS is the largest in both Idaho and Utah. While, non-denominationals are the largest in three states: Washington, Alaska, and West Virginia.
But this gets much more interesting when looking at the second largest religious group in each state. Now, the Catholic church leads in six states. That means that they are #1 or #2 in 43 total states. But look at non-denominationals - they are the second most popular choice in 27 different states ranging from California to Maine. That means that they are top 2 in 30 total states. The SBC is first or second in only 12 states. No other denomination hits double digits.
The Catholic Church aside, there’s no other group that can come close to the spatial dispersion as the non-denominationals. Looking at these maps, there’s no regional trend for this group. They do well in the Pacific Northwest and in the Bible Belt. There are lots of them in New England and the Southwest. They are really everywhere.
Let’s get more granular now. The Religion Census also reports county level data on adherents and congregations. I decided to visualize the share of each county’s adherents who are specifically part of a non-denominational congregation. Before we get to the map, let me point out that there is a non-denominational church in 2,707 counties in the United States. The total number of counties is 3,142 - thus 86% of American counties have a non-denominational presence.
Where are they the most widespread? It’s a weird result, really. And not entirely what I would have guessed. There is a pretty solid pocket of non-denoms in the Pacific Northwest, especially around the Seattle and Portland metro areas. But then there are really high concentrations in the Rust Best, throughout Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Michigan.
Then, there is strip of dark purple that is pervasive in places like Virginia and the Carolinas. However, Florida is on a whole other level when it comes to non-denominationals. Of the 47 counties in Florida, non-denominationals make up at least 20% of all religious adherents in 26 of them. Texas also has 26 counties that make it into this top bin, but Texas also has 202 total counties. So, it’s not even close to a fair comparison.
I wanted to end this whole thing with a scatterplot as a first little attempt at trying to understand what factors drive more non-denominationals in a county. One likely culprit is age. The perception of these new upstart churches are young couples with lots of kids running around. But does the data back that up?
I grabbed some recently released Census data about the median age of each county in 2022 and merged it with the Religion Census and then shot a straight line through over 3,000 data points. What I found goes against the perception - non-denominationals are actually more prominent in older counties.
The difference is not a huge one. For instance, about 15% of all religious adherents are non-denominational in counties where the median age is 30 years old. In counties where the median age in 60, about 18% of the adherents are non-denominational.
There are mountains of more ink that can be spilled over the rise of non-denominational Christianity. I think it’s probably the most visible manifestation of how American society, and by extension American religion has changed so dramatically in the last two decades. We used to be a nation of institutions. The government, unions, and religious denominations were held in high regard by the average American.
I wrote about the collapse of institutional trust here:
Trust and Not Believe? Or Believe and Not Trust?
Someone asked me in a podcast interview of a few weeks ago about the thing that I see in the data that worries me the most. There’s obviously a ton of stuff that I think about when trying to fall asleep at night (polarization, secularization, my parenting skills, etc.), but the biggest one may be the simplest: trust.
Now, American society is largely bottom up. It’s not institutions that run the show, it’s individuals. Society has demolished the gatekeepers. Social media allows anyone with an internet connection to build a following in the tens of thousands in mere days.
Denominations used to absolutely dominate American religion. The leaders of the United Methodists, the Episcopalians, and the Evangelical Lutherans got to decide who could become a pastor and where they would be shepherding a flock. Now, a handful of non-denominational churches are started every weekend in the United States, completely from the grassroots.
There are tremendous benefits to this new approach to religion. There are also very real downsides. One thing is clear to me: non-denominational churches are only going to increase in the years to come. What I cannot fully predict is the long-term impact they will have on American society and American religion.
Code for this post can be found here.
Excellent analysis as usual, Ryan.
A factor in this that is unspoken in many circles is that many of those who attend the largest denominational churches do not KNOW they are going to a church that is a part of a denomination. Those mega-churches with a denominational allegiance typically go to great lengths to obscure, bury, or never-mention-unless-asked their denominational alignment. Some of them will copy over the doctrinal statements of their denom onto their web page but rarely link over to it for fear that all these really desiring a "non" experience will be driven away. I some cases they don't want the internet trolls to "hold them responsible" for the views of the denomination either (you can imagine some of those.)
So, my thesis is that a meaningful chunk of those who identify as that 13% are actually attending a church from a denomination but they don't know it, and the leaders of that church don't want them to know it.
I say all this as someone who served as denominational headquarters chief-of-staff for 9 years where I saw this dynamic at play in our largest churches (and a majority of our new growing church plants as well). In our case we didn't really try to dislodge this approach at all, for a variety of reasons. But more on that another time.
My personal life observation -- not scientific research -- is that denominations defined and bounded their structural and programmatic identity during the Boomer generation birth period of 1946 to 1964. A few denominations finished up their institutionalization in the mid to late 1960s. However, by the 1960s the growth of styles of churches which were non-denominational began gaining strength. Then by the late 1970s and early 1980s -- symbolized by churches such as Willow Creek and Saddleback -- the non-denominational movement gained a significant crescendo. Denominations were not serving the innovation of new styles of congregations, so parachurch organizations began doing this. Then by the mid-1980s the decline of denominations ,that also started as far back as the mid-1950s in the mainline denominations, caused social science researchers to begin talking about a post-denominational era. I, myself, promoted a denominational transformation era as I felt denominations could adapt. But they could not adapt to the extent necessary so both the parchurch movement and the non-denominational movement gained momentum that denominations could not adequately respond to in a positive manner. Denominations "balkanized" through developing hard boundaries around who was truly part of their movement and who was not. Centered-set, non-denominational churches grew in number exponentially. Now it is too late for denominations without a radical "come to Jesus" scale of change. It is highly doubtful, however, that denominations are willing to make the changes necessary. Thus, we are truly in a non-denominational era and will not go back to what was.