What Does Denominational Decline Look Like?

A Deep Dive into Data from the Presbyterian Church (USA)

I love data. I love religion. I love religious denominations that make their data publicly available.

I write a lot about denominations that make their data easy to access. I write very little about denominations who seem to revel in being opaque about basic facts (like their membership).

It just so happens that the types of denominations that are good about record keeping are often part of the mainline Protestant tradition. Which means that I write a lot about the death of the mainline, unfortunately.

I take no joy in doing that. I am dancing on no one’s grave but my own. I’m a pastor in the American Baptist Church and we are one of the Seven Sisters of the Mainline.

However, I’m no fan of ignoring things because we don’t like them, either.

One time I went to a friend’s house who had a mail slot in her front door. I had entered through the side entrance and when I walked into the living room there was a stack of mail that was at least two feet high, piled up at the main entrance to the home.

She said she was behind on her bills and told me it was just easier to not open the envelopes. Ignoring problems won’t make them go away.

Let’s open the mail, shall we?

The Presbyterian Church (USA) is reformed in its theology, but liberal in its political orientation. And, it’s dying. At an incredibly rapid pace. Because they post their data on the PCUSA website, I can show exactly how quickly that’s happening.

The PCUSA finds its origin in 1983 when two different Presbyterian denominations merged. I have data that begins in 1984, which means we can trace the entire lifespan of this denomination.

In 1984, the PCUSA reported 3.1 million members on its rolls. The denomination has never posted a growth in membership since its inception nearly four decades ago. It took until 1987 for membership to dip below 3 million. By 2001, there were less than 2.5 million members. A decade later, the PCUSA was down another half million to 1.95M.

According to the most recently released data from 2022, there are 1.14 million members of the PCUSA. That’s a 63% decline over a period thirty-eight years. The denomination will be less than a million members in the next five years.

The hard thing to ascertain from the above graph is the overall rate of decline. If a group loses 100,000 members but it has 10 million members, that’s a pretty small dip - just 1%. However, if they are starting out at a million members, losing 100,000 is a 10% decline.

I calculated the year over year percentage decline in membership using the same data that runs from 1984 to 2022.

Clearly, the decline has accelerated. From 1984 through 2005, the membership dip had never exceeded 2% per year. Many years, it was closer to 1%. That’s no longer the case.

From 2012 onward, membership has dropped by at least 4% and was above 5% in 2014, 2015, and 2016. The denomination lost a quarter million members between 2013 and 2016 alone. That’s not sustainable for a denomination that only had 1.75 million members in 2013.

I took an educated guess at the annualized rate of decline and found that 4% is almost exactly right. If you annualize a 4% drop starting with 3.1 million in 1984, the number you arrive at in 2022 is 1,146,019. The actual reported membership in 2022: 1,140,665. A difference of less than 7,000 members.

So, I took that 4% year over year rate and projected it out through 2050, to see what the future of the PCUSA looks like. The answer is: very grim.

Assuming that the 4% drop will continue for the next three decades is obviously a big leap. It may accelerate, or it may slow down. I think that it will slow a bit - organizations tend to scratch and claw to stick around when things get dire. But it’s hard to fight against older folks dying - and that’s the problem with a lot of denominations. I can’t imagine it will be able to outrun demography.

Those caveats in place - the PCUSA will have less than 500,000 members by 2040. That’s a drop from 3.1 million to .5 million in less than fifty years. This model projects the denomination going to zero sometime before 2050. I don’t think that will actually happen. It’s very likely that they dissolve by that time, or merge with another denomination, or splinter into smaller groups. But the clock is ticking, and the end is near.

Finally, I wanted to visualize the drop in PCUSA one other way - the Religion Census. The Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies took data from the office of PCUSA (and hundreds of other denominations) and calculated the number of churches and members in every county in the United States. They have been doing these calculations every ten years for nearly a century now.

First, let me point out that there is a PCUSA congregation in 70% of all the counties in the United States. That’s an impressive dispersion. But in the counties that do have a PCUSA congregation - things have changed dramatically since 2010.

In 25% of the counties with a PCUSA presence, the number of PCUSA members has dropped by at least 50% in the prior decade. The PCUSA membership has dropped by at least a quarter in 70% of the all the counties with a PCUSA church. That’s stunning to consider. On the other hand, just 6% of all counties in the United States with a PCUSA congregation have seen an overall increase in members between 2010 and 2020.

It’s hard to speak about where these losses are the worse, because they are so widespread. The Northeast and parts of the Midwest seem to be the epicenter of the decline. Places like Ohio and Illinois have been especially hard hit, but there are many counties in New York where the drop is more than 50%.

I’ve got no good news to end this post. Any talk of a bright spots here or there in the data are just completely overwhelmed by rafts of bad news. The PCUSA is going to have to make some very hard decisions in the very near future about how and when it will change course.

I have collected some additional data about the PCUSA that may be helpful to understand how underlying factors point to a bleak future for this denomination. If this post gets some traction, I will write up those results in the near future.

Full code for this post can be found here.