IMO there is a direct and inverse correlation between material prosperity and religious belief. In the 1990s the Soviet Union was gone and there was widespread economic prosperity in the U.S. - hence, decrease in religious belief. As neoliberal feudalism continues to take hold and the gap between the ultra rich and everyone else continues to grow to monstrous proportions, I expect religious belief to come bouncing back bigtime.
There is more than one way to assess this. Communist states were officially atheistic, but the USSR made its peace with the Russian Orthodox Church and the Eastern European satellites had their tacet agreements with the Catholic church not to denounce each other. In the Americas, though less in Western Europe, religion became a surrogate banner for us being different and better during the Cold War. After the Cold War, different branch points arise. In Eastern Europe, Christianity had a mini-revival. In America, there are different ways to assess this. One is that our religious affiliations are no longer needed to affirm ideological differentiation, and they can decline. The other is that our religious traditions prevailed over their atheist ideology and should be strengthened. That did not happen.
American religion that preceded Ryan's window comes with some other historical baggage. The Catholic Church scandals began right before Ryan's time window. The Moral Majority and Christian Yellow pages came a little before that, with a confrontational approach to religion, adapted by some of my own Jewish organizations like the ZOA. People coming of age in the early Clinton era had to make a choice of for or against pluralism, and the graphs suggest they did.
Lyman Stone argues that religious decline is due to the increase in secular education institutions and the general decline and delay in marriage. I found his explanation very well-argued. AFAIK he rejects the Christian Smith et. al. explanation.
I agree we should look to education for at least part of the story. CS Lewis critiqued a new development in education in his book The Abolition of Man (1943), focusing his ire on a poetry textbook that sought to normalize a valueless secularism in place of previous assumption of natural law and morality. This had been brewing in certain circles for a while, of course. But in the 1960s, institutions including education departments (and the law) underwent a radical change to mainstream this new answer to the question “what is man”. By the 1990s, the new generation of teachers was in place, who had all graduated from the new education departments, and had enacted a shift in K-12 education, which greatly expanded the reach of the new vision. Legal changes and challenges prevented discussion of God in schools. The new “social imaginary” conflicted with Christian ideas and made it so that Christian ideas (which had previously dominated the social imaginary) were now more difficult to accept. With the education system now working against religious belief, it is no surprise that we have seen Christian numbers tumble ever since. The 90s may have been the first shock.
I've given this topic a lot of thought. Two explanations stand out:
1. The end of the cold war. For the first time in 60 years, in the early 90 the U.S. no longer faced an enemy who constituted a viable existential threat to the world order. This allowed us to return to our bickering, and when it became apparent that religious people were more interested in political bickering than faith, they lost their appeal.
2. The rise of the internet. In my reading of the Bible (esp. the New Testament and the Psalms, but elsewhere as well), faith is frequently described in terms of attention. With a major new interactive competitor for our attention, people lost their focus on the divine.
One slice of this topic that I think would reveal #2 as a likely compelling answer is to separate out faith groups by the specific approach they've taken towards the internet.
Megachurches embraced it, and they're growing. Certain highly communal groups (Old Order Mennonites, Orthodox Jews, Bruderhof, Old Order Mennonites, etc...) resisted it, and they are growing even more rapidly. Everyone else (most notably Mormons who were growing very rapidly up till then 90s) had no strategy, and they're all stagnant or declining.
By the end of the decade they did. What we saw in the 90s was the beginning of a trend, not a cliff. Gradually increasing internet adoption throughout the decade would fit that.
My personal anecdotal experience suggests to me a phenomenon that seems to fit these numbers but tells a whole other story. In the 1990s people under 30 abandoned in droves the church traditions they grew up in. Some stopped attending altogether, but most became concentrated either in newly launched megachurches or in a kind of church that promoted a perpetual youth culture. From there disillusionment set in, and over the next couple of decades their numbers dwindled. To this day Gen-X is underrepresented except maybe the youngest who are almost millennial. It creates this weird gap and partly explains why today's people in their 20s and lower 30s (children of Gen-X) seem completely unchurched compared to those before and after.
Ryan, have you ever conducted historical studies of college professors going back to the 1930s? Might help explain from a top down level how attitudes changed in the 1960s and the 1990s, since teachers tend to be 30 years older than the kids they teach.
The other way to look at the graphs would be to replace the 1990s window with more abrupt inflection points. The smooth curves from SAS data programs tend to obliterate these in favor of longer trends. There are a couple of inflection points. The first is around 1992 on the opening graph where the history perks along for a long time and changes suddenly with fewer Christians and more Nones. A less dramatic inflection point appears in the attendance figure. The dropoff from reliable to more sporadic attendance begins maybe around 1994, replacing an established trend with a new trend. The interpretations would perhaps be different. If there is sudden abandonment of religion tagged to a particular year, which seems the case in the opening graph, something likely precipitated that the year or two before, runs its course, and creates a new slope for the line which maintains its gradual new trend.
I don't think churches need a separate explanation. All established institutions have been losing trust and members since the '70s. All for the same basic reason. They stopped trying to attract new customers or members and turned inward, focusing more and more tightly on the same dull internal matters. When a church or newspaper or TV network or political party makes it blazingly clear that new customers are UNWELCOME and UNWANTED. it has to rely on the old customers who inevitably get older and die.
Fascinating. I assume you checked that the questions were not changed to create some hidden impact.
RE: attendance -- your numbers support my hypothesis that what's happening is primaily reduction in attendance while the number of human beings involved has not dropped as much. Unfortunately church membership records are probably the least accurate.
It's striking that, just as sociologists like Peter Berger and Rodney Stark were rejecting the secularisation thesis in the 1990s, with the US as a key counterexample, it was being validated among young Americans
I am active I. My progressive synagogue and we typically see a big drop in participation form most kids after they go through studying for and leading services for their bar/bat mitzvah at age 13. The 20 something crowd typically only attend high holy days once a year. It starts to see an uptick when they start to settle down, get married and potentially have a family. We ourselves in our 20s and early 30’s came to services only once or twice a year and did not join the synagogue until we had a kid in preschool, which happened in our early 40’s. Now I attend every week but that started in My 50’s. This timeframe also coincided with the death of my father in law and decline of our other parents, as well as a layoff at work.
Your data may have something to do with the increase in average age of first child (and the increase in Young Americans choosing not to have children at all, which is where our 25 year old daughter is at so far).
It would be interesting to compare, for the same period, what the curves look like for those in the mid life segments *above* 35. Did you look at that for comparison?
I remember the 80s as being the age of the televangelist. My grandma, for example, was glued to the local Christian TV station, but I can't remember her ever attending church. I wonder if, like streaming services, it helped a certain number of (generally older) people feel plugged into church, but their kids and grandkids never saw the point.
Following up Katja's point, I wonder if there is an influence of the televangelist era of the '80s, with all its scandals, followed up with the early '90s being when political right Christianity really started to make a wider public impact. Pat Buchanan got some notice running for the Republican nomination in 1992, and made a memorably divisive "culture wars" speech at the Republican National Convention. Ralph Reed and the Christian Coalition were prominent in the early '90s. Along with several other factors, I imagine this ascendancy of politicized Christian conservatism began to give a chuck of young Americans additional impetus to pull back from Christian/religious identification.
This is interesting. Question for Ryan though: did this 90s inflection point hit the sexes differently?
You could argue that at least partly what we're seeing is a "rebellion against the moral busybodies" effect. The 1990s came after the Satanic panic and Dana Carvey's iconic "Church Lady" character that lampooned the sort of moral busybody that we imagine being responsible for why demons couldn't be called demons in AD&D.
We can imagine this effect also explaining why young men, in particular, rebelled against the Democrats this election, with a figure like Titania McGrath standing in for Carvey's "Church Lady" as the archetypal moral busybody of the hour.
Noteworthy also in both cases that the moral busybody is a female character played by a man. This is what makes me think this effect would probably be gendered, with young men responding more harshly to busybodies (perceived as disproportionately female) than young women do.
Though in the 1990s case, it's possible that figures like Falwell, etc. that Ryan brought up in his article might be more offensive to young women. So maybe it balanced out in that case, unlike the contemporary case where the culture war has a more distinct male vs. female flavor to it, especially among the young and unmarried.
How much of the decline, for example with the mainline churches, is due to a low birthrate? A decade ago or more when I was on the church council for an ELCA church, a report (from the denomination as best as I can remember) pointed out that a good percentage of the decline in attendance was members having smaller families. Most of you members come from growing up in the faith, and from that pool there is a natural attrition of those who leave. If the pool gets smaller from families only having 1 or 2 children, there will be an inevitable decline.
Yes, I recall reading a paper that showed that the evangelical gains vs. the Mainline in the 20th century were driven primarily by differential fertility, NOT different rates of conversion or apostasy. Which to me was really surprising and I still question if there's a flaw in that analysis. It doesn't align at all with my life experience, which is there are WAY more conversions to evangelical from other traditions than the reverse, and while apostasy is very common all around, it's most common among those who grew up Mainline.
Though the data in that paper only ran through 2000 IIRC, and maybe that partly explains it: I was still in high school in that year, my experiences of watching people convert and apostatize are almost entirely from the 21st century.
I have no idea what that paper was called, though I'm pretty confident it was an academic paper and not produced by a denomination. Maybe ELCA found the same results with a separate study, or maybe it linked to that paper.
Though looking at it again, maybe I took away the wrong message. Evangelicals still had a notable advantage in retention according to them, it's just that the fertility effect was larger.
IMO there is a direct and inverse correlation between material prosperity and religious belief. In the 1990s the Soviet Union was gone and there was widespread economic prosperity in the U.S. - hence, decrease in religious belief. As neoliberal feudalism continues to take hold and the gap between the ultra rich and everyone else continues to grow to monstrous proportions, I expect religious belief to come bouncing back bigtime.
There is more than one way to assess this. Communist states were officially atheistic, but the USSR made its peace with the Russian Orthodox Church and the Eastern European satellites had their tacet agreements with the Catholic church not to denounce each other. In the Americas, though less in Western Europe, religion became a surrogate banner for us being different and better during the Cold War. After the Cold War, different branch points arise. In Eastern Europe, Christianity had a mini-revival. In America, there are different ways to assess this. One is that our religious affiliations are no longer needed to affirm ideological differentiation, and they can decline. The other is that our religious traditions prevailed over their atheist ideology and should be strengthened. That did not happen.
American religion that preceded Ryan's window comes with some other historical baggage. The Catholic Church scandals began right before Ryan's time window. The Moral Majority and Christian Yellow pages came a little before that, with a confrontational approach to religion, adapted by some of my own Jewish organizations like the ZOA. People coming of age in the early Clinton era had to make a choice of for or against pluralism, and the graphs suggest they did.
Lyman Stone argues that religious decline is due to the increase in secular education institutions and the general decline and delay in marriage. I found his explanation very well-argued. AFAIK he rejects the Christian Smith et. al. explanation.
https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/promise-and-peril-the-history-of-american-religiosity-and-its-recent-decline/
I agree we should look to education for at least part of the story. CS Lewis critiqued a new development in education in his book The Abolition of Man (1943), focusing his ire on a poetry textbook that sought to normalize a valueless secularism in place of previous assumption of natural law and morality. This had been brewing in certain circles for a while, of course. But in the 1960s, institutions including education departments (and the law) underwent a radical change to mainstream this new answer to the question “what is man”. By the 1990s, the new generation of teachers was in place, who had all graduated from the new education departments, and had enacted a shift in K-12 education, which greatly expanded the reach of the new vision. Legal changes and challenges prevented discussion of God in schools. The new “social imaginary” conflicted with Christian ideas and made it so that Christian ideas (which had previously dominated the social imaginary) were now more difficult to accept. With the education system now working against religious belief, it is no surprise that we have seen Christian numbers tumble ever since. The 90s may have been the first shock.
I've given this topic a lot of thought. Two explanations stand out:
1. The end of the cold war. For the first time in 60 years, in the early 90 the U.S. no longer faced an enemy who constituted a viable existential threat to the world order. This allowed us to return to our bickering, and when it became apparent that religious people were more interested in political bickering than faith, they lost their appeal.
2. The rise of the internet. In my reading of the Bible (esp. the New Testament and the Psalms, but elsewhere as well), faith is frequently described in terms of attention. With a major new interactive competitor for our attention, people lost their focus on the divine.
One slice of this topic that I think would reveal #2 as a likely compelling answer is to separate out faith groups by the specific approach they've taken towards the internet.
Megachurches embraced it, and they're growing. Certain highly communal groups (Old Order Mennonites, Orthodox Jews, Bruderhof, Old Order Mennonites, etc...) resisted it, and they are growing even more rapidly. Everyone else (most notably Mormons who were growing very rapidly up till then 90s) had no strategy, and they're all stagnant or declining.
But not that many people had the internet in the 1990s.
By the end of the decade they did. What we saw in the 90s was the beginning of a trend, not a cliff. Gradually increasing internet adoption throughout the decade would fit that.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ITNETUSERP2USA
I actually make this point in the Nones.
Internet adoption was so rapid, that it's impossible to statistically make sense of it.
I do think the internet gets you a lot of the way to explaining the denominational/nondenominational pipeline, though.
What point are you saying that you make in the Nones? And why does adoption being rapid make statistics impossible?
My personal anecdotal experience suggests to me a phenomenon that seems to fit these numbers but tells a whole other story. In the 1990s people under 30 abandoned in droves the church traditions they grew up in. Some stopped attending altogether, but most became concentrated either in newly launched megachurches or in a kind of church that promoted a perpetual youth culture. From there disillusionment set in, and over the next couple of decades their numbers dwindled. To this day Gen-X is underrepresented except maybe the youngest who are almost millennial. It creates this weird gap and partly explains why today's people in their 20s and lower 30s (children of Gen-X) seem completely unchurched compared to those before and after.
Ryan, have you ever conducted historical studies of college professors going back to the 1930s? Might help explain from a top down level how attitudes changed in the 1960s and the 1990s, since teachers tend to be 30 years older than the kids they teach.
The other way to look at the graphs would be to replace the 1990s window with more abrupt inflection points. The smooth curves from SAS data programs tend to obliterate these in favor of longer trends. There are a couple of inflection points. The first is around 1992 on the opening graph where the history perks along for a long time and changes suddenly with fewer Christians and more Nones. A less dramatic inflection point appears in the attendance figure. The dropoff from reliable to more sporadic attendance begins maybe around 1994, replacing an established trend with a new trend. The interpretations would perhaps be different. If there is sudden abandonment of religion tagged to a particular year, which seems the case in the opening graph, something likely precipitated that the year or two before, runs its course, and creates a new slope for the line which maintains its gradual new trend.
I don't think churches need a separate explanation. All established institutions have been losing trust and members since the '70s. All for the same basic reason. They stopped trying to attract new customers or members and turned inward, focusing more and more tightly on the same dull internal matters. When a church or newspaper or TV network or political party makes it blazingly clear that new customers are UNWELCOME and UNWANTED. it has to rely on the old customers who inevitably get older and die.
Fascinating. I assume you checked that the questions were not changed to create some hidden impact.
RE: attendance -- your numbers support my hypothesis that what's happening is primaily reduction in attendance while the number of human beings involved has not dropped as much. Unfortunately church membership records are probably the least accurate.
It's striking that, just as sociologists like Peter Berger and Rodney Stark were rejecting the secularisation thesis in the 1990s, with the US as a key counterexample, it was being validated among young Americans
I am active I. My progressive synagogue and we typically see a big drop in participation form most kids after they go through studying for and leading services for their bar/bat mitzvah at age 13. The 20 something crowd typically only attend high holy days once a year. It starts to see an uptick when they start to settle down, get married and potentially have a family. We ourselves in our 20s and early 30’s came to services only once or twice a year and did not join the synagogue until we had a kid in preschool, which happened in our early 40’s. Now I attend every week but that started in My 50’s. This timeframe also coincided with the death of my father in law and decline of our other parents, as well as a layoff at work.
Your data may have something to do with the increase in average age of first child (and the increase in Young Americans choosing not to have children at all, which is where our 25 year old daughter is at so far).
It would be interesting to compare, for the same period, what the curves look like for those in the mid life segments *above* 35. Did you look at that for comparison?
How does Jewish religious attendance compare during the same overall time period?
In the 1991 General Social Survey, there were a total of 18 Jews who were between the ages of 18 and 35.
It would be statistically problematic to report on this subgroup.
Heroes post Null results.
*Takes a bow*....I guess.
I remember the 80s as being the age of the televangelist. My grandma, for example, was glued to the local Christian TV station, but I can't remember her ever attending church. I wonder if, like streaming services, it helped a certain number of (generally older) people feel plugged into church, but their kids and grandkids never saw the point.
Following up Katja's point, I wonder if there is an influence of the televangelist era of the '80s, with all its scandals, followed up with the early '90s being when political right Christianity really started to make a wider public impact. Pat Buchanan got some notice running for the Republican nomination in 1992, and made a memorably divisive "culture wars" speech at the Republican National Convention. Ralph Reed and the Christian Coalition were prominent in the early '90s. Along with several other factors, I imagine this ascendancy of politicized Christian conservatism began to give a chuck of young Americans additional impetus to pull back from Christian/religious identification.
This is interesting. Question for Ryan though: did this 90s inflection point hit the sexes differently?
You could argue that at least partly what we're seeing is a "rebellion against the moral busybodies" effect. The 1990s came after the Satanic panic and Dana Carvey's iconic "Church Lady" character that lampooned the sort of moral busybody that we imagine being responsible for why demons couldn't be called demons in AD&D.
We can imagine this effect also explaining why young men, in particular, rebelled against the Democrats this election, with a figure like Titania McGrath standing in for Carvey's "Church Lady" as the archetypal moral busybody of the hour.
Noteworthy also in both cases that the moral busybody is a female character played by a man. This is what makes me think this effect would probably be gendered, with young men responding more harshly to busybodies (perceived as disproportionately female) than young women do.
Though in the 1990s case, it's possible that figures like Falwell, etc. that Ryan brought up in his article might be more offensive to young women. So maybe it balanced out in that case, unlike the contemporary case where the culture war has a more distinct male vs. female flavor to it, especially among the young and unmarried.
That gender question is interesting.
https://i.imgur.com/fyZ2Nfx.png
Men, Christian
1991: 86%
1998: 68%
Down 18
Men, None
1991: 10%
1998: 25%
Up 18
Women, Christian
1991: 88%
1998: 77%
Down 10
Women, None
1991: 7%
1998: 17%
Up 10
How much of the decline, for example with the mainline churches, is due to a low birthrate? A decade ago or more when I was on the church council for an ELCA church, a report (from the denomination as best as I can remember) pointed out that a good percentage of the decline in attendance was members having smaller families. Most of you members come from growing up in the faith, and from that pool there is a natural attrition of those who leave. If the pool gets smaller from families only having 1 or 2 children, there will be an inevitable decline.
Yes, I recall reading a paper that showed that the evangelical gains vs. the Mainline in the 20th century were driven primarily by differential fertility, NOT different rates of conversion or apostasy. Which to me was really surprising and I still question if there's a flaw in that analysis. It doesn't align at all with my life experience, which is there are WAY more conversions to evangelical from other traditions than the reverse, and while apostasy is very common all around, it's most common among those who grew up Mainline.
Though the data in that paper only ran through 2000 IIRC, and maybe that partly explains it: I was still in high school in that year, my experiences of watching people convert and apostatize are almost entirely from the 21st century.
I have no idea what that paper was called, though I'm pretty confident it was an academic paper and not produced by a denomination. Maybe ELCA found the same results with a separate study, or maybe it linked to that paper.
If you find it I'd love to read it.
I think it's probably this:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0049089X18302722
That wasn't it, but that still looks to be worth a look.
Pretty sure it's this one (this is a magazine article referencing the actual paper):
https://www.christiancentury.org/article/2005-10/birth-dearth
Though looking at it again, maybe I took away the wrong message. Evangelicals still had a notable advantage in retention according to them, it's just that the fertility effect was larger.