Map shows US states where religion is disappearing fastest             1

Religious service attendance across the U.S. is dropping                  4

Churches close their doors as fewer Americans attend                      5

THE MISUNDERSTOOD REASON MILLIONS OF AMERICANS   

STOPPED GOING TO CHURCH                                                               8

Where Did the Religious Nuttery Come From?                                    13

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Newsweek

Map shows US states where religion is disappearing fastest

There has been a "long period of sustained growth" in religiously unaffiliated people in America.

By Jordan King.   Published March 12, 2025

The proportion of non-religious people in America is growing in every U.S. state except South Dakota, new research suggests.

Newsweek's map, below, shows where the change is happening, comparing the oldest available data—from 2007 or in some cases 2014—from Pew's Religious Landscape Study and its most recent, from 2023-24, which surveyed more than 35,000 Americans in all 50 states.

These identifying as "religiously unaffiliated"—atheists, agnostics or as "nothing in particular"—accounted for 29 percent of the national population in 2024's survey. That represents a 13 percent increase from 2007.

Why It Matters

There has been a "long period of sustained growth" in religiously unaffiliated adults, the center's researchers said.

The U.S. is a historically Christian country in which the majority of people (62 percent) call themselves Christians—down from 78 percent in 2007, but researchers said the national decline shows signs of slowing; however "we can't know for sure whether these short-term signs of stabilization will prove to be a lasting change in the country's religious trajectory," co-author Gregory Smith said.

Pew found a huge age gap, with young adults overwhelmingly less religious than their elders—some 46 percent of the youngest Americans identify as Christian, compared to 80 percent of the oldest adults.

"These kinds of generational differences are a big part of what's driven the long-term declines in American religion," Smith said. "As older cohorts of highly religious, older people have passed away, they have been replaced by new cohorts of young adults who are less religious than their parents and grandparents."

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What To Know

Pew's 2024 survey suggested New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Utah, Wisconsin, Missouri, Montana and Pennsylvania had the largest growth in the proportion of people who identified as "religiously unaffiliated" since the 2007 study.

In the most recent study, 48 percent of New Hampshire respondents said they were not affiliated with organized religion—up from 27 percent in 2007.

Massachusetts rose from 17 percent in 2007 to 37 percent in 2024—a 20 percent jump— while Utah and Wisconsin increased from 16 percent to 34 percent—an 18 percent rise.

There was a 17 percent rise in Missouri (16 percent to 33) Montana (from 22 percent to 39) and Pennsylvania (from 13 percent to 30).

There is no data from 2007 for Alaska, Delaware, Hawaii, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming because the sample sizes from that year were not significant enough, a Pew Research Center spokesperson said. For these states Newsweek's map compares the 2024 results to 2014, the latest available.

Using only data for 2007-2024 comparison, the following places had the smallest proportional increase in religiously unaffiliated people: Nebraska and Arkansas (5 percent), South Carolina (6 percent), and New Mexico and Connecticut (9 percent). The overall study disclaims a margin of sampling error of 0.8 percentage points in general and 1.4 percentage points for religiously unaffiliated people.

Pew Research Center also stressed to Newsweek that these margins of sampling error are "much larger" at state level and have been different for each year, meaning "small differences are not statistically significant." For example, New Hampshire has a margin of error of 8 percentage points in the 2023-2024 study and 7.9 percentage points in 2007.

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What People Are Saying

Michele Margolis, a University of Pennsylvania political scientist, who has studied religious changes, told The Associated Press that while young adults often move away from religion, it is "more likely to become important when you get married and have kids."

Co-author Patricia Tevington told Newsweek: "Our data only go back to 2007, but other data sources show that the share of Americans who are not affiliated with a religion has been increasing for several decades and has been well underway since at least the 1990s."

What Happens Next

While the proportion of religiously unaffiliated adults has "plateaued in recent years after a long period of sustained growth," Smith said, "something would need to change" to stop the long-term decline of religion in America.

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Axils

Religious service attendance across the U.S. is dropping

Alex Fitzpatrick, Alice Feng • MAR 27, 2024

Vermont (75%), New Hampshire (66%) and Maine (66%) have the highest share of adults who say they never or seldom attend church or religious services, compared to the national average of 49%, per a new Axios analysis of Household Pulse Survey data.

Why it matters: More than three-quarters of Americans say religion's role in public life is shrinking, per a recent Pew Research Center survey — the highest level since the group first started tracking such sentiment in 2001.

Many Americans are unhappy about that, with about half of adults telling Pew both that "religion is losing influence and that this is a bad thing."

About 57% of adults say that religion has a positive impact on American life, per Pew.

The other side: Mississippi (32%), Alabama (36%) and Louisiana (37%) have the lowest share of adults who say they never or seldom attend services.

Friction point: Nearly half of U.S. adults say they feel at least "some" tension between their religious beliefs and mainstream culture, Pew found.

That's up from 42% in 2020.

Zoom in: A separate Gallup survey published this week found that Latter-day Saints are the only religious group wherein a majority say they attend services weekly, at 54%.

30% of Protestants say they attend services weekly, compared to 28% of Muslims, 23% of Catholics and 16% of Jews.

Yes, but: Religious service attendance has been dropping for decades, per Gallup, driven largely by "the increase in the percentage of Americans with no religious affiliation."

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ABC News

Churches close their doors as fewer Americans attend

Houses of worship around the country are adopting varying strategies to survive.

By Steve Osunsami, Sean Keane     Dec 28, 2024, 12:18 PM EST

During the final Mass at the All Saints Parish in Buffalo, New York, on a warm Sunday in July, the priests encouraged the few parishioners who came to take comfort in holy scripture.

"For everything, there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven," the passage read.

On Earth, many parishes are accepting that it's time to sell their properties. As the person leading renewal and development for the Diocese of Buffalo, Father Bryan Zielenieski is one of many religious leaders across America who have closed houses of worship in recent years.

"We essentially went to half of what we used to back in the early 2000s," he told ABC News. "We lost about 100 parishes."

Zielenieski expects he'll need to shut down another 70 churches in what the Diocese is calling its "road to renewal." It's a very biblical name for the challenge facing churches: People just aren't going as much as they used to.

On average, more than half of the diocese's churches today are baptizing fewer than one person a month, and 59% of them are spending more than they take in, Zielenieski noted.

"It's my job and role to not just pray about the situation, but to then look at the hard data and say, where does the church need to move?" he told ABC News.

In the late 1940s, nearly 80% of Americans said they belonged to a church, synagogue, mosque or temple, according to Gallup. Today, just 45% say the same, the analytics company noted, and only 32% say that they worship God in a house of prayer once a week.

In 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic, America was losing as many as 1,000 churches a year.

Some former churches are being converted for businesses or residential use. One old Methodist church in Atlanta, which was down to about 60 members when it closed, was sold to a luxury real estate developer seven years ago. Now, it's become a series of 3,000-square-foot condos.

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Some of the oldest churches in the world have even turned into bars and nightclubs.

However, another Atlanta church is taking a different route. Pastor Jasmine Smothers is saving the city's First United Methodist church from closing with what she says is a "God-sized" plan.

The most profitable thing they own is their land, and she's using it to build more than 300 apartments in the high-rent city -- most of which will become affordable housing.

"It's literally going to change the landscape of Atlanta in more ways than one," she told ABC News.

Smothers said the project will give the church the resources to help people and to continue its ministries.

"In the words of one of my friends, this ain't your great grandma's church," she said.

At Calcium Church outside Syracuse, New York, Pastor Milton LaSalle recently acknowledged to his small-town church that, after 171 years, they're in financial trouble. On a good Sunday, LaSalle has 35 regular members -- most of them are in the sunset of their lives. The church hasn't been forced to close or sell its land, the pastor says.

"The aging of the church here, of course, is seen all over America. That makes it harder in a lot of ways. For instance, we lost five of our members last year to death," he told ABC News.

LaSalle said he's confident Calcium Church will be able to stay open, but noted that they've had to make cutbacks.

They still hold clothing and school supply giveaways, parishioners told ABC News. Parishioner Jeannetta LaSalle expressed the importance of the church in her life, saying that her fellow churchgoers are like family.

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"It gives me purpose to get up in the morning," she told ABC News.

In Buffalo, Father Zielenieski also noted how people turn to the church for comfort in times of crisis, like in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

"There's a sociological principle or idea out there that when times are good, people forget God," he said. "When times are challenging, they go to God first."

However, Zielenieski highlights the danger of taking the church for granted.

"We've never asked the question, how is it going to be there and how is that going to stay?" he said.

The sale of the All Saints Church in Buffalo will close in the coming weeks. The priests told ABC News they have language in the deal that prevents the new owners from turning it into a place that encourages people to sin.

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The Atlantic

THE MISUNDERSTOOD REASON MILLIONS OF AMERICANS STOPPED GOING TO CHURCH

The defining problem driving people out is ... just how American life works in the 21st century.

By Jake Meador. JULY 29, 2023

Nearly everyone I grew up with in my childhood church in Lincoln, Nebraska, is no longer Christian. That’s not unusual. Forty million Americans have stopped attending church in the past 25 years. That’s something like 12 percent of the population, and it represents the largest concentrated change in church attendance in American history. As a Christian, I feel this shift acutely. My wife and I wonder whether the institutions and communities that have helped preserve us in our own faith will still exist for our four children, let alone whatever grandkids we might one day have.

This change is also bad news for America as a whole: Participation in a religious community generally correlates with better health outcomes and longer life, higher financial generosity, and more stable families—all of which are desperately needed in a nation with rising rates of loneliness, mental illness, and alcohol and drug dependency.

A new book, written by Jim Davis, a pastor at an evangelical church in Orlando, and Michael Graham, a writer with the Gospel Coalition, draws on surveys of more than 7,000 Americans by the political scientists Ryan Burge and Paul Djupe, attempting to explain why people have left churches—or “dechurched,” in the book’s lingo—and what, if anything, can be done to get some people to come back. The book raises an intriguing possibility: What if the problem isn’t that churches are asking too much of their members, but that they aren’t asking nearly enough?

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The Great Dechurching finds that religious abuse and more general moral corruption in churches have driven people away. This is, of course, an indictment of the failures of many leaders who did not address abuse in their church. But Davis and Graham also find that a much larger share of those who have left church have done so for more banal reasons. The book suggests that the defining problem driving out most people who leave is … just how American life works in the 21st century. Contemporary America simply isn’t set up to promote mutuality, care, or common life. Rather, it is designed to maximize individual accomplishment as defined by professional and financial success. Such a system leaves precious little time or energy for forms of community that don’t contribute to one’s own professional life or, as one ages, the professional prospects of one’s children. Workism reigns in America, and because of it, community in America, religious community included, is a math problem that doesn’t add up.

Numerous victims of abuse in church environments can identify a moment when they lost the ability to believe, when they almost felt their faith draining out of them. The book shows, though, that for most Americans who were once a part of churches but have since left, the process of leaving was gradual, and in many cases they didn’t realize it was even happening until it already had. It’s less like jumping off a cliff and more like driving down a slope, eventually realizing that you can no longer see the place you started from.

Consider one of the composite characters that Graham and Davis use in the book to describe a typical evangelical dechurcher: a 30-something woman who grew up in a suburban megachurch, was heavily invested in a campus ministry while in college, then after graduating moved into a full-time job and began attending a young-adults group in a local church. In her 20s, she meets a guy who is less religiously engaged, they get married, and, at some point early in their marriage, after their first or second child is born, they stop going to church. Maybe the baby isn’t sleeping well and when Sunday morning comes around, it is simply easier to stay home and catch whatever sleep is available as the baby (finally) falls asleep.

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In other cases, a person might be entering mid-career, working a high-stress job requiring a 60- or 70-hour workweek. Add to that 15 hours of commute time, and suddenly something like two-thirds of their waking hours in the week are already accounted for. And so when a friend invites them to a Sunday-morning brunch, they probably want to go to church, but they also want to see that friend, because they haven’t been able to see them for months. The friend wins out.

After a few weeks of either scenario, the thought of going to church on Sunday carries a certain mental burden with it—you might want to go, but you also dread the inevitable questions about where you have been. “I skipped church to go to brunch with a friend” or “I was just too tired to come” don’t sound like convincing excuses as you rehearse the conversation in your mind. Soon it actually sounds like it’d be harder to attend than to skip, even if some part of you still wants to go. The underlying challenge for many is that their lives are stretched like a rubber band about to snap—and church attendance ends up feeling like an item on a checklist that’s already too long.

What can churches do in such a context? In theory, the Christian Church could be an antidote to all that. What is more needed in our time than a community marked by sincere love, sharing what they have from each according to their ability and to each according to their need, eating together regularly, generously serving neighbors, and living lives of quiet virtue and prayer? A healthy church can be a safety net in the harsh American economy by offering its members material assistance in times of need: meals after a baby is born, money for rent after a layoff. Perhaps more important, it reminds people that their identity is not in their job or how much money they make; they are children of God, loved and protected and infinitely valuable.

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But a vibrant, life-giving church requires more, not less, time and energy from its members. It asks people to prioritize one another over our career, to prioritize prayer and time reading scripture over accomplishment. This may seem like a tough sell in an era of dechurching. If people are already leaving—especially if they are leaving because they feel too busy and burned out to attend church regularly—why would they want to be part of a church that asks so much of them?

Although understandable, that isn’t quite the right question. The problem in front of us is not that we have a healthy, sustainable society that doesn’t have room for church. The problem is that many Americans have adopted a way of life that has left us lonely, anxious, and uncertain of how to live in community with other people.

The tragedy of American churches is that they have been so caught up in this same world that we now find they have nothing to offer these suffering people that can’t be more easily found somewhere else. American churches have too often been content to function as a kind of vaguely spiritual NGO, an organization of detached individuals who meet together for religious services that inspire them, provide practical life advice, or offer positive emotional experiences. Too often it has not been a community that through its preaching and living bears witness to another way to live.

The theologian Stanley Hauerwas captured the problem well when he said that “pastoral care has become obsessed with the personal wounds of people in advanced industrial societies who have discovered that their lives lack meaning.” The difficulty is that many of the wounds and aches provoked by our current order aren’t of a sort that can be managed or life-hacked away. They are resolved only by changing one’s life, by becoming a radically different sort of person belonging to a radically different sort of community.

Last fall, I spent several days in New York City, during which time I visited a home owned by a group of pacifist Christians that lives from a common purse—meaning the members do not have privately held property but share their property and money. Their simple life and shared finances allow their schedules to be more flexible, making for a thicker immediate community and greater generosity to neighbors, as well as a richer life of prayer and private devotion to God, all supported by a deep commitment to their church.

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This is, admittedly, an extreme example. But this community was thriving not because it found ways to scale down what it asked of its members but because it found a way to scale up what they provided to one another. Their way of living frees them from the treadmill of workism. Work, in this community, is judged not by the money it generates but by the people it serves. In a workist culture that believes dignity is grounded in accomplishment, simply reclaiming this alternative form of dignity becomes a radical act.

In the Gospels, Jesus tells his first disciples to leave their old way of life behind, going so far as abandoning their plow or fishing nets where they are and, if necessary, even leaving behind their parents. A church that doesn’t expect at least this much from one another isn’t really a church in the way Jesus spoke about it. If Graham and Davis are right, it also is likely a church that won’t survive the challenges facing us today.

The great dechurching could be the beginning of a new moment for churches, a moment marked less by aspiration to respectability and success, with less focus on individuals aligning themselves with American values and assumptions. We could be a witness to another way of life outside conventionally American measures of success. Churches could model better, truer sorts of communities, ones in which the hungry are fed, the weak are lifted up, and the proud are cast down. Such communities might not have the money, success, and influence that many American churches have so often pursued in recent years. But if such communities look less like those churches, they might also look more like the sorts of communities Jesus expected his followers to create.

Jake Meador is the editor in chief of Mere Orthodoxy. He is the author of What Are Christians For?: Life Together at the End of the World.

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Where Did the Religious Nuttery Come From?

Jul 11, 2022 9:57am EDT by thomhartmann, 

Minneapolis residents Jess and John Pentz — a couple who’ve been married for 17 years — were traveling through Hayward, Wisconsin over the 4th of July weekend when Jess realized she’d forgotten to bring her birth control pills.They pulled into the local Hayward Walgreens pharmacy, where Jess picked up a box of condoms from a shelf and handed them to the clerk manning the register.“Manning” seems to be the right verb here: “John,” the Walgreens clerk, refused to ring them up.Jess, confused, asked him why, pointing to the shelf where she’d picked up the condoms.“We can sell that to you,” clerk “John” told Jess with a smirk, “but I won’t because of my faith.”We went to Hayward to get some groceries and a stop at @Walgreens because we had left Jess birth control at home. As Jess was checking out, cashier John told her he couldn’t sell her the condoms. “Oh I got them from over there.” “We can, but I won’t because of my faith.” 

There’s no law in America against being an ass, so this Walgreens clerk was within his rights to behave like one. But, because of five Republicans on the Supreme Court, it now is problematic — and soon could be against the law nationwide, if Clarence Thomas gets his way — for Walgreens to fire him for “exercising his faith” when working in a drugstore.

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The vast majority of Americans, opinion research shows, think a situation like this is absurd. As Jennifer Brooks notes in an article about the Pentz’s experience for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune:“When the Pew Research Center surveyed American attitudes about birth control, just 4% viewed contraception as morally wrong. Condoms protect us from disease and prevent unwanted pregnancies. What's not to like?”And what’s so astonishing about the entire situation is that we have reached this point not because the American public wants religious doctrine running our law, and not because most religious people agree with an arrogant prick working at Walgreens.Instead, it’s because a small group of rightwing billionaires didn’t want to pay their taxes, wanted to get rid of their unions, and didn’t want regulation of the pollution from their refineries and other operations.  

Seriously.  They put billions of dollars over five decades into a project to seize control of the legislatures of a majority of the states, jam up the US Congress, and pack the Supreme Court — and it was all about taxes, unions, and regulation.

So where did the religious nuttery come from?

The rightwing billionaires and the corporations and foundations aligned with them knew back in 1971 — when Lewis Powell laid out their strategy in his infamous Powell Memo the year before Nixon put him on the Supreme Court — that most Americans wouldn’t happily vote to lower billionaires’ taxes, end unions and regulation of gun manufacturers, or increase the amount of refinery poisons in our air.

So the strategy they came up with to capture control of our government was pretty straightforward:

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*Convince Americans that taxes aren’t “the cost of a civil society” but, instead, a “burden” that they were unfairly bearing. Once Republicans were elected on that tax-cut platform, they’d massively cut the taxes of the morbidly rich while throwing a small bone to the average person.

*Convince Americans that regulations that protect consumers and the environment are also “burdens” from an out-of-control “nanny state,” even though such regulations save lives and benefit Americans far more than they cost.

*Convince Americans that unions aren’t “democracy in the workplace” that protect workers’ rights but, instead, an elaborate scam to raid workers’ paychecks to the benefit of “corrupt union bosses.”

To pull these off, they spent five decades and billions of dollars to subsidize think tanks and policy groups at both the federal and state level; there’s now an extensive network of them reaching from coast-to-coast, all turning out policy papers and press releases the way bunnies have babies.

But it wasn’t quite enough to get the political power they needed.

They sponsored rightwing talk radio to the tune of millions of dollars a year (just Limbaugh and Hannity’s shows got over a million a year each) and Australian billionaire Rupert Murdoch rolled out Fox “News” to compliment the propaganda campaign. Later would come social media bots and trolls, along with thousands of new websites pretending to be local newspapers.

Still, that wasn’t quite enough to get them the political power they needed.

They hooked up with the NRA, which helped sponsor the Reagan Revolution and was richly rewarded with laws that forbade the federal government from compiling gun death statistics and gave complete immunity from lawsuits to weapons manufacturers and sellers for the damage their products cause (the only industry in America that enjoys such immunity).

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And they finally got a lot of Americans to go along with their plan, because they’d added in a religious “secret sauce.” More on that in a moment.

The Reagan presidency was their first major victory; in eight short years he cut union membership in America almost in half, dropped the taxes on billionaires from a top 74% bracket down to 27%, and slashed thousands of protective regulations, particularly around guns and the environment.

Over the 40 years of the Reagan revolution, we’ve gone from having about the same gun-ownership density as Canada (around 15 guns per 100 people) to the most in the world (over 120 guns per 100 people). We’re now drenched in blood: guns kill more American children than drunk drivers or any other cause.

But hating on unions, taxes, and the environment — and loving on guns — wasn’t enough to reliably win elections over the long run. They needed a larger bullhorn, a way of reaching into the lives of additional tens of millions of American voters who really didn’t much care about those issues.

That’s where Jerry Falwell and his friends came into the picture.

Falwell was an inveterate grifter, hustling Jesus to build a multi-million-dollar empire while ignoring Jesus’ teachings about humility, poverty, and the need to care for others. A new, muscular Jesus — a Jesus who endorsed assault weapons and private jets for preachers — came to dominate much of America’s protestant Christianity.

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This Jesus wanted you to get rich — riches, they said, are a sign of God’s blessing — and the “prosperity gospel” and all its perverted cousins were being preached on TV and in megachurches across the nation throughout the 1980s.

Reagan brought his vice president’s son — a young drunk named George W. Bush who got sober with Jesus’ help (and a threat from his parents and wife) — and Bush forged an alliance between the Reagan campaign and the then-emerging phenomenon of Falwell/Bakker/Graham/Robertson televangelists.

The televangelists became multimillionaires, churches openly defied IRS regulations and preached politics from the pulpit, and millions of mostly non-political church-goers were suddenly evangelists not just for Jesus but also for the Republican Party.

As a sop to them, Reagan (who’d signed the nation’s most liberal abortion legislation as CA Governor) became “pro-life” as did his VP, GHW Bush, who — along with his wife, Barbara — had previously been big supporters of Planned Parenthood.

With this dramatically expanded base of voters, Republican politicians went on a 40-year spree of cutting taxes, deregulating polluting industries, hustling guns, and busting unions.

To keep the rubes coming to the churches where they’d hear that GOP message, Republicans on the Supreme Court had to throw them the occasional bone. Giving bakers the right to tell gay people wanting a wedding cake to screw off was one of them, setting up the “religious right” of pharmacists to refuse to sell condoms.

Churches kept getting richer and Republicans kept getting elected, but most people didn’t realize the symbiosis at work.

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At first, these seemed problematic to many Americans, but, like Pastor Niemöller, it only affected a small minority of us and typically did so in ways that weren’t particularly public. Everybody figured it was somebody else’s problem, and the people being hurt were mostly marginalized minorities.

Now that the Supreme Court has struck down Roe v Wade, however, people are waking up to this unholy alliance between religious grifters in the White Evangelical movement, the Supreme Court, and the GOP.

Half the population is now in their crosshairs.

It’s no longer just a matter of that $50 trillion transfer of wealth from middle America to the top 1% through changes in tax law, or a few hundred thousand children downstream of coal mines getting permanent neurological damage, or workers thinking that maybe they’d have better wages and benefits if they had a union.

Now America is seeing clearly what the Republican coalition has brought us, from mass shootings to medical bankruptcies to student debt to homelessness.

Literally none of these things were major societal problems the year Reagan was elected; all are the direct result of Republican policies, and all were made possible, in part, by this unholy alliance of church and state that our nation’s Founders warned us against.

And now they’re coming for your birth control.

Will enough Americans finally wake up to this 40-year grift to put an end to it and return our country to sanity?

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