U.S. Church Membership Falls Below Majority for First Time | Hacker News Reader

U.S. Church Membership Falls Below Majority for First Time

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108 pointspseudolus26 comments

better thread here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26620892

It wouldn’t shock me if the recent drop was pandemic related, but “70% in 1999” really puts into context what a big social shift we’re living in.

In the graph you can see a 3% drop in the last year or two alone. And the fallout from covid probably hasn't reached membership rolls yet. Culture shift aside, we will likely see a big drop this year as well, since faith needs to be cultivated, and relies heavily on community.

I'm personally holding out for a resurgence, as people see how morally bankrupt our culture has become (e.g., the Emmys viewership dropped almost 50% this year), and how uninterested our elite are in doing anything substantial for the econimic underclass, aside from manipulate them for their own political ends.

I've often considered joining a church for fellowship, social opportunities, and networking but I'm an atheist and I just can't bring myself to do it. It's such a shame that the community around faith does not apply to people without it.

Participation in church-like, non religious organisations used to be more common.

That's kind of what freemasons, lions club, rotary and such are/were kind of like that. Social clubs. Unions sometimes played that kind of a role. Union meetings, barbeques, bars. Even personal identities tied into union memberships. A lot of organisations with names like "X society of Y" were actually "societies" at one point.

We are just far less affiliated than we used to be. Less church membership, probably less gang membership, social club affiliation, etc.

Some propose that those kind of clubs exist because of Christianity.

Paul told people to treat their wives like they were the Church, which lead to the end of tribes, the replacement of those large social/family groups with a more varied interest based group structure, which lead to more intermixing of ideas, the industrial revolution, and Western thought processes.

You might consider the Unitarian Universalists. They welcome everybody, including atheists, and they're pretty good people. I mean, people are people everywhere, but I don't think you'll find the same kind of problems that you find with other faith groups.

You might consider checking out Sunday Assembly[1].

[1] https://sundayassembly.online/about-sunday-assembly/

Membership vs. attendance, though, unless I'm reading the title too literally.

I think another great data point to give clarity would be college degrees. 1999 is basically the start of millennial generation college attendance. Millennials are between 30-40 years old now and are the largest generation with the highest education ever in the history of the world (I believe China might be beating this record soon, if not already). Lots of correlations between level of education and lack of religion.

I wonder what this correlation looked like 150 years ago, when most colleges were religious too (including the Ivy League). Did the educated end up more religious? More likely to attend church?

If so, that’d add credence to the argument that it’s not education itself that makes modern day students more liberal, it’s the educational environment that does it.

this is insightful.

there is an anti-Christian slant in the education world.

I'm surprised that 1999 number is so high. Anecdotally, when I think back to living in the 90's the majority of my friends and their families did not attend church. I would say maybe only a third actually attended church on a regular or semi-regular basis. I'm not including the Christmas and Easter crowd but maybe this 70% number is?

I think it has to do more with religious organisations interfering with politics and therefore influencing people's lifes.

IMO as soon as a religious organisation get's involved into politics it should lose it's tax exemptions and be treated the same way as any other lobby organisation.

I’m amazed it is even 47%. That’s crazy. I don’t know anyone my age that goes to church regularly. I guess there are tons of old people that do so.

Whereas I know very few people my age who do not. It depends on your social circles more than your age if my anecdata says anything about it at all.

Pretty much this. If you don't go to church, it is much more likely your friends don't either.

Check out https://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/attendanc... for a way more detailed, albeit older, survey.

Age doesn't really factor into it. Millennials, Gen X, and Boomers all attend church evenly-ish. There's some variation but nothing like "young people are leaving churches in droves." What's more likely is that you've semi-purposely gravitated toward a non-religious group of friends.

It's not even really a party/tribe thing either which is already known to create interpersonal bubbles. Red tribe attends church on average more than blue tribe but not at such a significant difference that it would explain people finding themselves with no religious friends.

>I’m amazed it is even 47%. That’s crazy. I don’t know anyone my age that goes to church regularly. I guess there are tons of old people that do so.

This varies considerably by region. In the south there are loads of these new "hip" mega churches with young pastors that appeal to the millennial crowd. I'd say the percentage of younger/middle age people that still identify as religious is somewhere around 50% here.

probably some people are members but do not attend frequently

It's these kinds of subtleties that make polls/census data on this hard to interpret? Has attendance declined? Adherence? Donations?

They might just be measuring an evolution in what "member" means to respondents.

I live in Ireland. Huge secularization over the last generation. I think it would be hard to narrate that story with church membership and/or census data alone. Even church attendance doesn't always mean what you think it means. It might not imply membership, beliefs or even census reported identity.

IMO, the more interesting questions relate to what the churches preach, and how that evolves over time.

When the baby boomers are gone the percentage will drop tremendously. I only know of one or two people below the age of 40 that practice religion regularly. Definitely curious to see what the headline will read 30 years from now.

It looks like the U.S. is running along a similar trend to the U.K. (and I'd guess many other countries, but I'm from the U.K.).

Church attendance falls, followed by membership, followed by people considering themselves "religious".

One of the tricky things in the UK over the last 3 censuses has been accurately capturing this, so that government funding and policy can be best targeted. People think "I celebrate Christmas so I'm a Christian", while never attending church, not identifying with any particular type of Christianity, not being able to talk about the content of the Bible even in a very general sense, and only generally thinking that there's probably some sort of god or something, and hopefully an afterlife.

This was so ingrained that the British Humanist Association (I believe humanism in the US is very different, here it's a secular belief system) had a big campaign during the previous census (2011) titled "If you're not religious, for God's sake say so!".

Despite not going to church or really taking part in any organised religion, people really don't want to be non-religious. I think we could better recognise this sort of generic "spiritualism".

Beware of metrics. Religiosity is really hard to quantify.

I think covering this well needs multiple angles. Which churches/religions/denominations? What regions? Are churches there empty?

Is there a financial angle to this? If membership is declining, have revenues declined?

On its own "declining membership" doesn't necessarily mean something outside of poll data.

Thank God

Hopefully the return to normal will lead to a speedy rebound. It would be a shame to lose the greatness of organized religion over a temporary pandemic.

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