The Overstated Decline of American Christianity

The new Pew survey on religious affiliation in America, released and much discussed around the internet yesterday, paints a portrait of institutional Christianity in retreat, and the continuing rise of what we call the â??nonesâ? â?? people attached to no organized religion â?? as a major constituency in American life. The pace of both trends is striking: As Notre Dameâ??s David Campbell, quoted in this Daily Caller piece, points out, given how quickly the non-affiliated population rose in the late 1990s and early 2000s you might have expected a slowing or a leveling off, but instead the trendline is still steep, from 16 percent â??noneâ? in 2007 to 23 percent today (and about 35 percent â??noneâ? among Millennials). Meanwhile identification with every major branch of Christianity is down in percentage terms, and only evangelical Christianity is seeing its absolute numbers still increase; the black Protestant churches are holding steady, but in Pewâ??s numbers Catholicism seems to have joined the Protestant Mainline in a kind of demographic freefall.