“If the concept of God has any validity or any use,” James Baldwin wrote in “The Fire Next Time,” “it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.”
For the past few decades, many feared that the marked rise of those who were leaving institutional religion were doing just that: Getting rid of God, in their lives at any rate.
But recent Pew Research findings suggest that the decadeslong decline in American Christianity may be stabilizing, leaving religion sociologists like me to ask, “Why would the rate of religious disaffiliation suddenly slow after years of steady increase?”
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