Counting the faithful
The Pew Research data showing a sharp decline in the nation’s Christian population—from 78 percent to 70 percent in seven years—might be interpreted as one more sign of the collapse of Christendom. Occasional church attenders and nominal believers no longer feel obliged to tell pollsters that they are Methodist or Presbyterian. In that reading, the survey numbers don’t directly touch the everyday realities of church life.
What does directly touch church life are Pew’s numbers on generational change. Attachment to religion is declining across all age groups, but the rise of the nones is most pronounced among younger cohorts: the younger the age bracket, the less likely people are to belong to any Christian (or other religious) body. And of all Christian groups, mainline Protestants do the worst job at reaching and retaining younger generations.
One practical lesson of the Pew report, then, is on the crucial need for mainliners to focus on passing the faith on to the next generation. Mainliners may need to borrow some of the ethos of evangelical Protestants (who seem to do a better job at this) in equipping families to be primary incubators of faith and in forming identities that are distinct and (in some selective ways) more oppositional toward the culture than they have been.
