What do you know? A new survey upholds exactly what I’ve said for years: The “cultural Christians” are leaving church altogether, and the loonies are increasingly concentrated in backward-looking redoubts.
Of those who said they had attended a house of worship in September, 14 percent reported that they had left that particular church by mid-November. That’s a proportion in line with several of our previous estimates from surveys in the 2000s. In the 2016 election, “leavers” were distributed across the religious population, and included 10 percent of evangelicals, 18 percent of mainline Protestants, and 11 percent of Catholics. This represents an enormous amount of churn in the religious economy.
The influence of the churches will continue to decline because their storyline is untrue, their ethics are cult-like and affirmatively harmful — and they no longer have the political and social power to compel at least the pretense of belief and regard. That is why they are an engine of so much turmoil; they want that power back.