‘The Great Dechurching’ explores America’s religious exodus

Jim Davis and Michael Graham knew something was up in their hometown of Orlando, Florida.

But they couldn’t put their finger on it.

At the time, both were pastors at Orlando Grace Church, an evangelical congregation, and saw a study showing their community had the same percentage of evangelicals as less traditionally Christian cities like New York and Seattle. Their city also ranked low on a list of “Bible-minded cities” — with a profile more akin to cities with secular reputations than Bible Belt communities like Nashville, Tennessee, or Birmingham, Alabama.

Which didn’t make any sense to them.

He and Graham knew of a number of people who had stopped going to church, and the two pastors started wondering how common that was. They began looking for data, and while there were studies of the so-called nones — those who do not identify with any faith group — there were few about churchgoing habits.

Eventually, they decided to do one of their own.

With the help of friends, they raised about $100,000 and enlisted the help of two political scientists who survey religious trends in the U.S. — Ryan Burge at Eastern Illinois University and Paul Djupe of Denison University — to create what they think is the largest ever study of folks who stopped going to church.

That study, combined with other data about America’s changing religious landscape, led them to a sobering conclusion.

“More people have left the church in the last twenty-five years than all the new people who became Christians from the First Great Awakening, Second Great Awakening, and Billy Graham crusades combined,” Davis and Graham write in their new book, “The Great Dechurching : Who’s Leaving, Why Are They Going, and What Will It Take to Bring Them Back?”

The book and the study that prompted it were driven by both curiosity and stubbornness.

The book appears to have struck a nerve with both church leaders and the broader public. Data from the book was featured in a series of New York Times columns about the changing religious landscape and what it might mean for American culture. 

Burge said the book’s surveys build on previous studies of the nones as well as studies showing the decline of congregational life in the United States. The 2020 Faith Communities Today study, for example, found the median congregation in the United States stood at 65 people, down from 137 two decades ago.

“For a long time, the church declined and no one really cared,” said Burge. “And now people are seeing the decline and saying, ‘Wow, this is really becoming a problem now.’ We have reached an inflection point where people are talking about religion in a more thoughtful, nuanced, statistically driven way.”

Religion News' Bob Smietana, in an article published on September 7, points out that Davis and Graham offer plenty of data to back up their "dechurching" argument. And they used research conducted by Eastern Illinois University's Ryan Burge and Denison University's Paul Djupe.

Smietana explains, "The dechurching study eventually yielded profiles of different kinds of dechurched Americans: 'cultural Christians,' who attended church in the past but had little knowledge about the Christian faith; 'mainstream evangelicals,' a group of mostly younger dropouts; 'exvangelicals,' an older group who had often been harmed by churches and other Christian institutions; 'dechurched BIPOC Americans,' who were overwhelmingly Black and male; and 'dechurched Mainline Protestants and Catholics,' who had much in common despite their theological differences."

In polls conducted in 2015 and 2022, the Barna Group asked respondents how much they agreed or disagreed with the following statement: "It is becoming harder to find mature young Christians who want to become pastors."

Blogger Hemant Mehta analyzes these figures in a column published on his Friendly Atheist blog on September 8. And he cites far-right Christian nationalism and the MAGA movement as key reasons why so many young Americans have no desire to become pastors.

"It doesn't help that the most pressing social issues of our time put conservative Christians on the wrong side of the moral divide — to the point where even younger Christians often disagree with what their churches teach," Mehta argues. "Thirty-eight percent of white evangelicals under 35 support abortion rights compared to 16 percent of those over 65. Younger evangelicals are more likely to support marriage equality. In 2020, younger white evangelicals were less likely than their parents and grandparents to support Donald Trump and Republicans in general."

Mehta continues, "If older pastors are worried about politics dominating their churches, why would younger potential pastors want to run churches made up largely of MAGA cultists? Many of the most devout younger Christians can't even bring themselves to attend churches, much less consider managing them. Why would anyone growing up in a culture where white evangelical cruelty is the GOP's entire platform, and sexual abuse is routinely swept under the rug, and women are treated as second-class citizens, and immigrants are seen as disposable, want the stigma of pastoring a Christian church?"

In Davis and Graham’s The Great Dechurching, the researchers also sorted dechurched Americans into two major categories: the “casually dechurched,” who lost the habit of attending services because they moved or had scheduling conflicts; and “church casualties,” who stopped attending because of conflict or because they’d experienced harm.

Each of the five profiles had a wide range of reasons for leaving their churches and why they might be open to returning. For so-called cultural Christians, they left in part because their friends weren’t there (18%) and because attending was not convenient (18%) but also because of gender identity (16%) or church scandal (16%).

Mainstream evangelicals dropped out because they moved (22%) or services were inconvenient (16%) but also because they did not feel much love in church(12%). Exvangelicals in this study left because they did not fit in (23%), because they did not feel much love in the congregation (18%), because of negative experiences with evangelicals (15%)  and they no longer believed (14%). Many BIPOC dechurched Americans left in their early 20s, often because they did not fit in (19%) or had bad experiences  (11%). Mainline Protestants left because they moved (25%) or because they had other priorities (15%) or did not fit in (14%), while Catholics who are dechurched said they did so because they had other priorities (16%) or had different politics than others in their parish (15%) or the clergy (15%).