Members of mainline denominations as a percentage of the US population have dropped to the single digits. That’s bad news for the poor and vulnerable.
Churchgoing is good for the poor and vulnerable in a variety of ways: it gives people moral guidance on how to live their lives. It gives them opportunities to directly serve others as a community. It results in tithes that are then spent on a wide variety of charitable works. These things are not salvation, and it is certainly possible for someone to be warming a pew for 50 years without a saving relationship with Jesus Christ. But any person is far more likely to find Jesus while nodding off in a pew than watching Netflix in bed.
It’s brutal to look at any decline this severe in any set of churches. While some conservatives may feel the temptation to smugly remark about the results of theological liberalism, that feels about as appropriate as a lecture about the dangers of drug addiction during the funeral of a young person who died of an overdose. Conservative evangelicals are facing their own demographic challenges, and non-denominational megachurches are overtaking denominational identity. The Great Dechurching is bad news for all Christians, no matter how you slice it.
The “why” of decline has been argued over here and elsewhere before, so I won’t spend much time on that. You’ll hear many accounts of believers who watched their churches descend into polarizing right-wing politics or shifted their own beliefs significantly, but these stories still represent a minority of people who have stopped going to church in the past few decades. Most dechurching is less of a decided break with tradition and more of a slow fade into the busyness of American life. This is important to note because people who leave their churches don’t usually make the jump to a different, equally important commitment—they just have a lot of other things that are a higher priority for them.
Fewer Christians anywhere is bad news for the poor and vulnerable. It doesn’t matter too much whether we’re talking about mainline denominations, conservative evangelicals, or any other category of believers. Even nominal believers matter. There are differences in priorities, percentages of giving, or levels of commitment between different groups, and I don’t want to pretend those distinctions aren’t important. However, the biggest deciding factor for many of these issues is the binary question of whether or not someone’s posterior is in a pew rather than at home (or at a soccer game).
Irrespective of whether you think that the Church should try to transform the world in any particular way, it is inevitable that churches full of Christians will do good. They will care for one another. They will care for poor people. They will provide places where the elderly, sick, and lonely can spend time with other people. They will teach, encourage, and reify a variety of moral behaviors that have positive health consequences. It is possible that going to church regularly will lead to too many fellowship dinners and thus obesity, but even this is not a particularly robust finding.
Much of this is related to the fact that Christian belief and practice urges people to adhere to the limits of created order. God has created the world in such a way that obeying his law and worshiping regularly with other people who obey him will naturally lead to a certain degree of health and prosperity. This is not an ironclad law of existence, and it is obviously complicated by many other statements in the Bible about how following Jesus will lead to persecution and difficulty that I’ll address below. However, people need to be taught how to live well and they need some level of social reinforcement to ensure that they follow the rules for living well.
As recent articles like Derek Thompson’s “The True Cost of the Churchgoing Bust” have made clear, our grand experiment in de-churching has had consequences for many people. As much as people like to denigrate “nominal Christianity,” you cannot deny that a nation full of people disconnected from a coherent moral community is worse off than one full of nominal Christians. There are a handful of people who can choose lives of generosity, kindness, and otherwise upright behavior without any religious instruction (although most of their moral beliefs are still deeply shaped by two millennia of Christianity.) These people who can go it alone are the exception, not the rule, and they’re more likely to have other material advantages that allow them to live ethically and pass their morals on to their children. Kichijiro was right (and even Richard Dawkins agrees): nominal belief is better than the alternatives. Spend any time with poor people, and you’ll see not only that churches and their ministries offer material goods that allow them to survive, but also that religious strictures help keep them from falling prey to destructive behaviors and ideas.
Ross Douthat has said something along the lines of, “If you hated the Christian right, just wait until you meet the post-Christian right.” One must only look at the Nietzschean and neo-eugenics screeds floating around to appreciate how much the moral logic of the West was dependent on Christianity. Tom Holland has observed how concepts like human rights, sexual consent, and even the idea of progressively hoping for a better future owe their origins to the New Testament; so we can expect to see these recede as Christianity’s influence in culture fades. The ethics that secular humanists love are, in the words of Oliver O’Donovan, “craters of the Gospel.”
There is a rich tradition of advocacy for the poor within Christendom, including government aid for the poor. One must note that the sharp division, promulgated by conservatives nowadays, that views “private” charitable aid as good and “public” government assistance as bad would have been incomprehensible to many Christians throughout history. However, even the most stridently right-wing Christians give to support poor people through charitable programs that feed, house, and provide medical care to those in need.
Less religious people give away less money to those in need, and the Great Dechurching represents about a billion dollars in giving that is disappearing. There are some people who remain equally generous after they stop going to church, but they are uncommon. Many former believers hold stronger views about government welfare spending on the poor than their churchgoing counterparts, but this hardly compensates for the deficit in giving. Even if every American who stopped going to church dedicated themselves correspondingly to advocacy for more government welfare, that leaves people in other countries out of luck.
The collapse of mainline churches has been devastating for mission hospitals and other charitable institutions across the world. While unaffiliated churches are still supportive of missionaries and other charitable works, there is a much greater sense of longevity and sustainability with denominationally-based institutions. Few people eating a nutritious meal or receiving subsidized health care want to know whether the American who paid for these did so out of heartfelt generosity or social pressure.
We can acknowledge these benefits and mourn the harms caused by de-churching while also making it clear that these benefits aren’t really a compelling reason for anyone to believe in Jesus. In many ways, this line of argumentation is primarily a rebuttal to pervasive cultural narratives that have privileged the rejection of institutional religion and inflated the value of a la carte spirituality well beyond reality. You can read countless memoirs and essays by individuals who were harmed by the doctrines and practices in stuffy, legalistic churches and found freedom outside the walls of the church. You read far fewer by people who grew up in those same walls and were formed by the boundaries religion set by them, helping them grow into kind and decent people who give to those in need. You read practically none by people who grew up in chaotic, non-religious households and suffered because their parents had no moral discipline and no community to care for them.
There are many ways in which churches have failed to be faithful, and many places where their failure has immiserated people. The tendency of conservative evangelicalism to support right-wing politics can easily bleed into simply despising poor people, and one can find abundant examples of Christianity that simply prop up middle-class consumerism. However, even the most milquetoast of nominal churches is still doing good in the world, especially for the poor and vulnerable. We should always be striving to preach the Gospel and push churches to be as faithful as possible, and it’s not surprising that the churches who celebrated other cultural values above faithfulness are the ones in steepest decline. But the Great Dechurching is coming for all of us, and it is going to hurt the most vulnerable among us the most.