Pretty solid deep-dive that taught me some things I wasn’t super aware of.
I knew that moderate Christianity hasn’t exactly been thriving in the US but I didn’t think it was losing members to the fundamentalists particularly, or that it had fallen so far.
The TL;DR distillation is that as the nation has polarized politically, the inability of conservatives and liberals to sit in the same pews has caused that political polarization to be reflected in the distribution of people within the various denominations.
Also of interest, there’s a “bubble” of church attendance in people earning > $70K/yr, peaking at around $120K/year. I have to go back and do some closer reading and/or digging to see if that bubble exists only on the liberal / moderate side or not. I doubt there are tons of upper middle class in the most conservative congregations, though.
I have in the past criticized liberal Christians for not adequately calling out their authoritarian siblings but maybe it’s as much because there aren’t many of them by numbers anymore, IDK. The article DOES make a point that it was actually the moderate denominations that pushed originally for things like prayer in schools, adding “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance, etc. So to some degree the Christo-Fascists are just building on that foundation.
Maybe I just have to concede that there should be a pox on all their houses?
If America could survive wars, the Great Depression, and 9/11, “but we are taken down by political and religious polarization,” Burge writes, “then we may not be as good as we once were.”
Quoted from the posted article. This makes the assumption we were good in the first place.
Evangelicals are in a different paradox than the main stream detailed within the article. They suffer with dropping attendance as well. They have the double edged sword of slowly becoming an identity rather than a community.
Religion these days bears a strong resemblance to a virus. It mutates to survive. It searchers for vectors to proliferate. I would argue that social media is the preferred vector for the religious strain of 2026. Rather than address the epidemic, everyone appears to be hoarding Ivermectin…
Yeah I would rephrase that as “we never were as good as we thought we were”.
One thing evangelicals have less wrong is that they always were biased by the doctrine of the “total depravity” of humanity to not have a rosy view of human nature. Just for all the wrong reasons and that of course led to the wrong solutions.
That is the inevitable outcome of bring politics into the church; which isn’t even legal (if you aren’t going to pay taxes). When I was a child, I had the record of perfect attendance at the local church (5 years, more than the preacher himself, I was forced to attend), and I never once heard the name of a politician or political party mentioned in church. They have gone out of their way to foul their own nest.
There used to be a tacit understanding in polite company that you never discussed politics or religion. Now both religious and political opinions are leaking into every aspect of life. In the men’s group I hang out at on Saturday mornings last week, a new guy felt free to casually mention that he doesn’t believe in God, and the leader had his usual MAGA propaganda that he gets from Faux News to talk about. Most of us still ignore such remarks as there’s no productive response and it’s not an environment where we go to debate, so we concentrate on human things we have in common – but I could see it evolving into a knock-down drag-out fight someday if we got a particular firebrand in there.