White Protestant Christianity keeps declining. Is that a problem or not? | Opinion

If you’re a white Protestant—whether you’re a conservative evangelical or a moderate mainline Christian—you probably have the feeling your religion’s influence is in a freefall.

I’m sorry to bear unpleasant news, but that sense of loss is, as the rock group Boston sang in the1970s, more than a feeling. It’s a documentable fact. Only it’s not Marianne who’s slipping away, but a type of faith that for generations was the United States’ bedrock religious culture.

We have the numbers to bear that out — a whopping 30 percent decline in the number of white Protestants since 1990. Whether you think this is tragic or the best thing that ever happened, it signals a sea change in American religious life.

The question is what, if anything, white Protestants can or should do to mitigate this decline.

First, a few numbers.

Recently, PRRI (the Public Religion Research Institute), a nonpartisan organization that studies the intersection of religion, culture and public policy, released a 2022 update to its 2020 Census of American Religion. Its findings are staggering if you’re a non-Hispanic white Baptist, Pentecostal, Methodist, Lutheran, etc.

White evangelicals are now 13.6 percent of the U.S. population, white mainliners are 13.9 percent, white Catholics are 12.6 percent and other white Christian groups are 1.8 percent. All told, white non-Hispanic Christians account for roughly 42 percent of the population.

That might not sound noteworthy—except that in 1990 the number was 72 percent.

And there’s another, related trend: a falling away from religion generally across the country. At 26.8 percent, the religiously unaffiliated now make up the single largest spiritual constituency of Americans, about twice the percentages of white evangelicals, white mainliners or white Catholics if you consider them as separate entities.

In 2006, only 16 percent of all Americans were unaffiliated, and white evangelicals alone were 23 percent of the U.S. population.

The trend away from churches is most noticeable among the young.

For instance, among Americans of all colors aged 18–29, 38 percent are religiously unaffiliated. That’s compared to, as said above, about 27 percent among the whole population. The unaffiliated make up 32 percent of those ages 30-49.

So the future looks worse for churches than even the present, as these larger numbers of younger, unaffiliated Americans age and as older, more religious generations die out.

A backlash to this decline among white Protestants, especially evangelicals, has already affected our political climate. It includes the rise of Christian nationalism and support for the MAGA movement.

For a deeper take on the political fallout, there’s an excellent column by the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin, which as of this writing has drawn more than 14,700 reader comments.

As a minister who’s white and Protestant, I’m more concerned about the spiritual implications of this grand shift than the political. Thinking about the kingdom of heaven rather than the kingdoms of this world is part of my job.

Here are a few observations:

▪ As motivational speakers tell us, every challenge is also an opportunity. Nothing is the end of the world—except the actual end of the world. White Christianity’s demographic spiral presents us with a chance to rethink the messages we’re sending to an increasingly secular culture.

Last week I wrote about a step in that direction, the massive “He Gets Us” ad campaign, funded by wealthy evangelicals. It focuses on the love and grace of God rather than on the usual evangelical brimstone. I’m a bit ambivalent about the campaign, but it’s a move in right direction.

We should approach the marketplace of ideas with more grace and less judgment. We must demonstrate that God and the church are real forces for good.

▪ There is also a stellar opportunity for white Protestants to finally do what they should have been doing all along: form alliances with Christians of other colors. To be fair, a lot of white Protestants have been trying for decades — sometimes awkwardly—to reach out.

But now’s the time to double down, to approach interracial cooperation with urgency, commitment and humility. White Protestants are a minority themselves, and that’s going to become even truer in the future.

They can’t expect to dictate anymore the shape cooperation will take. They must learn at last how to not be in charge, how to follow and learn as well as lead and teach. From here on out, it’s going to take all hands of all colors working as one. That could be a beautiful thing—a kingdom of God thing.

▪ Maybe white Christians should rejoice at our loss of prominence rather than bemoan it. Christianity began as a splinter faith, as a persecuted minority, and has always functioned most purely when it possesses no temporal power or social cachet.

Such lowly circumstances reveal who the true Christians are. When being a Christian doesn’t gain anybody glory, money or power, when it instead gets disciples excluded from the mainstream, then only those who truly love God stick around.

They spend less time competing for political advantage and more time preaching the good news, nursing the sick and joyfully breaking bread together.

Hey, far worse fates than that could befall us.

Paul Prather is pastor of Bethesda Church near Mount Sterling. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.