Contemplate the swelling numbers of followers for Instagram wellness gurus, the hundred of thousands of denizens of QAnon message boards, the gaudy and growing subscriber lists for conspiracy theory YouTubers, and the cult-like explosion of critical race theory. Now consider that these believers aren’t coming from nowhere.
These are people, or the type of people, who used to go to a church, a synagogue, or a mosque. Some of them, as individuals, were never part of an organized religion, but they are the children or generational counterparts of churchgoers.
One necessary consequence of these new-age politicized faiths (most of which pretend not to be faiths) is that the more organized religions are losing members.
Most people, for the first time in recorded U.S. history, do not belong to a religious congregation, according to the latest Gallup poll. Asked “do you happen to be a member of a church, synagogue, or mosque,” only 47% said yes.
The drop was big in recent years, down 3 percentage points from 2018. The COVID-19 lockdowns are surely a culprit. Robbed of the ability to worship in person, in communion with physically proximate neighbors and fellow believers, many lost the habit, the feel, and the norms of congregational worship. Many probably lost the practice of worship.
But the lockdowns were only an accelerant of the trend. Generally above 70% from the 1930s to the 1990s, the number of belongers steadily began to drop in the late 1990s. We could blame the internet. It’s certainly an echo of the collapse of marriage, which began about 15 years before.
The bigger tectonic shift underlying all of this is the deinstitutionalization of Western culture. As those bumper stickers on Priuses declare, quoting Thomas Paine, “My country is the world, and my religion is to do good.” That trite 8th-grade wisdom is now the majority faith in the United States.
Tellingly, the people who go to church the least are disproportionately white, male, native-born, unmarried, and childless — the same demographic that is most likely to be radicalized on politics and alienated in general.
But it’s hitting both sexes, all ages, and all colors. They don’t belong to churches, but many of them don’t belong to anything else either, except an ideology, an Instagram feed, or a message board.
