The Overstated Collapse of American Christianity

[guillaumeb]

From the article:

Fifty years ago, many observers of American religion assumed that secularization would gradually wash traditional Christianity away. Twenty years ago, Christianity looked surprisingly resilient, and so the smart thinking changed: Maybe there was an American exception to secularizing trends, or maybe a secularized Europe was the exception and the modernity-equals-secularization thesis was altogether wrong.
Now the wheel has turned again, and the new consensus is that secularization was actually just delayed, and with the swift 21st-century collapse of Christian affiliation, a more European destination for American religiosity has belatedly arrived. “In U.S., Decline of Christianity Continues at Rapid Pace” ran the headline on a new Pew Research Center survey of American religion this month, summing up a consensus shared by pessimistic religious conservatives, eager anticlericalists and the regretfully unbelieving sort of journalist who suspects that we may miss organized religion when it’s gone....



Lukewarm Christianity may be declining much more dramatically than intense religiosity.....

The waning of Christianity may be still as much a baby-boomer story as a millennial one....

There’s a strong case that any crisis facing Christian institutions is a more Catholic crisis than a Protestant one. …

To read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/29/opinion/american-christianity.html

The author suggests that this decline may represent a cyclical pattern rather than any long term trend.