A Church Where We Belong

For the past several decades, Americans have been leaving Christian churches in record numbers. This phenomenon has been dubbed “The Great Dechurching” by pastors Jim Davis and Michael Graham. What’s surprising is that many of those Americans didn’t leave the church because they stopped believing. They left because their church stopped feeling like a place of belonging. What we need to do to reverse the “Great Dechurching,” argues Jake Meador, is embrace the task of being good friends and good neighbors — a task given to all Christians, but also necessary for all humans.

Ryan Burge: Author of The Nones and 20 Myths About Religion and Politics in America.

Michael Graham: Co-author of The Great Dechurching with Jim Davis. Works with The Keller Center and The Gospel Coalition.

Jen Wilkin: Bible teacher, speaker, and bestselling author advocating for deep Bible literacy.

Jim Davis: Co-author of The Great Dechurching, Pastor at Orlando Grace Church. Contributor to The Gospel Coalition.

Jake Meador: Writer, editor-in-chief of Mere Orthodoxy.

Alan Cooperman: Director of Religion Research at Pew Research Center.

TRANSCRIPT

Susan was raised in a small town in Idaho, the oldest of four kids, and grew up with what she called “a strong testimony” – a solid conviction of the Christian, Mormon faith in which she was raised.

Susan: We were all close to the church, my dad was a bishop, eventually all three of my brothers became bishops. After I married in the temple, I was a Relief Society President once and a Young Women's President three times, so my testimony of the Gospel was very strong.

This is Susan speaking on the Come Back podcast in 2024. Susan got married just before turning 25 in Salt Lake Temple, and she and her husband raised their children in the church. But after some painful and unexpected life transitions, Susan left the church for 15 years.

Susan: The bishop that I had at the time, he said, “Susan, I think you're going to come back to the church someday,” and I said, “Oh I don't think so, I don't think I'm coming back.”

Susan is one of around 40 million Americans who share this story. They used to attend church regularly. And then – they left.

Davis: We are currently in the largest and fastest religious shift in the history of our country.

This is Jim Davis, teaching pastor at Orlando Grace Church, and co-author with Michael Graham of The Great Dechurching. Davis and Graham commissioned the most comprehensive nationwide study ever done on “dechurching.” The study found that about 15% of American adults (around 40 million people) have effectively stopped going to church.

Cooperman: So the share of Americans who identify as Christians has dropped by about 15 points, percentage points in about 15 years, and the share who don't identify with any religion has risen commensurately by about 15 percentage points over the same time.

This is Alan Cooperman, Director of Religious Research at Pew Research Center.

Cooperman: Today the consensus among sociologists of religion is that the picture, at least for institutional religion, [is] overall decline.

When telling this story, the media has given a lot of attention to the “nones” as in n-o-n-e-s, or non-religious people. Political scientist Ryan Burge, who co-authored The Great Dechurching, defines the “nones” as atheists, agnostics, and “nothing in particular.” And he’s watched closely as the group has grown.

Burge: At least 40% of Generation Z are non-religious, but it's rising among every age group. It’s not just younger people, it's older people too, it's not just whites, it's people of color, it's not just Democrats, it's Republicans. The nothing-in-particulars are the fastest growing religious group in America today.

But the “none” group isn’t the same as the “dechurched group.” The dechurched are people who used to regularly worship with a specific faith tradition but don’t anymore. A “dechurched” person, in Graham and Davis’s study, is someone who “used to go to church at least once a month but now goes less than once a year.” Their book tells the story of how the “dechurched” numbers have grown. But it also explains why these numbers are only half the story. The simple narrative of decline doesn’t capture why people are actually leaving, or how ready or willing they might be to come back. Susan didn’t think she would come back to a church. But she did.

Susan: My family stayed very close to me, they were so good, you know, they stayed by the tree. They loved me, they stood by the tree, and they loved me with every fiber of their being.

Welcome to Article 13 – a podcast that brings together cutting-edge research and spiritual wisdom to provide blueprints for a better world. I’m Zachary Davis.

In this episode, we learn about the phenomenon of dechurching: why so many people have stopped attending church in America, and how we can help people find a spiritual home again.

Why people are leaving

The first thing to understand is why dechurching is happening. Those 40 million people didn’t all dechurch for the same reason. Some of those reasons were “pain points.” There was something negative about the church they were actively reacting against. One negative factor has been politics.

Cooperman: Part of what's going on is a backlash against what at least some younger Americans perceive as the over-entanglement of religion with politics, and particularly conservative religion or traditional religion with conservative politics, and so they're reacting against that. And I think there's some evidence to that.

Perhaps the most serious push factor has to do with scandal – immoral, abusive behavior by people working within the church. And if that’s a reason people are reacting against organized churches, Alan Cooperman says that could be a very good thing.

Cooperman: If institutional religion is declining because of the faults of institutional religious traditions and leaders, because of hypocrisy and greed and sexual abuse of minors, then religious institutions and religious leaders either need to do a better job, get their houses in order, reform do better, or they're going to continue to lose. Put it in economic terms again, market share, and if that's a “market reaction,” that could be an entirely positive thing.

It’s essential that church leaders and laypeople alike take serious action to address these “pain points”. But it’s also important to know that these are not actually why the majority of people have dechurched.

Davis: Do you want to know the number one reason for dechurching in America? “I moved.” “I moved.” We actually found that of the 40 million adult Americans who have left church, 30 million of them did so without any pain point. We began to distinguish between these two groups, and we called one the ‘dechurched casualties,’ they have the pain point, and the other 30 million Americans we called the ‘casually dechurched’: they moved, they had life transitions, they got divorced, they had children, their children maybe grew up and they were consumed in travel sports, the children had their activities, church became inconvenient for whatever reason.

For the casually dechurched, it wasn’t a specific problem with the church that pushed them away. They were pulled away – often unintentionally or unwittingly – by other forces of 21st-century life. Too many things are competing for their time and attention.

This is Jake Meador, editor-in-chief of Mere Orthodoxy, a network of Protestant podcasts and media dedicated to Christian renewal.

Meador: That is kind of the natural momentum of American society as it exists today: you get sucked into a lot of busyness, a lot of things that are going to pay for that new thing you really want to have, or that nicer house, or nicer car, or nicer vacation, allow your kids to go to a better college – you'll get sucked into all of these things.

For the casually dechurched, their leaving may not indicate serious objections to their church per se. But their departure is still a symptom of serious problems – problems for those who leave, for those they leave behind, and for the country as a whole.

Why dechurching is a problem

Among the 30 million people who casually dechurched – those who left without any specific pain-point – some people were pulled away by positive things, like a full schedule or enrichment activities for the kids. But for others, the pull factors weren’t positive at all. Davis and Graham found that, contrary to some cultural narratives, it isn’t chiefly people in the affluent upper classes who are dechurching. In many cases, it’s people who are struggling– in their finances, their relationships, or their life at home. They’ve been left behind by other American institutions. And when they face new challenges, sometimes church attendance becomes a casualty.

Davis: Dechurching is largely a middle-lower-class and lower-class phenomenon. Now this is very important for the church to hear. The top reasons for people dechurching: “I moved” and “life transitions.”

Life transitions made a big difference in Susan’s case. She started moving away from the church when she was faced with some overwhelming financial and marital problems.

Susan: Everything was going really well, then I started having some problems in my marriage, things weren't going well, we weren't getting along, and we started having some huge, huge financial issues. It happened several times, and it got pretty bad, so at one point, I just said, “Okay I'm not going to do this anymore,” and I took my children and left.

Davis: So who gets hit hardest when there's a divorce, when kids come, expected or unexpected, who gets hit hardest when you lose a job? Well, the lower class gets hit the hardest. Then that requires working longer, unusual hours, it requires more transition in some cases when there are custody issues, so the life issues that contribute to dechurching are hitting the lower class more significantly.

For people of lower means, dechurching often indicates some specific problems at home and some unmet needs at their church – a lack of outreach, a lack of schedules and fellowship activities designed for their needs.

And for people in all classes and groups, dechurching can indicate one major need that isn’t being met. This is the need of belonging. For dechurched evangelicals, write Davis and Graham, “the animating concerns for their departures … mainly fall into the category of belonging. When asked why they stopped attending a house of worship, 19% said they moved and didn’t find a new faith community, 14% said they didn’t experience much love from their faith community, 14% said they didn’t fit in … 12% said their friends weren’t attending with them.”

These survey findings suggest that dechurching may be both a cause and an effect of a larger cultural problem around belonging. Religious and non-religious Americans alike are struggling more and more to find community and connection.

Meador: We're much lonelier today than we were 50 or 60 years ago, far more isolated, so there's not the kind of thick communal groups of any kind, really, that people are drawing on or being pulled into [...] and this isn't just church.

Cooperman: And if you think about what's happening in our society, if we are being atomized and if the decline of institutional religion is not a cause of that, if it's a symptom of that – that could be a very serious thing with negative consequences for society.

Dechurching may be a symptom of that larger struggle to find connection. But if it means that there are fewer robust church communities in the country to welcome people in, then dechurching may contribute to disconnection too. There just won’t be as many churches around where people can come together. And that can do further damage to the country. As Meador writes in the Atlantic, “Participation in a religious community generally correlates with better health outcomes and longer life, higher financial generosity, and more stable families—all of which are desperately needed in a nation with rising rates of loneliness, mental illness, and alcohol and drug dependency.”

“Even if you have no faith whatsoever, a case can be made that dechurching is impacting you, your community, and your country negatively,” Davis and Graham write. So what can we do about it if we’re concerned?

The good news is, we can actually do a lot.

What we don’t need to do

To start, we should understand what we don’t have to do. “The Great Dechurching” was a carefully chosen term. 40 million people have stopped attending church. They haven’t necessarily stopped believing.

Davis: We call it “the great dechurching” because it's not “the great un-Christian-ing” or something, and it's not “the great deconversion,” because a lot of these people are still Christians.

Evangelicals are still largely orthodox in their faith. 68% of those surveyed still believe in the Trinity, 64% believe in the divinity of Jesus, 67% believe in the resurrection. Only 10% of dechurched mainliners cited as a reason for leaving “I began to doubt God’s existence.” So while they may have departed from the church, their responses indicate that they have not departed from the faith.

This means that our most urgent task isn’t convincing people to believe or arguing them out of atheism. In fact, it may not require any arguments at all.

Graham: Of those 40 million people, over 20 million of them are willing to return to church today. And the reasons why that they said are very, by and large, very reasonable, in many ways, they just want to have better relationships interpersonally with other individuals.

So if we want to slow or reverse dechurching, the most important thing we can do is learn how to build better relationships – especially with people who haven’t felt fully seen or cared for within the church.

What we do need to do: the needs of women

It’s crucial, for instance, to understand the nuanced differences between men and women’s experiences of church.

Davis: We found in the study that almost 10 percent of those who have de-churched from an evangelical context cited misogyny as a reason.

In this 2023 conversation, Jim Davis and pastor Mike Aitcheson spoke with author and Bible teacher Jen Wilkin about why women can often be made to feel that they don’t belong in the church – at least, not with their full range of gifts and talents.

Wilkin: Often men in ministry have been told that women are to be treated in a guarded manner, because they are either showing up as a usurper, someone who wants to take; a temptress, someone who wants to sleep with them; or as a child, someone who is needy and is going to require more of their time than they can give.

As Wilkin has seen, even the most good-hearted and well-intentioned of pastors can make women feel lesser or unwanted in these ways.

So what can we do here? Davis and Graham write, “Even churches that restrict the office of elder to men have a biblical duty to lift women up by developing their gifts and building them up in every way possible.” Sometimes this will mean celebrating their work outside the church, like pursuing a new degree or a new job. Sometimes it will mean inviting them to do more work inside the church.

Wilkin: Often women's ministry, it suffers from a benign neglect from pastoral staff. If you don't have any sense that there are women in your church who can teach, I would ask first, Have you gone to the places where women are teaching in your church? Because I think you will find that they're there, and they're doing humble and quiet work, and they could probably use some help and advocacy.

What we do need to do: the needs of young people

Another crucial group to attend to is young people. In their study, Davis and Graham found that The hardest time for people to maintain their faith was in that transition period where they were leaving their parents’ homes. Davis and Graham refer to the “missed generational handoff.” What accounts for this failure?

Part of it is that young people naturally want to question and learn, but aren’t allowed to do so. 23% of evangelicals who dechurched between age 15 and 25 said they weren’t comfortable admitting doubts; 36% said they weren’t comfortable expressing their most pressing questions in church.

Davis: 13 to 30 is the hardest time to maintain your faith, and we as a church need to make [] big investments there. We want to invest in that generation, we want to give them space to ask questions, we want to give them real answers for the questions that they're asking, in high school and in the transition out of their parents’ house.

But here again, issues of belonging were as important as issues of belief – in many cases, the desire to belong to an inclusive and loving family: “A huge number of dechurched evangelicals (30%) said that if their parents had just embodied love, joy, gentleness, and kindness more or listened to them more … they might not have left the church.”

If you have a young person in your life that you want to share the faith with, Graham and Davis advise following these strategies. Listen more than you speak. You may feel that if your child brings up a topic and you don’t immediately give a full theological defense of the Christian position, you’re being an unfaithful witness. But in fact, the opposite may be true. The best witnesses draw others into the faith. And the best way to do that is by not saying anything at first, but just listening.

Then, when you do speak, don’t lead with your own opinion. Lead with open, curious questions – not ones that have a judgment built in.

To share our faith with another person, we need to know our faith, but we also need to know that other person. At its core, being a good witness for the next generation requires the same things as being a good parent. Listen to your child. Strive to know your child. Let them know they are loved. Then they may be open to listening to you – and learning about the source of your love.

Susan - the woman whose story began this episode - came back to her church after 15 years away. And what made a great difference to her was the unceasing love and support of her family.

Susan: And so now I'm in the middle of a divorce and I'm broke, and I'm trying to get all that figured out and trying to take care of my kids, and I was just devastated, and I remember talking to my mom one time and I said, “Mom, you know, I don't even have a family anymore,” you know, because I was divorced. She said, “Yes, you do, Susan: you have me and you have your three brothers, and you have your nieces and nephews, and we will always love you.” And they did. That was the thing they did. Of course they didn't agree with my decision, but they kept me involved, they kept me close to them. We have to do that for our family members, or what do they have to come back to?

The needs of friends and neighbors

The final group of people we need to consider are our friends, neighbors, fellow congregants, anyone else we make contact with in our lives. Our circle most likely includes some of those 40 million dechurched Americans. And what it takes to help invite them back starts simply with what it takes to be a good friend and neighbor.

Burge: The number one reason why they would go back to church, like the constant theme you see over and over again, is friends. Friends friends friends friends friends friends, is literally the key to the whole thing.

The main reasons people give for dechurching have to do with belonging – not feeling a close fit or strong ties with their church. And remember that 51% of dechurched evangelicals say they were willing to go back to church. Reasons they give for what would bring them back also have to do with belonging: 28% say they would come back if they made new friends; 17% if a friend invited them.

This data makes our path forward pretty clear. There are many people who might be willing to join you at church if you preceded the invite with an invitation to your home. For many others, it might take only a nudge – a casual conversation or a quick text. “Hey, we’re headed to church – would you like to come?”

“The main takeaway,” say Davis and Graham, “is that many dechurched evangelicals simply need a friend to invite them to church.” That’s good news. Any of us can give an invitation.

But we want to think carefully about that other piece too – these people need an invitation from a friend. It’s entering and remaining in that life of friendship with others that’s the larger and more demanding requirement here. But this, of course, isn’t just required to reverse dechurching. It’s required to live a good Christian life. A good human life.

Meador: If we're in a time of widespread loneliness, if there's a very deep sense of existential angst and felt meaninglessness, rootlessness, we don't resolve that by just doubling down on all of the things that have gotten us here. Like, these are not problems that are going to be solved through more hours at work, dedicating ourselves to making more money, or spending more time with Netflix. What I'm saying is that parishioners in churches need to look at each other and recognize that we are called to live life together as the people of God, and we are meant to serve and love and give of ourselves to one another. So, very simple, kind of silly example – I'm Presbyterian, so in our tradition, when you're an infant, the parents of the child go before the congregation and they make certain vows. And then the pastor turns to the congregation, and the pastor asks the congregation, “Do you vow to support these parents as they raise this child and to love them as your Christian brother and sister?” And then the congregation is supposed to raise their hand and say, “We do.” And one time after we did that, the pastor smiles and he goes, “Look at all of those Sunday School and Nursery volunteers.” But that's right. It's not wrong for our fellow church members to expect that that is going to mean something beyond, I raised my hand and said “We do” on a Sunday morning.

The church calls on us to love one another. Human experience tells us we can’t live a happy, flourishing life without loving one another. That love needs to be manifested in concrete acts of friendship. Sometimes that means service in the church, like volunteering in the nursery. Sometimes it’s just the regular things real friends do.

Meador: We have friends, they needed to go do some appliance shopping, and they had three little kids. So another family from church was like, “Just drop your kids off for a few hours and go on your own and find what you need.” It's just simple things like that. Just a general posture of availability and generosity toward the people that you're supposed to be living the Christian life with.

Not everyone will come back. But we should feel encouraged knowing that the actions that will bring some people back are actions we should have been taking all along anyway.

Why small changes matter a great deal

The 40 million dechurched represent 15% of the US population. It can be easy to be daunted by the apparent magnitude of the task before us. But we need to be clear about what the task is. It’s not about numbers.

On this point, Davis and Graham are emphatic. Yes, there was a time in the recent history of the United States when Christians made up the majority of the population. But that wasn’t always the case in our country’s past. And it doesn’t need to be the case in our country’s future. It certainly wasn’t always the case in salvation history.

If we are concerned about dechurching, it needs to be because we are concerned about individual souls – not about retaining power in some political or cultural system. “The more concerned we are with maintaining power in our culture,” write Davis and Graham, “the more focused we will be on ourselves instead of others, which can’t help but decrease our desire to see others know Jesus.”

From God’s perspective, it doesn’t matter how many or how few people you actually see back in a building thanks to your efforts. What matters is the disposition of heart that it takes to make the effort.

Meador: I think, at its core, Christianity is saying that you're an eternal being. And so think about the way that habits form and shape us over time. Somebody who has a practice or a habit that shapes them over 30 or 40 years, that's one thing. Think about the habits that shape you if you last forever. And so I think changing your reference point in those moments of despair can be really important, because even if this decision to love, to serve, to be generous, to be merciful, it might not pay off in this life – but if Christianity is true, God is at [the] work of restoring all things. Good things are never completely irrevocably lost. And so that hopefully gives you the courage to be willing to risk, to be willing to love, to show mercy, to give, even when the odds of immediate success are not very high.

The Spirit that ultimately draws a person towards faith will not be yours. But by cultivating love towards the people in your life regardless of where they are on their faith journey, you can help them be more open to that divine spirit’s promptings. And God only knows what difference that could make.

Article 13 is a narrative podcast from Faith Matters that brings together cutting-edge research and spiritual wisdom to offer blueprints for a better world. Article 13 is produced by Maria Devlin McNair, Zachary Davis, and Gavin Feller. Music by Steve LaRosa. Art by Charlotte Alba. You can learn more about Article 13 here.

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