Special Report: Evangelical Christianity In Crisis by for End of the American Dream
The evangelical movement in the United States has reached a moment of reckoning. To the surprise of many readers, this is actually not an article about Donald Trump. Yes, evangelicals have become very closely linked to President Trump over the past four years, and this has deeply affected how many outsiders view the evangelical movement. But no matter what happens politically, evangelical churches will just continue to keep doing what they have been doing. In the long-term, the success of evangelical Christianity in America does not depend on the political success of Donald Trump.
Nor is this article about the very long list of high profile evangelical leaders that have fallen in recent months. To see so many prominent names fall so spectacularly has grieved me deeply, but I try very hard to avoid making a public spectacle out of them.
I do this for a couple of reasons. Number one, they are still my brothers and sisters no matter what they have done. Secondly, there is very little positive that comes out of drawing attention to our bad apples. The mainstream media loves to make a spectacle out of evangelical leaders that fall, and they do this because it greatly supports many of the narratives that they are pushing. But the mainstream media will never, ever do stories on the thousands of absolutely amazing men and women of God that are doing incredible work all over the globe. They only want to do negative stories about evangelical Christianity, and we need to push back against that.
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Don’t get me wrong – I am certainly not saying that we should ignore when evangelical leaders are morally compromised. Those that fall should be held accountable, and there are times when entire churches and ministries need to be held accountable.
And when people have honest questions about what has happened, we should be more than willing to address those questions.
Having said all that, this is not an article about evangelical leaders that have fallen either.
Rather, the real reason why evangelical Christianity is in crisis in the United States is because our numbers are rapidly falling and surveys have shown that many of the remaining evangelicals no longer hold to even the most basic evangelical beliefs.
Let’s start by talking about numbers. When George W. Bush was first elected president, evangelical Christians made up approximately a quarter of the U.S. population. But then we were down to about 21 percent in 2010, and at this point that figure has dropped to about 15 percent. The following comes from NBC News…
In addition to white American Christianity crossing the majority-minority threshold, the last decade also saw a particularly significant decline within one subgroup: white evangelicals. While the ranks of white mainline Protestants and white Catholics have been shrinking for decades, white evangelical Protestants had seemed immune to the forces eroding membership among other white Christian groups.
But since 2010, the number of white evangelical Protestants has dropped from 21 percent of the population to 15 percent. While white evangelical Protestants have enjoyed an outsized public presence over the last four years because of their predominance in President Donald Trump’s unshakeable base, it is notable that today they are actually roughly the same size as their white mainline Protestant cousins (15 percent vs. 16 percent, respectively).
At what point are evangelical leaders finally going to admit that we have a major problem on our hands?
If this trend continues, it won’t be too long before we are at 10 percent of the population, and then eventually it will just be 5 percent.
