Church Attendance Has Plummeted Again - Nobody Is Addressing the Main Cause, Expert Says
Concern and outrage over President Joe Biden’s Holy Week proclamation declaring March 31, 2024 — Easter Sunday, the holiest day of the year for Christians — “Transgender Day of Visibility” justifiably dominated the news cycle in the days leading up to and following Easter.
But a report that was also released during Holy Week, and that might have made more headlines were it not for Biden’s blatant blasphemy, demonstrated that Christians are facing a far greater crisis with worrisome long-term implications.
On March 25, Gallup released a report that showed regular religious attendance in America for nearly all religions has dropped like a stone, continuing a 20-year downward trend. Only 3 in 10 Americans are currently attending a weekly religious service.
“Two decades ago, an average of 42% of U.S. adults attended religious services every week or nearly every week. A decade ago, the figure fell to 38%, and it is currently at 30%,” the report reads.
“This decline is largely driven by the increase in the percentage of Americans with no religious affiliation — 9% in 2000-2003 versus 21% in 2021-2023 — almost all of whom do not attend services regularly.”
Gallup’s poll was conducted from 2021 to 2023 via telephone interviews. The aggregate sample used to compile results numbered over 32,000 American adults from all 50 states and D.C. The margin of error for the overall sample was +/- 1.5 percentage points at a 95 percent confidence level.
“Church attendance will likely continue to decline in the future, given younger Americans’ weaker attachments to religion,” Gallup said in its summary.
“Specifically, more 18- to 29-year-olds, 35%, say they have no religious preference than identify with any specific faith, such as Protestant/nondenominational Christian (32%) or Catholic (19%). Additionally, young adults, both those with and without a religious preference, are much less likely to attend religious services — 22% attend regularly, eight points below the national average.”
Gallup’s distressing findings track with a Pew report published in March that revealed 80 percent of Americans think religion’s role in public life is shrinking even as 49 percent believe such a decline is a negative development. It also tracks with a December Pew report that showed Americans are increasingly defining themselves as “spiritual” rather than religious.
But, as all of this applies to Christendom, even the Pew studies can be seen as symptomatic rather than the root of the problem — the one that churches are ignoring at their own peril, according to J.P. De Gance, founder of the nonprofit ministry Cummunio.
“In our nationwide study of faith in relationships, we saw that the growth of religious non-affiliation appears to be the effect of the collapse of marriage,” De Gance said in a telephone interview with The Western Journal.
His group’s research on the matter, published in an updated report last year, proved that “family decline appears to fuel faith decline.”
When things are working correctly, according to De Gance, churches and families have something of a symbiotic relationship.
Solid Christian churches promote solid Christian marriages that grow into families; in turn, these united families make up the bulk of regular church attendees, perpetuating the church over generations. Scholars call this phenomenon “generation succession,” and it’s a major driver of religious affiliation.
Over the last 30 years, however, the sexual revolution, the ballooning divorce rate and the rise of cohabitation arrangements have combined to strike a major blow to generation succession.
For instance, Communio noted, “Over the last decade, less than half of all 17-year-olds reached their birthday with two, continuously married, biological parents in the home.”
This is significant since family “likely shapes the formation of personal views, political perspectives, and behaviors including church attendance. It helps shape the zeitgeist,” the report stated.
“If you’re going to church on Sunday morning, four out of five — 80 percent of everybody sitting in church — regardless of age, grew up in a home where mom and dad stayed continuously married,” De Gance said. That’s true whether you were born in the year 2000 or 1960.
Given all of that, you’d think that churches would be devoting a great deal of time and dollars to shoring up marriages with thought-provoking sermons and programs like dating instruction, ongoing counseling and even marriage retreats.
Sadly, however, “85 percent of the churches in our country report spending no money on relationships and marriage ministry,” said De Gance, who emphasizes this point to churches with which he consults about improving attendance.
Churches don’t focus on marriage because “there’s a fear of offending,” he said. “There’s a fear that by talking about marriage, it will alienate those who are not married.”
There’s also a stigma attached to church-led marriage instruction.
“Frequently in churches, you might go on a spiritual retreat. Nobody turns to a person on a spiritual retreat and asks, ‘Are you losing your faith? Is that why you went?’ But if I go on a marriage retreat, somebody might assume there’s something wrong with my marriage, and that’s unfair. We tell pastors that that’s their enemy. We’ve got to go after that.”
Not surprisingly, De Gance’s study found that “roughly 1 in 5 married church goers struggle in their marriage. The gap in relationship satisfaction between married men and women is substantial as women are 62 percent more likely to report struggling than married men.”
So, on whom do churches focus their outreach efforts and dollars?
Typically, it’s young people. But this is essentially addressing a symptom of the problem and not the problem itself, according to De Gance. Going after young people may seem like a logical approach, especially with fewer of them believing each year, but the focus is one generation too late.
“We estimate that $4 to $6 billion is spent annually there,” De Gance said. “That means [$40 to $60 billion] is spent every decade to transmit Christian faith to the next generation.
“Never in the history of the church has more money been spent to transmit the faith to our young people. And it also means that we’ve never been less effective in transmitting our faith to our young people.”
“If we want to understand why the number of rolling stones is growing,” he said, “it’s because the number of kids growing up in homes without their dads is growing.”
While De Gance’s study showed that continuously married couples perpetuate faith — as reflected by church attendance — religious transmission really originates with present fathers.
“[The] link between marriage and fatherhood is not limited to positive outcomes in social mobility, education, and overall flourishing — it is also strongly linked to faith. Indeed, a growing body of research on religion shows that a child’s relationship with his or her father is critical for faith practice,” De Gance’s report asserted.
It cited a four-decade-long study published by Oxford University Press that found that “closeness to fathers matters more than closeness to mothers in religious transmission.”
The researchers noted, “Among Evangelical fathers, there is a 25-point difference in [the professed faith] similarity [between parent and child] for children who feel emotionally close to fathers compared to those who are not close; for Evangelical mothers the difference is just 1 percentage point. A similar pattern exists for Mainline [Protestants] and Catholics.”
De Gance’s study also cited research by Dr. Paul Vitz, emeritus professor of psychology at New York University, that showed that “the failure [of] a child to form a healthy attachment to his or her father often manifests itself in the later loss of faith, interest in New Age spirituality, or the manifestation of agnosticism or atheism.”
For these critical reasons, De Gance predicts that religious non-affiliation and the drop in church attendance of the kind Gallup and Pew keep reporting will continue until the trend toward marriage collapse reverses.
In the meantime, he notes that there is hope, but churches must act quickly.
“This is an area where churches can fill a real need. Churches can develop relationship ministries that reach out to the community and help them have healthy marriages, help them form healthy relationships,” De Gance emphasized.
“By not teaching them about this, we are losing a golden opportunity.”
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