Tag Archives: Religion

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The Broadside | Christianity’s Slide Into Obscurity Has Bottomed Out—For Now

Some 62 percent of U.S. adults currently describe themselves as Christians.

The decline in the number of Americans who identify as Christian appears to be slowing down after years of losses, according to a Pew Research Center survey published Wednesday.

The expansive Religious Landscape Study (RLS) study found the number of people in the U.S. who identify as Christian has been stable since 2019. It also discovered that the number of those who are unaffiliated with a religion, after years of uptick, has plateaued.

Around 62 percent of Americans identified as Christians. Some 40 percent were Protestant, 19 percent were Catholic, and 3 percent identified with other Christian groups, according to the survey.

The share of Americans who identify as Christians has been hovering in the 60s from 2019 to 2024. In 2023, it was 63 percent, down from 78 percent in 2007.

That the slide has stopped is good news but is tempered by the fact that only 62 percent of Americans identify themselves as Christians. We were at 78 percent less than twenty years ago.

That’s a steep drop.

Nearly 3 in 10 Americans, 29 percent, were religiously unaffiliated. Among those, 5 percent were atheist, 6 percent were agnostic and the other 19 percent said they identify as “nothing in particular,” Pew found. 

Approximately 7 percent of the U.S. population is non-Christian but religious: 2 percent were Jewish, while Muslim, Hindu or Buddhist were each at 1 percent, according to the poll. 

What’s fascinating is that our liberal or “progressive” friends, who support all manner of sexual deviancy, have become increasingly irreligious.

Researchers also noted that 37 percent of self-described liberals identified with Christianity, a 25-point drop from 2007 when it was 62 percent. Just more than half of liberals, 51 percent, said they have no religion, a 24-point jump from 2007’s 27 percent.

The Epoch Times adds:

Young adults also presented as far less religious than those of older generations—a fact that the study’s researchers noted could portend an eventual decline.

“It is inevitable that older generations will decline in size as their members gradually die,” the researchers wrote in their report. “We also know that the younger cohorts succeeding them are much less religious.

“This means that, for lasting stability to take hold in the U.S. religious landscape, something would need to change.”

That change could be on the horizon.

In the weeks since President Donald Trump took office, he has taken several steps to put Christianity front and center, from creating a new White House Faith Office led by Pastor Paula White-Cain to establishing a Justice Department task force to root out anti-Christian bias.

He has also vowed to create a Presidential Commission on Religious Liberty.

At the National Prayer Breakfast on Feb. 6, Trump lamented the decline of faith in the United States and called on the nation to “bring God back” into its life.

“We have to bring religion back,” he told lawmakers on Capitol Hill. “We have to bring it back much stronger. It’s one of the biggest problems that we’ve had over the last fairly long period of time.”

I’m not sure if Trump understands that Christianity is not a “religion,” which is a secular way of describing it. A religion is marked by rules and regulations; Christianity is about a personal relationship with God. Yes, we engage in worship and acts of service and read our bibles and pray, but those are expressions of gratitude and obedience, not a list of activities that we check off to keep God happy or to stay in His good graces.

Trump’s instincts are right, even though his call to “bring religion back much stronger” isn’t quite what we need. What we need is to humble ourselves and repent of our corporate sin, then encourage the act of making disciples, which is the way the Church has grown of the centuries.

We were once considered a Christian nation, founded on Judeo-Christian principles. Trump can’t “make” America Christian again, but he can call attention to our need for God.

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Daily Broadside | Are You Being Watched While You Worship?

Every day brings more evidence that we’re rapidly evolving into a police state as our historic norms and traditions disintegrate and lawlessness is flaunted by our domestic enemies on the Left, whether in politics, education, science, entertainment, religion, medicine or business. We can no longer assume that we live in freedom with the U.S. Constitution guarding our rights, because those in power no longer respect that historic document.

Take, for instance, our rights of religion, speech, assembly and, though not specifically listed, freedom of association. Every one of those rights was to be violated with the latest revelation that the FBI planned to cultivate informants within the Catholic church.

The chair of the House Judiciary Committee has subpoenaed FBI Director Christopher Wray for all records relating to a leaked internal memo that proposed developing sources in traditionalist Catholic parishes to inform on potential “violent extremists” in such houses of worship.

In an April 10 letter (pdf) attached to the subpoena, Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) noted that the committee’s investigation of that Jan. 23 memo, which has since been repudiated by the FBI, had revealed that it was produced by at least one undercover agent and that, despite leadership’s claims to the contrary, the bureau intended to act on the memo’s recommendations.

“Based on the limited information produced by the FBI to the Committee, we now know that the FBI relied on at least one undercover agent to produce its analysis, and that the FBI proposed that its agents engage in outreach to Catholic parishes to develop sources among the clergy and church leadership to inform on Americans practicing their faith,” Jordan wrote to Wray. “This shocking information reinforces our need for all responsive documents, and the Committee is issuing a subpoena to you to compel your full cooperation.”

“Shocking”? Really, Jim?

Is it really so shocking after all we have endured during and post-Trump? We’ve learned that the FBI helped fuel the Russia! Russia! Russia! hoax, likely took part in instigating the J6 “insurrection”, coordinated the raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home with the White House, targeted concerned parents opposed to public (i.e. state-run) schools corrupting their kids with critical race theory and transgenderism, concocted a ludicrous entrapment scheme to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen “Wretched” Whitmer, and abused their authority to arrest a pro-life activist in front of his family as a warning to anyone else who might think they can protest abortions at the little extermination camps set up across our fair nation without reprisal.

So, “shocking”? No. Not shocked at all.

This is the kind of police state activity you might expect in communist or socialist countries ruled by dictators-for-life. The FBI is acting more like the East German Stasi or the Russian NKVD than it is the domestic investigative unit whose mission is “to protect the American people and uphold the Constitution of the United States.” (*spit*)

FBI Director Christopher Wray denied that the FBI condoned such activity, protesting that, “we do not and will not target people for religious beliefs, and we do not and will not monitor people’s religious practices.” Yet, Jordan found that, “The document itself shows that its contents, including its proposal to develop sources in Catholic churches, were reviewed and approved by two senior intelligence analysts and even the local Chief Division Counsel.”

Say, I wonder if the FBI is developing sources within Islamic mosques to monitor for “potential ‘violent extremists’”? Or nah?

It’s not like the FBI had identified a specific threat coming from a specific church. The plan was simply to develop inside sources among “clergy and church leadership” to report to the FBI what certain church members were up to.

Can you imagine the distrust and suspicion that would be sown among the body of believers, especially as people found out that parishioners were winding up in federal prisons? The effect would chill relationships and conversation. After all, who could you trust?

For now it seems like the threat has been averted. But the fact that it was even proposed tells us all we need to know about how the FBI sees religious conservatives.

Today the Catholics; tomorrow the Protestants. Now that the precedent has been set and the idea of surveilling churches is out there, don’t be surprised when parishioners begin to be arrested or simply disappear without a trace.

It shouldn’t be that shocking.