The Number Of Christians Continues To Shrink In The U.S.

There have been several surveys showing that the percentage of Americans that are religious (particularly christian) has been shrinking with each generation -- and that currently about 20% of the general public in the United States say they are not religious (although some claim to be "spiritual"). Among the millennials, this is about 30% or slightly more.

That actually makes christianity look pretty good. There is less than 10% of the population belonging to religions other than christianity, so it makes it look like over 70% of the United States populace is made up of practicing christians. That is simply not true though, and this is pointed out in a new book called Churchless, written by David Kinsman and George Barna. These are not atheists attacking christianity, but christians worried about what is happening to the church in this country.

To come up with their figures, they studied about 20 polls done in the last few years by the Barna Group. Each survey contained a random sample of more than 1,000 adults, and has a margin of error of 3.1 points. Instead of asking people if they were religious, they divided the respondents into "churched" and "unchurched". The results they found are illustrated in the charts above. They first divided survey respondents into four groups:

Actively Churched (49%) -- This group regularly attends church (at least once a month).

Minimally Churched (8%) -- This group attends church infrequently and unpredictably. This would include those who go only on Easter and Christmas, and maybe a couple of more times in a year.

De-Churched (33%) -- These people used to attend church, but no longer belong to a church or attend one at all. Some of them may say they are christian if asked, but they don't act that way -- basically leading secular lives.

Purely Unchurched (10%) -- These people have never attended any church, and have no desire to attend one.

This means that active christians make up only 57% of the United States population, and many of them only attend church once a month or even less -- while 43% of the population don't attend church at all, and lead secular lives by choice (christians in name only, those claiming to be spiritual but not religious, agnostics, and atheists).

When you look at christianity in this way (churched and unchurched), it is easy to see that christianity is in trouble in this country. Kinsman and Barna go on to say that the numbers of new members claimed by some churches reflects basically only people moving from one christian church to another, and includes very few people who were unchurched and became churched -- because the number of unchurched Americans is growing. This unchurched group becomes larger with each generation.

That is illustrated in the bottom chart above -- which shows the Elder generation (born in 1945 or earlier) with 28% unchurched, the Baby Boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) with 35% unchurched, the Gen Xers (born between 1965 and 1983) with 40% unchurched, and the Millennials (born in 1984 or later) with a whopping 48% unchurched.

The truth is that on any given Sunday significantly less than half of all Americans will go to church. Christians, especially evangelicals, like to claim the United States is a christian nation -- but the fact is we are a secular nation, and we are becoming more secular all the time.