The death of American religion is a myth of bad measurement. Faith is not declining — it is churning, uncounted, and hiding from the surveys.
The Thesis — Johnson & Kidd, authors of “The Death of Religion?”, in The Washington Post
THE ARGUMENT
In this weekend’s Washington Post, Byron Johnson and Thomas Kidd — whose new book The Death of Religion? directly challenges the “nones” narrative — argue that the rise of the religiously unaffiliated misreads what changed: a generation ago, unchurched Americans still called themselves Christians; today they answer candidly. The nones overwhelmingly believe in God and pray, self-identified Christians still outnumber nones, atheists, and agnostics combined more than two to one, and — citing Gordon Melton’s studies — the decennial congregational census undercounts congregations by at least 25 percent, missing the “others”: nondenominational, Pentecostal, and immigrant churches like those that doubled metropolitan Boston’s congregations between the 1960s and early 2000s. Yes, the mainline is collapsing — Episcopalians fell from 3.4 million to 1.6 million while the U.S. population nearly doubled — but that, they say, is nominal religiosity becoming a thing of the past, not the death of faith. Not decline — churn.
THE ANSWER
Sociologist and former pastor Ryan Burge — whose own congregation closed in 2024, and whose earlier book The Nones built the very framework Johnson and Kidd now challenge — agrees the nones have plateaued. But in his book The Vanishing Church (reviewed last month in America), he argues that headcounts miss the real crisis: the hollowing-out of the moderate middle. Aging centrist congregations are closing faster than young people replace them, leaving American religion an all-or-none proposition — conservative evangelical or nothing — and millions of moderate and liberal Christians religiously homeless, at a cost to community and democratic life. Faith may persist; the places that housed it are vanishing.
THE INTELLITAKE
Johnson and Kidd concede Burge’s central fact in words stronger than his own: progressive denominations, they write, are in “a virtual state of collapse.” Both sides agree the middle is going; the whole fight is over what that middle was. Johnson and Kidd say it was nominal — a label shed without loss, its place in the marketplace claimed by storefront Baptists and Nigerian Pentecostals. Burge says it was the moderate believer and the bridging institution — the politically mixed pew that nothing in the marketplace replaces. Same instrument, same corpse, two causes of death. Whether American religion is churning or in free fall depends entirely on which autopsy you believe.
If your childhood congregation closed tomorrow, would you go looking for another — or quietly become a none?
— THE EDITORS, INTELLICURIOUS —
