Recently OnTheMedia had an interview with Christine Wicker, author of The Fall of the Evangelical Nation. As a former religious reporter for the Dallas Morning News as well as being raised as an evangelical she was seen as an ideal person to investigate what was going on with the evangelical movement. What she found was that rather than being the powerhouse movement the media and Rove say, it is actually a religious movement that was shrinking and losing clout year by year as followers fall away. As a matter of fact, Evangelical churches are experiencing the same thing other traditional religions are: people are leaving their religions and seeking new spiritual homes.
However, even more surprising for the Evangelicals, she found that they never could have been the force that they claimed as they never did have the numbers reported. Here's a gist of her thesis from a sermon she quoted by Pastor Davidson Loehr, pastor at the First Unitarian/Universalist Church of Austin:
Evangelical Christianity in America is dying. The idea that evangelicals are taking over America is one of the greatest publicity scams in history, a perfect coup accomplished by savvy politicos and religious leaders, who understand media weaknesses and exploit them brilliantly. (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, p. ix)
The facts are that about a thousand evangelicals walk away from their churches every day and most don’t come back (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, p. xiii). As a whole, American Christians lose six thousand members a day – more than two million a year. (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, p. 123) The real figures are that fewer than seven percent of the country are really evangelicals – only about one in fourteen, not one out of four. The fastest growing faith groups in the country are atheists and nonbelievers. In just the eleven years from 1990 to 2001, they more than doubled, from 14 million to 29 million, from 8% of the country to 14 percent. There are more than twice as many nonbelievers and atheists as there are evangelicals. And since it’s hard to believe everyone would have the nerve to tell a pollster they were an atheist or nonbeliever, I suspect the real figures are higher. You don’t read this in the media because there are no powerful groups pushing the story.
In another sermon, he notes that the reason evangelical children leave the church is because the modern world is winning the culture war:
Who’s to blame for all this? Not the bible, not God, and not the churches. Modern life, changed circumstances, the new realities that we live among are to blame (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, p. 4). Evangelicals tried to fight the modern world and the world won.
What’s eroding Christianity is the rise and victory of the more scientific and humane worldview we’re a part of: a worldview that incorporates almost all the basic assumptions of liberalism. It affects all religions, but in different ways.
I’ve heard for 25 years that 95% of Unitarian kids leave the church after high school. I don’t think anyone has actually done a methodical study that could produce reliable numbers like that, but I suspect that it’s probably in the ballpark. Why? Because evangelical youth are leaving at about the same rate. Josh McDowell, who has worked for Campus Crusade for Christ since 1964, says that 94% of high school graduates leave the faith within two years. The Southern Baptists estimate that 88% of their kids leave the church after high school. So this is not an indictment of liberal religion; it’s a description of American 18-to-20-year-olds. On the surface, it looks like we’re all in the same situation.
But when you look at why evangelicals or religious liberals leave their church, it gets more interesting, and suddenly we’re not all in the same situation.
The world evangelical kids enter when they leave the control of the church isn’t much like the world the church has offered them. There’s more freedom to question, no subjects declared off-limits, less self-righteousness, more science, more independence. And nineteen out of twenty of them find the real world more appealing than the world the church had given them. Evangelicals lose their kids to the modern world. But we don’t lose our kids to the modern world, because we’ve worked to prepare them for it. It’s the worldview they learn in churches like this. We just want them to find more depth of fulfilling meaning and purpose within it than the soul-killing “market value” idols offer.
This thesis conforms with what I had found in some of the articles I had read as well.
So what's been going on? Wicker explains that the aggrandizement of the religious right has been a concerted effort which gave evangelicals an outsized platform in the news.
How did it happen? As Digby writes, it started because the Religious Right decided to take up abortion as their cause. And as Digby says, this was not from any deep theological commitment, but it was a political decision to pick up a cudgel that could be used to gain power.
This was one of the key strategies for the Radical Right to take over our country. Don't forget that the incestuous relationship with between the Republicans and the Religious Right came out of the machinations of Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed. Today, it is not surprising to see that making common cause with the criminal conspiracy instigated by the Rove, Norquist, et. al, has come to naught for the Evangelicals. Now can we make the media realize the truth about the religious right and that it is not the main voice for religion in America? Naw. That might be expecting too much thoughtfulness on the part of the pundits.
x-posted at PacificViews