Slow Decline of Obsessive Credulity

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Just 43% of American adults call themselves Protestants, down from 51% 13 years ago, according to a Pew Research Center survey. The percentage of American Catholics also dropped four points, to 20%. According to the last expansive study, in 2014, a third of millennials now identify as “religiously unaffiliated,” as do about a quarter of American adults over all, up from 16% in 2007. Almost one in five Americans was raised in a religion only to leave it to join the ranks of the “Nones.”

Even among Americans who say that they belong to a religious tradition, relatively few regularly practice their faith. Less than 40% of self-professed Catholics, and a third of mainline Protestants, attended services weekly (back in the pre-virus days when doing so was possible). Only 22% of American weddings are held in houses of worship, down from 41% in 2009.

Even Americans who do believe in a higher power are less likely than ever to adhere to dogma. The traditional elements of shared religious life — community, ritual, a sense of purpose — have increasingly come “unbundled” from one another. 

For better and for worse, Christianity is no longer the American default. Flexible “Christmas and Easter” Christians, and those for whom religion is a primarily social or communal affair, now have a panoply of less-demanding options. The totalizing demands of a faith like Christianity — from its radical rejection of earthly power and success to its condemnation of premarital sex — are becoming appealing only to those who want something totally demanding in the first place. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/08/opinion/sunday/weird-christians.html .