Religious Trends

“At the dawn of the attention industries, then, religion was still, in a very real sense, the incumbent operation, the only large-scale human endeavor designed to capture attention and use it.

“As part of the American Bible Society and Barna Research’s State of the Bible 2019, respondents were given five prominent biblical commands and asked which one was the most important.

Out of the options, American Bible users were most likely to choose ‘do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God,’ taken from Micah 6:8.” - Facts & Trends

“Pew survey of 30,000 people finds a median of 39% favor, 13% oppose a “more important role for religion.” - Christianity Today

Why the Secularization Hypothesis Is Fundamentally Flawed

“This article compares church membership data for the 1998-2000 and 2016-2018 periods, using combined data from multiple years to facilitate subgroup analysis. On average, 69% of U.S. adults were members of a church in 1998-2000, compared with 52% in 2016-2018.” - Gallup

“[S]ecularization theory … posits that as societies become more economically prosperous and obtain higher levels of education, the inevitable result is a movement away from organized religion and toward secularization.” - CToday

“The analysis of the General Social Survey from Ryan Burge, a political scientist at Eastern Illinois University and a Baptist pastor, found that 23.1 percent of Americans claim no religious affiliation.” - Christian Headlines

“Evangelicals and Catholics remain slightly less than a quarter of the American population, and now so are the religiously unaffiliated, according to the latest release of the General Social Survey (GSS).” - Facts & Trends

“The increased reliance on web-based research for public opinion surveys is raising questions about the relevance of long-accepted political and social trends documented in decades of telephone polling. … prominently and consistently reported declines in belief and church attendance may be less dramatic than reported over the past two or three decades.” - BNGlobal

“With more people leaving the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints than in past generations, it seems everyone has an explanation for why this is happening.” - RNS