There's a wonderful Ted Talk with Mark Liddell in which he talks about how any set of statistics might have something lurking inside of it and can, therefore, be misleading. In order to understand the statistics, we have to study the actual situations that they are describing because, quite frankly, people can use statistics to manipulate others and promote their own agenda.
Liddell uses the example of two hospitals which both offer surgery that you are contemplating. You read that Hospital A and Hospital B have both performed 1000 surgeries. While 900 of the patients in Hospital A survived, only 800 did in Hospital B. So you think, "I better go to Hospital A because it has a higher survival rate."
But what if I tell you that only 100 of the patients entering Hospital A did so in poor health while 400 of the 1000 that entered Hospital B were in bad health. And what if I tell you that only 30 of the 100 patients in poor health survived in Hospital A whereas 210 of the 400 people in poor health survived in Hospital B. You now realize that Hospital B is your better option because you looked beyond the statistics.
You can listen to the whole talk here:
https://ed.ted.com/lessons/how-statisti ... rk-liddell
So how about these statistics regarding church attendance, religious self-identification, etc.? In a New York Times article entitled
The Overstated Collapse of American Christianity, writer Ross Douthat suggests the statistics are misleading. As with the hospital scenario above, he goes behind the numbers to see what's going on. For example, he notes that lukewarm Christianity may be declining much more dramatically than intense religiosity. In other words, nominal Christians, that is, those who are Christian in name only and not in fact, who started to attend a church for whatever reason, stopped going. Their affiliation was weak -- and meaningless -- to begin with. But the number of born-again, Spirit-filled believers remains strong.
Put it another way, if the Republican Party has X number of members, but some people joined for a superficial reason (their friend did so they did to, they wanted the experience of being part of a political party, etc., etc. etc), but they leave eventually because they never took it seriously, never backed the claims whole-heartedly, etc., does that mean the Republican Party is in danger of collapsing because it has lost members? Not at all, because the committed members remain strong and will carry on.
Douthat also notes that just saying that people are no longer attending a church doesn't mean that they have become atheists. Their interest in the divine/spiritual may still be strong. They have just chosen to pursue that interest in a different way.
He has other points to make, but I won't repeat them all. Those interested can read the article here:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/29/opin ... anity.html
It's also misleading to compare statistics of today with those of the past re: religious affiliation. For example, up until the 1990s, Pew polls asked people to tick off which religion they belonged to -- Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, etc. But they did not offer a category of "none of the above" until the 1990s which means there were probably lots of people before that choosing Catholic out of that list, for example, simply because they didn't fit in any of the other categories offered. Again, we're talking about nominal Christians. Only in the last few decades, could people choose "none" as a category. But here's the thing: What the Pew poll presents is the fact that "Nones" have NO affiliation with a religious organization. It does NOT say that they have no religious beliefs. That's an important fact to consider when looking at the statistics.
For more see here:
https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/20 ... anity.html
The interesting thing is that Christianity is growing by leaps and bounds in countries that are less affluent than the U.S. Given that church attendance goes up in times of great trouble and trial (following 9/11 for example), it suggests that people realize a need for someone with greater power in difficult days. At the other end of the spectrum, we have people who, when wealthy and healthy and enjoying good times, start to think they don't need God because they can do it all. That's when we see people drift away -- it's pride which, as the Bible notes, goes before a fall!
Of course, I could have saved myself all that writing if I had just given a Biblical answer as to why we see some Americans leaving the church and turning their backs on God:
"But understand this: In the last days terrible times will come. For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, unloving, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, without love of good, traitorous, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God . . . . who are always learning but never able to come to a knowledge of the truth" (2 Tim. 3:1-4, 7).
