Young American evangelicals are dropping the faith

Terry Shoemaker
Sat, July 29, 2023
Abridged and modified from: The Conversation

Young evangelical Christians are facing a dilemma whether to follow in the footsteps of their parents or pursue other choices.

In the Public Religion Research Institute’s 2020 Census on American Religion, only 14% of Americans identified as white evangelical in 2020, compared with 23% in 2006.

The data also indicates a stable increase in the number of those who no longer identify as religious at all and who make up about a quarter of the American population. These statistics are even more drastic when considering age. In short, older Americans are more religious than younger Americans, while millennials do not practice or identify with any religion. With these trends, it seems that America is finally catching up with Europe.

This data is significant because although white evangelicals tend to be politically vocal, influential, and contributive to the dumbing of America, several are known to be leaving the faith.

Research continues to track the rising numbers of those defecting from religion. In Elizabeth Drescher’s 2016 book, “Choosing Our Religion,” she notes that people leaving evangelicalism “express anger and frustration with both the teachings and practices of their childhood church.” The younger evangelicals are disenchanted with their faith traditions’ staunch and divisive political positions and how theology has been used to prop up these positions.

The interviewees, all white, were typically in their late 20s to early 40s and highly critical of the Christian faith of their youth. Some completely leave their faith while others try to reform their faith from within. For the majority, church was a major part of their social life, and they described rigid expectations to defend their theology, politics and spiritual communities to outsiders. Several of them mentioned how politics had influenced the theology of white evangelicalism in the United States. One Florida evangelical who spent the majority of his early adult life as a musician in a white evangelical megachurch, said that his church preached “God, country and the Republican Party.” He was even taught as a teenager that “Jesus was definitely a Republican,” and he characterized God as “quite angry, a cosmic referee” seeking to regulate the lives of the faithful.

It thus appears that younger evangelicals are fatigued with white evangelicalism’s allegiance to the Republican Party and to specific stances on racism and sexuality. White evangelicals categorize these issues as a “culture war” for the soul of America – an internal struggle for who will define and decide the future of America. 

In short: These are, for the most part, the American southern white barbarian losers who reject the evolving demographics of the land of immigrants that the US is, and they hate everyone who is not white Anglo-Saxon protestant: Jews, Catholics, Muslims, African-Americans, native Amerindians, etc., and anyone who favors a scientific approach to living in this world: liberals, scientists, humanists, secularists and atheists.

Sarah grew up in Kentucky, spending much of her childhood in church services, Bible studies and Christian camps within a Baptist denomination. “Part of me likes the idea of church,” she says, “but I think I like the idea of just helping people more. That’s my idea of what a Christian is, someone who helps others.” Her involvement in poverty alleviation in Kentucky influenced her attitudes on how she sees white evangelicals today: “The way that the church operates in Kentucky is so backwards. It’s all about the self. About pleasing yourself. It’s all white, middle- to upper-class people watching a big screen with a full band. I think that’s probably the opposite of what Jesus wanted.”

Brandy was raised a Baptist in Tennessee. She recounts how her family actually held a religious intervention on her, with a screen, PowerPoint and projector, after she stopped attending her family’s church. She was ostracized, “I felt rejected, overlooked, looked down upon,” she says. “I felt apart from the community.”

The staunch resistance to civil unions, transgender rights and women’s equality, along with the inability of white evangelicalism to grapple with its racialized and patriarchal structures, is misaligned with some of these younger perspectives today. Replace the words “white evangelicalism” with “Iranian Islam”, and nothing would change in the preceding sentence.