Minnesota matches U.S. trend of slowing decline of Christianity

NINA MOINI: Well, our nation's churches have made it clear throughout this century that they're losing members. And it's been a part of a larger trend of declining religious life in the United States in general. But a new poll out from the Pew Research Center shows a shift-- the decline of Christianity in the US has slowed, and researchers think it may have leveled off.

So here to explain the results of the poll is Pew Research Center Senior Associate Director Greg Smith. Thanks for being here, Greg.

GREG SMITH: Thank you for having me.

NINA MOINI: And also very happy to be joined by Penny Edgell, a University of Minnesota Professor of Sociology and an advisor to this study. Thanks for being here as well, professor.

PENNY EDGELL: Oh, thank you.

NINA MOINI: Well, I just find this so fascinating. Greg, why is it important, in general, to track some of this data around religiousness in the US closely?

GREG SMITH: Well, we know religion is an important part of many people's lives in the United States. Many people tell us religion helps shape the way they approach their day-to-day tasks. And we also know that religion is related to all sorts of other elements of people's lives, including their politics and the way they think religion should interact with public life. So religion is an important part of American life, and that's why we track trends over time.

NINA MOINI: Yeah. Professor Edgell, what would you add to that from a sociological standpoint?

PENNY EDGELL: Oh, I think Greg is absolutely right. Being involved in a mainstream religious institution has been associated for with a variety of outcomes for both individuals and for local communities. It's associated with other forms of civic involvement.

It's associated with the networks of help and care that people are embedded within that create well-being. It's associated with how people construct an identity. It is increasingly associated with their political orientation, although that has changed over time. And for local communities, too, religious institutions have been key to the provision of charitable services and also are important locations for the performing arts in the local community. So these institutions are really embedded in our local communities and in people's lives in ways that matter.

NINA MOINI: Yeah. It's been integral for so long and in so many people's lives. That's why when you hear about it dropping off, Greg, we often wonder, what was replacing that for people? Where were they going to forge identity and community? Do you have any insight on that from your data?

GREG SMITH: Well, I'm not so sure we can say what any one individual is replacing religion with. But we do see in the data that a big part of what's happened in American religion is generational replacement. What I mean by that is that you have older groups of Americans, older cohorts, who, by and large, are quite religious and mostly Christian.

And as members of those cohorts have gotten older and passed away, they have been replaced in the population by new generations of young adults who've come of age with lower levels of attachment to religion than their parents and grandparents before them. So part of what's going on is people changing themselves individually religiously. But a big part of what's happening is demographic change.

NINA MOINI: Right. So we've seemed to have seen this decline over the first 25-ish years of the century and in Christianity or practicing Christianity. According to this new data, it looks like maybe we've hit the bottom of that decline? I'm curious, who's the base that's holding on to Christianity from your perspective, Professor Edgell?

PENNY EDGELL: Well, I think that that's a great question. And I don't know what Greg would say about this. We'll have a chance to hear from him, I'm sure. I do not think we've seen the bottoming out of the decline.

I think we've seen a pause. It's very clear in the Pew data that religious involvement is concentrated amongst older cohorts of Americans. And I think that what has happened recently is a lot of folks have shifted out of religion for reasons that have to do with the contemporary political and cultural environment-- people who were kind of maybe upset about what they see as the politicization of religion have already left.

And I think that trend has kind of stopped. But the cohort replacement effect-- when younger cohorts right now are markedly less religious than their parents and grandparents were. And when those folks age into adulthood and older cohorts age out of the population, I think what we're going to see is religious decline that isn't as kind of slow and continuous as we've seen in the past.

I think it's going to be lumpy. At a certain point, I think there'll simply be a kind of a fall off, unless there is any reason to think that these younger generations will become a lot more religious as they age. But I don't think they're seeing that so much in the Pew data. And when you think about the way that people become involved in institutions, it's not terribly likely.

So I do think we're going to see more decline. I don't think that religious institutions will disappear or that mainstream religion will disappear. But I do think that we are in for more change in the near to mid-term future.

NINA MOINI: That's fascinating. Greg, what do you think? Because you both mentioned age. I'm curious if there's any sort of regional, or depending where you live, or other factors that are focusing for you on who's holding on to Christianity.

GREG SMITH: Yeah. Everything Professor Edgell just said is correct. We do see differences across the country, some differences in the religious composition of people in different regions. But the long term trends are all in a direction.

We're seeing long term declines in religion in every region of the country, among men and women, among college graduates, and those with less education. These long term changes are broad based.

That's what, seeing the recent stability, that's part of what made the recent stability so striking. But you're right that it raises a question. So is the recent stability going to prove to be a lasting feature of the American religious landscape?

We can't predict the future. But there are a few things that we do know for sure. We know that older cohorts will decline as a share of the population as their members pass away.

And we also know for sure that the younger people coming up behind them are much less religious. And so that means that for lasting stability, for the stability we've seen recently to prove lasting, to take lasting hold in US religion, something would have to change. As Professor Edgell notes, either today's young adults are going to have to become a lot more religious as they get older, or we're going to have to see new generations of young adults come of age with far higher levels of religiousness than today's young adults.

Something like that is going to have to change. Otherwise, we're likely to see a resumption of the longer term downturns that we've seen over the decades.

NINA MOINI: And I am a little curious about how you measure this in a survey. Some of the questions were about how often do people pray. How did you get a feel for this in your data?

GREG SMITH: Well, this survey has dozens of questions, maybe more than 100 questions, I haven't counted them up-- about all different elements of religion and spirituality, as well as people's social and political attitudes. So we asked people a bunch of questions about their religious identities, which religious groups do they identify with.

We asked them about their religious and spiritual beliefs. We asked them what sorts of religious and spiritual practices they engage in. And the hope is that by asking a wide variety of questions about a lot of different topics, we can help paint kind of a full picture.

NINA MOINI: And, Greg, just another follow up there-- I want to see if we can narrow in a bit on Minnesota, if you would, of maybe any changes that you're seeing statistically in just the religious makeup of Minnesota.

GREG SMITH: Yeah. Minnesota's really interesting. Overall, the population of Minnesota looks a lot like the US population as a whole. About 6 in 10 adults in Minnesota describe themselves as Christians. 7% describe themselves as members or adherents of other faiths like Judaism, or Islam, or other religions.

And about 3 in 10 people in Minnesota say they have no religion. They're atheist, or agnostic, or simply nothing in particular with respect to religion. The trends in Minnesota also look a lot like the overall long term trends-- long term declines in Christianity and growth in people who have no religion.

One interesting thing that stands out about Minnesota is the high number of Lutherans. Something like a little less than a quarter of people in Minnesota describe themselves as Lutherans. And that's far higher than the national average.

NINA MOINI: Professor Edgell, as you're talking about all of these things in your classes and how religion relates to people's lives, what are you thinking about what it would take to reverse a trend like that?

PENNY EDGELL: Honestly, I don't really think about that. This is a long term trend, and there are lots of different causes. It's difficult to see how anything could intervene that would be effective.

There has been a long term shift in people's orientation towards gender roles, and sexuality, and women's roles. For example, I don't see that reversing anytime soon. And I see a lot of people-- that explains, for many people, not all-- that explains some of their critical distance from religious institutions. But that's only part of the story.

Some people don't like that religion has become more politicized. A lot of those folks, I think, have already left. But that's only part of the story.

I think the other aspect that you have to think about is once people are raised with no religious community, they're not really-- how would we think about what would motivate them to-- well, the phrase might be "to go back" to churches. But they were never there in the first place.

They've already constructed young adult lives. They've figured out how to raise their children with other kinds of social support. They have other sources for their parenting networks and all of the things that parents need to raise their children. So it's just hard to see what intervention might be practical to reverse the trend.

I think the only possible thing to think about in this space is this question of spirituality. In other parts of the survey, it's very clear that there's really high levels of spirituality in the United States.

NINA MOINI: Yeah.

PENNY EDGELL: Something like 86% of people say that. They think that people have not only a physical body, but a soul or spirit. I can't think of another single thing that 86% of Americans agree on. That's just remarkably high.

NINA MOINI: That is very fascinating, yeah.

PENNY EDGELL: Right. It's really high. And over 90% of Americans embrace some kind of spiritual belief. And the vast majority of Americans believe in God. So is there the potential there for new kinds of religious movements or new kinds of religious institutions to arise that might speak in a different kind of way to contemporary generations and people in the contemporary landscape? That's possible. But nobody can really predict the future when it comes to something like that.

NINA MOINI: That's really great context. Thank you both so much for coming on and talking with us about it. We really appreciate it.

GREG SMITH: Great to be with you.

PENNY EDGELL: Thank you.

NINA MOINI: Thank you. That was the Pew Research Center Senior Associate Director Greg Smith and University of Minnesota Sociology Professor Penny Edgell.