Major Religious Groups Continue to Lose Members

In the high-stakes game of denominational musical chairs, the big winner of the ‘90s may be no church at all.

A new study on religious mobility in America has found that many Americans have given up the religious tradition they grew up with and not replaced it, or have turned to another form of religion.

Catholics and conservative Protestants are the most loyal, but even large segments of their memberships are showing increasingly marginal ties to their denominations, researchers say in the latest issue of the Review of Religious Research.

The social pressure to belong to an organized religious group, which reached its height in the 1950s, doesn’t seem to apply.

“It’s become quite acceptable these days to be nothing throughout your life,” said C. Kirk Hadaway of the United Church Board of Homeland Ministries. “It doesn’t really matter what you are anymore.”

In the study “All in the Family: Religious Mobility in America,” Hadaway and sociologist Penny Long Marler of Samford University in Birmingham, Ala., looked at religious switching patterns from 1973 to 1990 based on General Social Survey interviews collected by the National Opinion Research Center in Chicago.

In that period, conservative Protestants, such as Southern Baptists and members of the Assemblies of God, surpassed Catholics as the group most likely to stay in the religious tradition they were raised in. In surveys from 1988 to 1990, 83% of adults raised as conservative Protestants said they remained conservative Protestants, compared to 81% of Roman Catholics who stayed in the Catholic Church. The percentages were nearly reversed in surveys taken from 1973 to 1976.

In the most recent survey, liberal Protestants including Episcopalians and Presbyterians were least likely to stay within the denominational family, with only 63% of individuals surveyed between 1988 and 1990 saying they remained liberal Protestants. The loyalty rate for moderate Protestants was slightly higher at 67%.

When it comes to the net effect of religious switching, Hadaway found that all the nation’s major religious groups lost members. The net loss ranged from 1% for conservative Protestant groups to 16% for moderate Protestant groups, which included the United Methodist Church and other denominations that have endured dramatic membership losses in the last two decades.

Liberal Protestant denominations lost 2%, and the Catholic Church experienced a net loss of 10%.

The big gains from religious switching came in the “other” and “none” categories.

There was an 86% increase in individuals switching to no religious affiliation in the surveys from 1988 to 1990. Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Christian Scientists had a net gain of 33% through religious switching.

Sociological trends such as the decline of the traditional family, one of the “bread-and-butter” constituencies most likely to pass on the faith to future generations, increases the gravity of the challenges faced by the nation’s largest churches, researchers said.

“The current situation poses serious problems and concerns for all denominations,” Marler and Hadaway say.

Sociologists Benton Johnson of the University of Oregon and William McKinney of Hartford Seminary said the study findings are consistent with other research indicating the loosening of religious ties in the newest generations.

McKinney said there are signs that mainline Protestant denominations, such as the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and the United Methodist Church, which were hit with the first wave of steep membership declines showing the weakness of “inherited religion,” are starting to address the issues of passing on the faith to future generations.

Work on updating church hymnals, developing statements of faith and involving congregations in major church policy pronouncements instead of developing them on high from national headquarters indicate “a new kind of realism” among mainline congregations, he said.

But Hadaway and Marler appear to be less optimistic.

They say mainline churches have tended to rely on the children of members and the hope that dropouts will return when they marry, but at the same time have neglected church school “and other aspects of religious socialization that could help translate those hopes into reality.”