The Rise of Non-denominational Christianity

Ryan Burge is a sociologist of religion and he has an interesting graph on his website. It'll come as no surprise to anyone who's been tuned into what's going on in the Christian church for the past decade or two, but it might be a surprise to those who haven't been paying much attention.

Here's Burge:

A lot of what I do is talk about decline. I am painfully aware of that fact. Religious attendance is down in the United States. The proportion of young people who identify as Christian has declined significantly over the last couple of decades. The share of Americans who don’t believe in God has risen, as has the share of folks who take an agnostic view of God. Many religious groups are significantly smaller now than they were twenty years ago....

· However, there is one group that is much larger and is growing. It’s not really a denomination. And it’s not really a tradition. They are united by what they reject - that is the idea of organized denominations. I always tell people that the rise of the nones (those who reject religion entirely) is the biggest story in the faith space. But the second most important story is the rise of the nons - that is those folks who identify as non-denominational Christians.

In the early 1970s, non-denominational Protestants were little more than a rounding error. Just 2% of all respondents said that they were non-denominational - it was 3% of the Protestant sample. You could forgive any religious demographer for ignoring this part of the sample.

Both figures slowly began to increase over the next couple of decades. But, really noticeable growth would not begin until the mid-1990s. By 2000, about 10% of all Protestants and 5% of the entire sample were non-denominational.

By 2010, the percentage of Protestants who were non-denominational would rise to about 20% and they were about 10% of all Americans. In the most recent survey, which was collected in 2022 - one in three Protestants did not identify with a denomination like Southern Baptists or Evangelical Lutherans. That was a twelve point increase from just a few years earlier.

Here's the graph:

Nearly 35% of all protestants identify as non-denominational as of three years ago and the trajectory appears to have been almost straight up. What do the numbers look like today? What will they look like by 2030? If I may be permitted a prediction based on nothing more than a hunch and perhaps some wishful thinking, I think the decline in the overall numbers of Christians is soon going to bottom out, if it hasn't already, and begin to reverse.

People are looking for something that can put meaning, hope, and objective moral values into their lives and the secular worldview does not, and cannot, offer any of these. We may well be on the threshhold of another "Great Awakening."