American involvement in organized religion continues to wane
The data on the decline in church membership shares “almost exactly the same pattern of ups and downs” as engagement in secular civil society, said political scientist Robert Putnam.
A new Gallup report found that only half of Americans say they belong to a religious congregation.
“U.S. church membership was 70% or higher from 1937 through 1976, falling modestly to an average of 68% in the 1970s through the 1990s,” Jeffrey M. Jones wrote on Gallup’s website. “The past 20 years have seen an acceleration in the drop-off, with a 20-percentage-point decline since 1999 and more than half of that change occurring since the start of the current decade.”
That lines up with an overall lack of interest in belonging, according to Harvard University political scientist Robert Putnam, whose 2000 book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, argued that Americans have been engaging less and less in communal activities such as bowling leagues, Rotary clubs, gardening clubs, or book clubs, since the 1960s. The data on the decline in church membership shares “almost exactly the same pattern of ups and downs” as engagement in secular civil society, Putnam said.
