The Death of Religion? - Juicy Ecumenism

The claim that American religion is collapsing has become a standing feature of media coverage and academic commentary. In The Death of Religion? authors Byron R. Johnson, a social science professor at Baylor University, and Thomas S. Kidd, a church history professor at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, examine that claim and find it overstated. Drawing on survey data, congregational research, and the Global Flourishing Study, they argue that religious life is changing rather than disappearing, and that standard measures often miss the extent of continued practice.

Johnson and Kidd rely upon several large surveys that measure overlapping but distinct aspects of religious life and well-being. The Global Flourishing Study, a $43.4 million longitudinal project directed by Johnson and Tyler VanderWeele of Harvard and conducted with Gallup and the Center for Open Science, tracks more than 200,000 people across 22 countries. Its first-wave findings were presented at a launch event on April 30, 2025, at Gallup World Headquarters in Washington, DC. Pew Research Center’s Religious Landscape Studies, supported by The Pew Charitable Trusts and partners including the Lilly Endowment and Templeton Religion Trust, have surveyed tens of thousands of U.S. adults over successive waves and document affiliation, belief, and religious switching. Gallup’s World Poll and other national datasets provide additional cross-checks on attendance and identification.

The Pew survey has documented substantial movement among churches and denominations, with many Americans no longer attending the tradition in which they were raised. This switching is often cited as evidence of institutional weakness, but Johnson and Kidd read it differently. If religion had become peripheral, they contend, few would make the effort to leave one community and join another that better matches their convictions or circumstances.

The rise of the Nones, those who report no particular religious affiliation, has received extensive attention, but Johnson and Kidd observe that the category is more varied than the label suggests. Most are not atheists or agnostics. Many affirm belief in God or a higher power and report prayer or other spiritual practices, and a minority attend religious services. The authors also document many congregations that fall outside standard categories. These “Others,” concentrated among evangelical, Pentecostal, nondenominational, and immigrant churches, have been undercounted in some local studies by 25 to 40 percent, so the picture registers losses among older denominations while overlooking growth elsewhere.

Johnson and Kidd place the present moment in a longer American pattern. From the colonial period forward, observers have predicted the demise of Christianity, worrying about “Nothingarians,” indifference, and the decline of particular confessions, each time mistaking shifts in affiliation or institutional form for disappearance. The authors argue the same misreading occurs today when the contraction of mainline Protestantism is taken to represent American religion as a whole. Nominal identification has fallen, yet roughly two-thirds of adults still identify as Christian, and atheism and agnosticism have remained comparatively stable.

The book’s most direct evidence on the consequences of religious practice comes from the Global Flourishing Study. Across physical and mental health, close relationships, meaning and purpose, character, and material stability, active religious participation emerges as the strongest and most consistent predictor of flourishing. The association appears in multiple countries and is not limited to older respondents. Religiously active young adults in the United States, for example, report higher well-being than their nonreligious peers. Johnson and Kidd present this as a corrective to accounts that treat faith as a source of division or a residual practice in decline.

The authors do not claim that every religious institution is growing or every community of faith is healthy. They acknowledge losses among some denominations and note that some self-identified evangelicals attend infrequently. Their point is narrower: the evidence does not support the conclusion that religion in America is collapsing, and regular participation is associated with measurable advantages for individuals and communities. If practicing congregations are more numerous and consequential than conventional counts indicate, then legal and policy debates that treat religious institutions as marginal or fading rest on an incomplete picture.

The Death of Religion? is written for a general audience while remaining grounded in the authors’ fields, church history and the social scientific study of religion. It does not defend any single tradition or minimize the challenges facing particular churches. Instead, it offers a careful reading of the numbers that have shaped public discussion and shows why they have often been interpreted more dramatically than the patterns warrant. Readers who have followed the coverage of the Nones will find a clear account of what the surveys record and the congregations they have missed. The book’s central claim is that American religion continues to matter in ways the dominant narrative of decline has not registered.