Lazy Conclusions about Decline Aren’t Helpful
The headlines make it all sound so clear and simple. Churches have experienced or are experiencing decline because …
they got too political
they became progressive
they were overly fundamentalist
they signed on to Christian nationalism
they abandoned orthodoxy
they alienated young people
they allowed liberals to secularize everything.
The problem with these headlines isn’t that they’re totally wrong. It’s that they are incomplete. They each tell a slice of a bigger, more complex story. To say that progressivism or the MAGA movement alone has caused church decline is lazy reporting at best. But at worst, such lax analysis is a cheap attempt to bolster one’s status as a “truth-teller” at the expense of the truth.
News organizations are guilty of feeding this over-simplistic analysis in various ways. Here’s a sampling of headlines that point toward lazy conclusions:
“A year of Trump is backfiring on the religious right” [1]
“Pope Leo has stirred awake a progressive Christianity. It can rise again” [2]
“Claims of Christian revival ‘laid to rest’ as churchgoing falls” [3]
“Christianity declines among U.S. adults while ‘religiously unaffiliated’ grows” [4]
Again, these headlines all point in directions worth exploring. They help uncover pieces of a broad mosaic. But for those with agendas, these bits of reporting get filtered down and diluted into simplistic, monolithic stories. Substack articles and social-media posts grab what confirms preexisting biases and amplifies what their primary audience already believes.
The full picture of church decline in America, however, is far bigger. The Pew Research Center, for example, does extensive work to examine trends in North American Christianity. [5] You can examine the data for yourself, but it’s clear from their research that the trends of decline are long-standing and broad-based. No single church or denomination has escaped this decline or is totally responsible for it. (There are a few interesting exceptions, notably among churches filled with recent immigrants.)
What stands out is that mainline denominations are losing a lot of members. In 2007, 18.1% of American adults claimed to be part of a mainline Protestant church, compared with 26.3% who claimed to be part of an evangelical Protestant church. In 2024, those numbers had dropped to 11.5% and 23.1%, respectively. Mainline churches have been in decline for a while, but that decline has sped up in recent years.
Why is this? This is where we need to step back from casual observations and lazy analysis. Instead, we need to return to bedrock principles of congregational health and church leadership. Can the problem of decline be explained in ways that lift it from the current milieu and set it in a broader context? Do churches only shrink and die when progressives take over? Would religious nationalism help churches find their footing?
In 1981, Robert Dale published a short tome entitled To Dream Again: How to Help Your Church Come Alive (Broadman Press). Amazingly, congregations in the 1970s and 1980s faced existential threats, too. While our society back then might have been more receptive overall to the Christian message, and thereby more forgiving of church missteps and foibles, the threat of congregations losing their way and dying was still very real.
Dale was a Southern Baptist professor of pastoral leadership and church ministry. He knew the challenges of building and sustaining a healthy church. And he realized that most congregations eventually lose impetus and need renewal so as not to decline sharply and die.
Many churches throughout the centuries have ceased to exist. To assume defunct churches were filled with bad people, bad theology and lousy preachers is to miss the point. All churches, without exception, must eventually seek renewal or die.
Dale suggests there are four ways to attempt a church’s revitalization, the first three of which are most commonly tried: (a) change church policy; (b) change ministers or personnel; (c) change programs and ministry structures; (d) clarify the church’s purpose and act with unity toward that single purpose. Dale’s proposal, quite obviously, is the fourth one, and I concur with this. The first three, he argues, tend only to worsen the decline rather than alleviate it.
But let’s ponder the three most common paths for a moment. What do church leaders typically do when faced with the prospect of stagnation or decline? They nervously say, “We need to change something!” And often they do. They push aside their long-standing ministry team and bring in a young minister. They go to a conference and start an expensive new program. Or they make a policy change that they think will attract new people.
In thinking about our contemporary scene, I regularly ponder: how many shrinking churches today have embraced a new ideology or a shift in their belief system because they were trying to stem decline? In other words, might they be applying Dale’s first strategy from 1981? They are “changing church policy” to renew their church.
So please: hear me out with regard to our situation today. A shift toward more “progressive” church policies or an embrace of a “MAGA” agenda may not be the cause of decline. It is likely a stab at reversing decline. Misguided efforts at fixing a problem are still problematic, but they aren’t necessarily the root cause of the problem.
Lazy conclusions about the causes of church decline aren’t helpful. They miss the fact that causation and correlation are two different things. A more thoughtful approach would be to go back to the basic idea of building a healthy church and then constantly renewing it. This is the idea propagated by Robert Dale and many others. I wish casual commentators would take the time to understand the important reality that the desperate symptoms of decline are not usually the root causes.
[1] https://www.vox.com/politics/488587/trump-religious-right-christian-nationalism-biblical-christian-nation-religion-prayer-250
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/apr/26/pope-leo-trump-hegseth-christianity
[3] https://www.thetimes.com/uk/religion/article/christian-revival-churchgoing-falls-mp6wxvsc5
[4] https://www.npr.org/2025/02/26/nx-s1-5298180/christianity-declines-among-u-s-adults-while-religiously-unaffiliated-grows-study-says
[5] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/02/26/religious-landscape-study-religious-identity/
