By Joe Carter, TGC. (Photo: Jakub Żerdzicki/Unsplash)
Here are two headlines you might have seen recently. In September, Barna Group announced, “Young Adults Lead a Resurgence in Church Attendance,” with Gen Z and millennials attending more frequently than they did during the pandemic. Then, in November, Gallup reported, “Drop in U.S. Religiosity Among Largest in World,” with the percentage of Americans who say religion is important to their daily life falling 17 points over the past decade, from 66 percent in 2015 to just 49 percent today.
So which is it? Is Christianity in America experiencing a resurgence or a collapse?
The honest answer is that it depends on what you’re measuring, how you’re framing it, and which slice of the population you’re examining. The Barna data tracks young adults who already attend church and measures whether they’re coming more often. The Gallup data measures the broader population and whether religion matters to their daily lives. Both can be technically accurate while pointing in opposite directions. And yet American Christians are likely to remember only the one that matched their mood.
This is precisely the problem with watching religious trends. And it’s the reason, after two decades of writing about such trends, I’ve become hesitant to give them much weight. We evangelicals tend to get too enamored with religious trends, both the encouraging ones and the discouraging. We read too much into data that confirms our hopes or validates our fears.
There are at least three reasons we should hold these trends more loosely.
Trends Often Don’t Mean What We Think
Consider a seemingly unrelated example. If I asked you whether gun violence in America increased or decreased between 2002 and 2011, you might look at the gun-related homicide rate and conclude that things stayed roughly the same—about four deaths per 100,000 people throughout that decade.
But you’d be missing something important.
Read here.