Promise and Peril: The History of American Religiosity and Its Recent Decline

Key Points

American religiosity is in rapid decline according to numerous measures.
However, Americans today remain more religious than many other countries and, by some measures, more religious than at many times in American history.
Alongside decline in the extent of religious belief and behavior, the social, political, and legal environment in America has become less hospitable to virtually all forms of religion over the past 75 years.
The most likely causes of declining religiosity are the increasingly intense role that more and more secularized educational institutions play in children’s lives and the continuing delay and decline of marriage.

Executive Summary

Religion has always been a vital part of American identity, with entire libraries written about Americans’ distinctively religious behaviors. But basic facts about American religious history, and implications for American religion today, remain widely unknown. This report will present a wide range of new data on the history of religion and religiosity in America, discuss causes of changes over time, and explain what it all implies for American society today and in the future.

By any measure, religiosity in America is declining. As this report will show, since peaking in 1960, the share of American adults attending any religious service in a typical week has fallen from 50 percent to about 35 percent, while the share claimed as members by any religious body has fallen from over 75 percent to about 62 percent. Finally, the share of Americans who self-identify or report being affiliated with any religion has fallen from over 95 percent to about 75 percent. All these statistics, and where they come from, will be explained in detail in this report.

The present decline is striking in its speed and uniformity across different measures of religiosity. But a longer historical perspective suggests some caution in making overbold statements about what such a decline might portend. At the dawn of the American republic in the 1780s, probably just a third of Americans were members in any religious body, and just a fifth could be found at church on a given Sunday. This was a historic low ebb in American religiosity. Thus, in some important ways, America today is more religious than it was two centuries ago—and indeed at any point between 1750 and 1930.

But the perception of an increasingly secular society is not wrong. Even in past periods when religious attendance and membership were low, other forms of religious attachment were still robust: More than 85 or 90 percent of Americans most likely perceived themselves as religious in some form or fashion in all periods before 1960. They were hard-drinking, sometimes murderous, rapscallions, gamblers, and slavers, who did not go to church and were not part of any religious body.

But, if you asked, the vast majority of Americans would most likely say they at least believed in God and quite likely would identify themselves as Christians. More than two-thirds of baby boys received religious names, and before 1800, virtually all babies born in America had church baptisms, dedications, or christenings. Furthermore, early America was dominated by formal, official religion. Most of the 13 colonies had established religions, and legal favoritism for some religious groups continued in various forms and places until at least the 1950s.

Today, all this has changed. More Americans have no religious identity at all. A quarter do not identify with any religion, less than a third are given names connected to any religion, and America’s legal environment is increasingly secular, explicitly limiting support for religion.

Indeed, that changing legal and policy environment may be the cause of declining religiosity. Research on determinants of religiosity has found two contrasting results. First, explicitly sectarian governance, such as having a state religion, tends to reduce religiosity, because it reduces the competitiveness and diversity of the religious marketplace. Second, expansions in government service provision and especially increasingly secularized government control of education significantly drive secularization and can account for virtually the entire increase in secularization around the developed world. The decline in religiosity in America is not the product of a natural change in preferences, but an engineered outcome of clearly identifiable policy choices in the past.

Introduction

In June 1564, a group of French Protestants, called Huguenots, landed on the banks of the St. Johns River in north Florida. After fleeing the religious wars and persecution of Roman Catholic–dominated France, they established a settlement they called Fort Caroline. Life was hard for these settlers. An earlier attempt in 1562 had been a miserable failure and ended in cannibalism.

But when Spain, another Catholic country that happened to claim Florida as its own, learned of the settlement, it dispatched the conquistador Pedro Menéndez de Avilés to drive away any intruders encroaching on Spanish lands. Menéndez’s forces vastly outnumbered and outgunned the Huguenots, but the religious dissenters managed to win the first naval engagement near Fort Caroline. Unfortunately, when they pursued the Spanish fleet, their ships were blown off course, and many sank. Spanish forces marched overland, captured Fort Caroline, and butchered its inhabitants. When the remainder of the Huguenot fleet surrendered, the captives were summarily executed despite promises of clemency.

When the wider European public learned of the massacre, they were shocked by its brutality, even by the violent standards of the French wars of religion. Undeterred, the Spanish forces then established St. Augustine, the oldest continually inhabited place in America. America’s first experiment in religious refuge was not the successful experience of Pilgrims at Plymouth, but the massacres at Fort Caroline.

So begins the story of American religious tolerance, a story of promise and peril. European religious dissenters hoped to find a New World, free from old threats to their faiths. But often, they found the same savagery as they faced in the Old World.

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