The prayers are coming from non-traditional and uncounted pews.

I am not certain the story is quite as positive as the following article suggests but I am certain that the media driven insistence on the increasing irrelevance of religion is quite incorrect. From New Harvard Research Says U.S. Christianity Is Not Shrinking, But Growing Stronger by Glenn T. Stanton.

“Meanwhile, a widespread decline in churchgoing and religious affiliation had contributed to a growing anxiety among conservative believers.” Statements like this are uttered with such confidence and frequency that most Americans accept them as uncontested truisms. This one emerged just this month in an exceedingly silly article in The Atlantic on Vice President Mike Pence.

Religious faith in America is going the way of the Yellow Pages and travel maps, we keep hearing. It’s just a matter of time until Christianity’s total and happy extinction, chortle our cultural elites. Is this true? Is churchgoing and religious adherence really in “widespread decline” so much so that conservative believers should suffer “growing anxiety”?

Two words: Absolutely not.

New research published late last year by scholars at Harvard University and Indiana University Bloomington is just the latest to reveal the myth. This research questioned the “secularization thesis,” which holds that the United States is following most advanced industrial nations in the death of their once vibrant faith culture. Churches becoming mere landmarks, dance halls, boutique hotels, museums, and all that.

Not only did their examination find no support for this secularization in terms of actual practice and belief, the researchers proclaim that religion continues to enjoy “persistent and exceptional intensity” in America. These researchers hold our nation “remains an exceptional outlier and potential counter example to the secularization thesis.”

What Accounts for the Difference in Perceptions?

How can their findings appear so contrary to what we have been hearing from so many seemingly informed voices? It comes down primarily to what kind of faith one is talking about. Not the belief system itself, per se, but the intensity and seriousness with which people hold and practice that faith.

Mainline churches are tanking as if they have super-sized millstones around their necks. Yes, these churches are hemorrhaging members in startling numbers, but many of those folks are not leaving Christianity. They are simply going elsewhere. Because of this shifting, other very different kinds of churches are holding strong in crowds and have been for as long as such data has been collected. In some ways, they are even growing. This is what this new research has found.

The percentage of Americans who attend church more than once a week, pray daily, and accept the Bible as wholly reliable and deeply instructive to their lives has remained absolutely, steel-bar constant for the last 50 years or more, right up to today. These authors describe this continuity as “patently persistent.”

The percentage of such people is also not small. One in three Americans prays multiple times a day, while one in 15 do so in other countries on average. Attending services more than once a week continues to be twice as high among Americans compared to the next highest-attending industrial country, and three times higher than the average comparable nation.

One-third of Americans hold that the Bible is the actual word of God. Fewer than 10 percent believe so in similar countries. The United States “clearly stands out as exceptional,” and this exceptionalism has not been decreasing over time. In fact, these scholars determine that the percentages of Americans who are the most vibrant and serious in their faith is actually increasing a bit, “which is making the United States even more exceptional over time.”

This also means, of course, that those who take their faith seriously are becoming a markedly larger proportion of all religious people. In 1989, 39 percent of those who belonged to a religion held strong beliefs and practices. Today, these are 47 percent of all the religiously affiliated. This all has important implications for politics, indicating that the voting bloc of religious conservatives is not shrinking, but actually growing among the faithful. The declining influence of liberal believers at the polls has been demonstrated in many important elections recently.

It used to be said that the Anglican church was the Tory party at prayer. Similarly, one might claim over the past fifty years that the mainstream Protestant churches are the center-left Democratic party at prayer.

And they are collapsing. I am a member of one which remains strong and vibrant but I see the issues all around. A conviction that the personal is political. That Republicans are the morally suspect party. A narrow and fervid interest in a sliver of historically marginalized groups at the expense of the congregation at large. No wonder traditional believers are no longer finding a home in the mainstream churches. As Stanton notes, the refugees from the increasingly politicized mainstream churches are not losing faith, they are simply having to relocate in order to actually find it.

I think the secular left leaning triumphalists are wrong to herald a material decline in religious belief but I also suspect Stanton is a little over-optimistic in his argument. People are seeking faith and religious fulfillment but all the old institutions have fallen to the Gramscian fifth columns. It makes measuring and tracking much harder than it used to be but I am confident that the religious are as prevalent and as committed as they long have been, even if their prayers are offered from non-traditional pews.