This Memo concerns not some breaking story but a potential scenario about U.S. "evangelical" Protestants that reporters on both the politics and religion beats should be watching.
For the umpteenth time we revisit the definition of this vibrant but challenged movement and its relation to a Republican Party that the secularized Donald Trump continues to dominate.
(See The Guy's effort at defining evangelicalism here, and remember that most media discussions involve White evangelicals only, since Black and Hispanic evangelicals are very different politically. And click here for a wave of tmatt posts on this topic.)
GetReligion team member Ryan Burge, an energetic political scientist who posts interesting data most days of the week, tweeted the chart at the top of this post on Sept. 16th showing how self-identified evangelicals described their own church attendance over a dozen years in Cooperative Election Study polling.
There's a clear developing trend. As recently as 2008, 58.6% of self-identified evangelicals said they worshiped weekly or more often, but less than half (49.9%) by 2020.
Over the same years, evangelicals who "seldom" or "never" attended grew from 16.1% to 26.7%. The slide did not begin with the Trump presidency but was already at work, since in 2016 the weekly-or-mores were down to 52.9% and seldom-or-nevers up to 22.6%.
The Guy considers attendance a good barometer of devotion, as a historically central value inside the evangelical subculture. We can speculate that similar downward slides might be occurring with other bonding activities in the evangelical tradition such as adult Bible classes, prayer meetings, small groups, daily devotions, evangelistic revivals and charity projects.
The numbers surely reflect the nation's 21st Century secularization. But Burge reaches the provocative conclusion that they mean evangelical "is not a religious term anymore." (What substitute word would suffice? There's a story theme for you.) Certain movement insiders have argued that a different label is needed because the term has taken on such a heavy Republican -- and Trumpublican -- flavor.
In other words, "evangelicals by belief" — gauged at 18% of U.S. adults last year in a Southern Baptist survey — are a subset within a larger population that includes Americans who are not necessarily pious in activity or orthodox in belief but accept this as a conservative societal marker.
The Trump factor brings us to Pew Research Center's significant data last week from polling after the 2016 and 2020 elections using the same pool of respondents in its American Trends Panel.
A July Public Religion Research Institute poll, critiqued here, portrayed evangelical shrinkage. But Pew finds instead a slight uptick (click here for info), with 25% of White adults calling themselves evangelical or born-again Protestants in 2016 and 29% in 2020.
Moreover, Pew reports "solid evidence that white Americans who viewed Trump favorably and did not identify as evangelicals in 2016 were much more likely than white Trump skeptics to begin identifying as born-again or evangelical Protestants by 2020."
Though many suppose Trump linkage damages evangelicalism, 16% of those who did not consider themselves evangelicals in 2016 — but liked Trump — had embraced the evangelical label by 2020. Meanwhile there's only weak evidence that White evangelicals who opposed Trump in 2016 were forsaking this religious identification by 2020.
Two important notes on interpretation. Remember that these polls document self-identification, not actual church participation or affiliation. Also, Pew's survey occurred last November 12-17, before President Trump spurned the state certifications and resulting Electoral College ballot that made Joseph Biden president, and January 6 events when some of his supporters rioted in an attempt to keep Congress from certifying the U.S. voters' choice.
Questions?
* Are we entering an era of more "evangelicals" and fewer evangelical churchgoers?
* Are we seeing a broad non-sectarian movement that surrounds a core of specific religious beliefs?
* How might things play out if "evangelicalism" is subtly secularizing and declining as a spiritual force even as it succeeds as a socio-political phenomenon?