Don't count your atheists before they're hatched

So this is good news, right? The secular faction is growing and the Christian right faction is shrinking. It’s all downhill from here.

Unfortunately, as Sarah Posner at Religion Dispatches ably demonstrates, that’s probably not correct. While it’s true that many Catholics and mainline Protestants have apparently switched to “unaffiliated” (which could mean many things) the evangelicals haven’t missed a beat:

Evangelicals…have seen their share of the adult population drop very slightly (less than a one percent drop, but still around a quarter of the U.S. adult population). But their overall numbers are up because they have experienced net gains from religious switching. Here “evangelical” includes the Southern Baptist Convention, the Assemblies of God, Churches of Christ, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, the Presbyterian Church in America, and “0ther evangelical denominations and many nondenominational congregations.” Sixty-two million Americans fall into this demographic, two million more than in 2007, according to the Pew Survey.

That’s two million more people, the large majority of whom are presumably social conservatives than in 2007.

Posner points out that we don’t know what all this means in terms of political orthodoxy, because that part of the Pew Poll won’t be released until later in the year. It’s always possible that the evangelical community has had a revelation and are no longer socially conservative, but I wouldn’t count on it. And they may have adopted some more populist economic stances which would be a good thing. But we just don’t know at this point.

Posner also draws our attention to a little noticed Pew Poll from last year which shows a “growing appetite” for combining religion and politics:

As I wrote at the time, the poll found “those affiliated with a religion, particularly evangelicals, Protestants, and Catholics, ‘have become significantly more supportive of churches and other houses of worship speaking out about political issues and political leaders talking more often about religion.’”

Again, if the idea is that they are following Pope Francis’ teachings on poverty, great news. But let’s just say I haven’t seen much evidence of that, and a lot of evidence that they are very excited by the prospect of “religious liberty” political crusades. Posner points to studies showing that they have actually evolved over many decades of political involvement into a movement based on a “narrative of Christian nationalism.” She also notes that this might be what has driven some people out of their traditional religious homes. Unfortunately, the unaffiliated don’t have a shared identity or common institutions the way the Christian conservatives do, so they may not be much of a political counterweight.