Adam Lee: You Wouldn't Believe How Fast Americans

are losing their religion, but the fundamentalists have a plan. Sometimes last year, the US quietly passed a milestone, demographers had long been predicting: For the first time in its history, this country is no longer majority Protestant. Fewer than 50 percent of Americans now identify as Protestant Christians of any denomination. This change has come on surprisingly recently, and from a historical perspective, with breathtaking speed. As recently as 1993, almost two thirds of Americans identified as Protestants, a number that had remained stable for the several preceding decades. But sometime in the 1990s, the ground started to shift, and it's been sliding ever since. Whether it's the mainline Protestant denominations, like Methodists, Episcopalians, Lutherans or Presbyterians, or the independent evangelical, charismatic and fundamentalist sects, the decline is happening across the board. The rise of so-called mega-churches, like Rick Warren's Saddle-back Church in California, or Mark Driscoll's Mars Hill in Seattle, represents not growth, but consolidation. What's happening to these vanishing Protestants? For the most part, they're not converting to any other religion, but rather are walking away from religion entirely. They're becoming "nones," as the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life puts it. It seems likely, that this is the same secularizing trend being observed in Europe, as people of advanced, peaceful democracies find religion increasingly irrelevant to their daily lives. The spokespeople of the religious right, have noticed this trend as well, but it's clear they have very little idea what to do about it. In a column from 2005, Albert Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, declared that theological liberalism is at fault for Christianity's decline, and that the only thing they need to do to reverse it, is to make a bold commitment to biblical authority. Far from it, the evidence is clear that churches clinging to antiquated dogma are part of the problem, as young people turn away from their strident decrees about gays and women. But the foot-soldiers of fundamentalism haven't been entirely idle these past few decades. As their power declines in America and Europe, they're increasingly moving abroad, to developing countries not as far along the secularization curve, where they often find a more receptive audience.