{"id":1526,"date":"2013-03-18T13:42:00","date_gmt":"2013-03-18T13:42:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2013\/03\/you-wouldnt-believe-how-fast-americans-are-losing-their-religion-but-the-fundamentalists-have-a-plan.html"},"modified":"2013-03-18T13:42:00","modified_gmt":"2013-03-18T13:42:00","slug":"you-wouldnt-believe-how-fast-americans-are-losing-their-religion-but-the-fundamentalists-have-a-plan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2013\/03\/you-wouldnt-believe-how-fast-americans-are-losing-their-religion-but-the-fundamentalists-have-a-plan.html","title":{"rendered":"You Wouldn’t Believe How Fast Americans Are Losing Their Religion — But the Fundamentalists Have a Plan"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

<\/p>\n

Sometime last year, the US quietly passed a milestone demographers had long been predicting:\u00a0for the first time in its history, this country is no longer majority Protestant<\/a>. Fewer than 50 percent of Americans now identify as Protestant Christians of any denomination.<\/span><\/div>\n
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>, a number that had remained stable for the several preceding decades. But sometime in the 1990s, the ground started to shift, and it\u2019s been sliding ever since. Whether it\u2019s the \u201cmainline\u201d 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\u00a0megachurches<\/a>, like Rick Warren\u2019s Saddleback Church in California or Mark Driscoll\u2019s Mars Hill in Seattle, represents not growth, but consolidation.<\/span><\/div>\n
What\u2019s happening to these vanishing Protestants? For the most part, they\u2019re not converting to any other religion, but rather are walking away from religion entirely. They\u2019re becoming \u201d\u00a0nones<\/a>,\u201d 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.<\/span><\/div>\n
Read the rest here<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sometime last year, the US quietly passed a milestone demographers had long been predicting:\u00a0for 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2251,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1526","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nYou Wouldn't Believe How Fast Americans Are Losing Their Religion -- But the Fundamentalists Have a Plan<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Sometime last year, the US quietly passed a milestone demographers had long been predicting: for the first time in its history, this country is no\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2013\/03\/you-wouldnt-believe-how-fast-americans-are-losing-their-religion-but-the-fundamentalists-have-a-plan.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"You Wouldn't Believe How Fast Americans Are Losing Their Religion -- But the Fundamentalists Have a Plan\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Sometime last year, the US quietly passed a milestone demographers had long been predicting: for the first time in its history, this country is no\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2013\/03\/you-wouldnt-believe-how-fast-americans-are-losing-their-religion-but-the-fundamentalists-have-a-plan.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Rhetoric Race and Religion\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2013-03-18T13:42:00+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Andre E. 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