By Michael Bell
I must admit I am quite embarrassed. I had done a couple of studies looking at the growth or decline in Evangelicals in North America. In one, I had great numbers showing the growth of Evangelicals in Canada from 1980-2000. In another I showed the growth of the Christian and Missionary Alliance in the U.S and talked about a great tool for measuring numerical denominational growth.
I think it was the strong performance of the Evangelicals in Canada that made me discount many of the recent anecdotal stories of people leaving the church. So I blogged on that assumption, trying to put a positive spin on situation saying that people were replacing the leavers just as fast as they were leaving, and that the situation was not as bad as people were making out. To reinforce my thinking in the subject, no one was challenging me with any real statistical data. So I continued on repeating my views all over the blogosphere.
U.S. Evangelicals Legend
Today I thought I should take another look at the tool that I had mentioned previously. This time instead of looking at individual denominations, I looked at Evangelical Protestants as whole. I was quite shocked by what I saw. When I compared Evangelical Protestants in 1990 with Evangelical Protestants in 2000, I saw quite a significant decline. The differences, especially in the South East are quite stunning. The legend at the right shows that as a color lightens, the number of evangelicals in a region goes down. As you can see there is a significant lightening across a broad section of the country.
U.S. Evangelicals 1990
U.S. Evangelicals 2000
In my next blog post I will try to look a little bit more at what this means, and how this trend might be able to be reversed. A question for our readers: What do you think has been causing this decline? I will respond to your comments on the weekend.
Michael Bell
Joshua Hearne
Tim Melton
Joel Black
Nov 21, 2008 at 2:10 am
could it simply be birthrate — in a decade, older people died off, and were not replaced by an equivalent number of dedicated churchgoers? US birth rate DID drop, non?
Nov 24, 2008 at 5:58 pm
[...] has been the result? As I have pointed out in previous posts, while the American Evangelical church has been declining, the Canadian Evangelical Church has [...]
Mar 16, 2009 at 6:14 pm
[...] Much to my surprise, the decline in evangelicals in the U.S. has already begun. The Association of Religious Data Archives (ARDA) lets you generate maps to visibly see the changes. The maps shown here show the difference in Evangelicals between 1990 and 2000. Note how the colors have lightened over 10 years, particularly in the south-east. [...]