What's the Story in Your Neighborhood?

This week I was about to write about the troubling implications of a new survey that showed a decline in the number of Americans who identify themselves as Christians and an increase who call themselves non-religious. I was going to write about the challenge that posed for the American Church, and the likely shape of the future if trends continued. But then I read the survey. And it turns out the story reported isn't the full story.

There is a story here, in the fact that 75 percent of Americans call themselves "Christian", when in 1990 the figure was 86%. And in the fact that the number of people with "no religion" has nearly doubled in the last 18 years. It sets a tone reflected by the headlines: "Those With No Religion Fastest-Growing Tradition", "America Becoming Less Christian", and "Americans Becoming Less Religious".

But the unexplored and unexplained phenomenon in the American Religious Identification Survey is the fact that the decline in self-identifying Christians was much smaller from 2001 to 2008 than from 1992 to 2001. In the 2001 survey, self-identified Christians were 76.7 percent of the population, meaning that while the '90s saw a 9.5% decline, the last eight years saw only a .7% drop. Meanwhile, the number of self-identifying "non-religious" people climbed six full percentage points in the '90s (from 8.2% to 14.2%), but less than a percentage point since 2001 (it's now at 15%).

Does this mean we've lately seen a dramatic rise in either the number of Americans walking away from Christianity or from religion altogether? Hardly. If the trends of the '90s had continued, we would expect that by now only 2/3 of the country would call itself Christian, and that fully one-fifth would be irreligious. But that's not the picture at all.

The question, of course, is so what? Does a picture like this change the mandate of the Church at all? And the answer is, not really. Tactically these national snapshots inform the work of the church some, and the survey validates long-suspected trends that speak to the future of mainline denominations (which are losing members), the Catholic church (whose concentration has shifted from the Northeast to the American Southwest), and evangelical megachurches (they're popular, attended by more than 8 million people). And it is troubling, of course, that churches are failing to pass on the faith and the value of life in a religious community to later generations. Surveys like this one, which show the church losing ground, are convicting; they're never good news.

Yet in another sense, it doesn't change the work of the church at all. For one thing, it's rather callous for any church to regard its work as "done" the moment someone comes through the door, to adopt an attitude that as long as people self-identify as a kindred believer, we've done our jobs. The work of a church inside its walls is as important as the work outside its walls - in fact, they're two points on the same continuum. The Great Commission implies an ongoing work, not a once-for-all evangelistic invitation.

The second factor that limits the usefulness of the ARIS report at a local level is that it's a broad national snapshot and individual churches cannot, by themselves, reverse national trends. So the answer to the "so what?" question is, indeed, "so what?" Yes it's helpful to know that the public we're reaching out to is less religious than a generation ago, but the numbers aren't even high enough to say that "most" people are non-Christian or anti-religion, because that just isn't true. And even if it were true, courtesy would dictate that you appeal to someone on the basis of their individual need, knowing their personal story and circumstances, and not treat them as a generality constructed out of expectations of what's typical.

The real question - now and always - is: what's the story in your neighborhood? What are the needs of the people there? When they see and visit you, what effect does your Christian spirituality have on them? Does it attract, or repel - if it's even discernable? Is your life a silent testimony to the power of God? Are non-believing friends and neighbors more inclined toward attending a church because of you, or less? These are the relevant questions that ought to guide evangelism and outreach regardless of whether the percentage of Christians in your country is 90 percent or 9 percent.

And in another eight or nine years, when the survey is taken again, the numbers will show what the numbers will show. But do we really want to be in a position where we either threw up our hands or rested on our laurels because national averages showed we were doing our work pretty well or pretty poorly? The ARIS survey should make us neither glow with proud nor panic. It should only wake us up to the fact that we should not take for granted that our neighbor holds a theistic conception of the world. As if we needed reminding of that.