Pew Research recently released a very worrying report for Catholics in America, showing a drastic decline since 2014. Many people, including Trent Horn, made videos sounding the alarms to try and raise awareness. Joe shows that the data may not be as bleak as we think…

Transcript:

Joe:

Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer and I want to explore the question of whether an American Catholic revival is underway, whether the American Catholic Church is dying. Because if you do something like Google Catholic Church droves, at least in my experience, the top two results are a video explaining why Catholics are leaving the church in droves and why young men are joining the Catholic Church in droves. And you might be saying, well, which of those is right? And the answer in part is both of them. So it’s not just the first two videos you pull up when you Google this, you’ll find all sorts of seemingly contradictory sources about this. So recently the New York Post had a piece on young people converting on mosques to Catholicism and told some of the personal stories, but then you also have articles like Eric Salmon’s article about how for every 100 new Catholics, 800 people are leaving the Catholic church in America, and that the numbers were actually even worse somehow than that sounds fittingly for Crisis Magazine.

And even my friend and colleague, Trent Horn did a video recently on why he says Protestantism is winning and the lesson this provides for Catholics. Now, I want to agree with everybody in part and disagree with everybody in part on this because it’s not just the headlines that can cause this confusion. It’s also when you get into the data. So Trent and Eric and people who are focusing on some of the alarming signs are largely looking at a Pew research study that came out in February of this year, and although it’s called decline of Christianity in the US has slowed, may have leveled off. Nevertheless, the article has some pretty ugly news for the state of the Catholic church in America, namely that bit about how for every 100 people who join some 840 people have left Catholicism for something else. The largest recipient of this isn’t actually Protestantism.

Mostly this is people becoming religiously unaffiliated. In fact, Protestantism is struggling as well, just not nearly as much as American Catholicism when you look at those numbers. Other numbers though, tell a somewhat different story. Now, this is tricky because it’s not systematically organized, but I know that the pillar has done, Luke Kain in particular has done good work at just gathering evidence at a diocese by diocese level about the number of adult baptisms. And what we’re seeing in many cases is that adult baptisms are way up. I’ll get more into that data in a little bit, but I just want to kind of pose the question, what do we make of all this? Are we seeing a revival? Are we seeing the death of Catholicism in America, or is it something a little more complicated? And as you might guess, I’m going to say a little more complicated, although I do think there are authentic, good reasonable grounds for hope that a real revival is happening quietly and in its early stages sort of too soon to say, sure, but we’re seeing a shift underfoot.

But to get there, we have to know how to parse through the data. And this is tricky for a few reasons. The first is that while Protestantism is divided into evangelical and mainline Christians, when you look at Pew research data and other research data, usually it’s actually mainline Protestants, evangelical Protestants, and historically black Protestants. Because these groups, even though they’re all under the broad umbrella of Protestant, are pretty different sociologically and they operate in different ways. That’s going to be really important because Catholicism doesn’t have those official distinctions. You don’t go to a Catholic church and it says we’re a mainline Catholic church, or we’re an evangelical Catholic church, but nevertheless, we can have a little bit of something similar. It’s going to be different in some important ways as well. But to get a sense, here’s Redeem Zoomer, who is himself a more conservative or evangelical Presbyterian who attends a mainline Presbyterian church, explaining from his perspective what those differences look like. And obviously this is not going to be super favorable to someone from more of a liberal perspective. Additionally, he’s a zoomer, so of course he’s doing this while playing Minecraft. So if you hear a weird clicking sound, that’s what’s going on.

RZ:

So for those of you who don’t know, I’m a Presbyterian and there are a bunch of Presbyterian denominations in America, but there’s two main ones. There’s the PC, USA Presbyterian Church, USA, which is it’s the more liberal one, and the PCA, the Presbyterian Church in America, which is the more conservative one, and I am more conservative, so it makes sense that I would be in the PCA, right? No, there’s a reason why I’m not. I’m in the P-C-U-S-A instead of the PCA. So really it’s because the P-C-U-S-A is the original one. It’s what’s called a mainline Protestant denomination because it’s, there used to just be the Presbyterian churches. There wasn’t mainline and evangelical denominations. That distinction came about. When the mainline Protestant churches in all brands, Presbyterian, Methodist, Lutheran, Baptist, Episcopal, they all started to become more theologically liberal. And that’s not quite the same as politically liberal.

As I always say. Theologically liberal means they don’t take the claims of Christianity as seriously, and they don’t really care if people actually believe in it. It’s becomes more of just like going through the motions. And the only thing they really care about is social justice. They sort of redefined the gospel as that. So when the mainline denominations became more theologically liberal, the evangelical denominations were basically a bunch of conservative outcasts who split off, who ran away and who started their own things. So it’s no exception for Presbyterians. The P-C-U-S-A Presbyterian Church, USA is the original Presbyterian denomination and the PCA, the Presbyterian Church in America is a denomination was formed by a bunch of conservatives who got frustrated with the P-C-U-S-A becoming more liberal and who split off.

Joe:

So one of the reasons this matters is that what we’re looking at in the data isn’t necessarily the death of Catholicism in America. It seems much more to be the death of mainline or liberal Christianity in America. And we see this by looking quite clearly at the trajectories of the two different groups of Protestants. So remember, the Pew research stuff from 2025 breaks out evangelicals, historically black Protestants and Mainliners, and in particular it finds that while there’s this overall downward trend, it has stabilized, it hasn’t affected everyone equally. So evangelicals went from being 26% of the population to 23% of the population. That’s a relative decline of about 11%. For those of you who don’t understand relative decline, if you go from being 2% to 1% of the population, you’ve lost half of your membership. You haven’t lost 1%. So relative decline is the better measure to use when you’re seeing how much did something grow or shrink by looking at the health of the organization.

So evangelicals are about 11% smaller now relative for overall population growth, et cetera, et cetera, than they were in 2007. But in that same time period, mainline Protestants have just bottomed out. They’ve lost just shy of 40% of their members. They were 18% of the population, they’re now 11% of the population. That is as we’re going to see a worse decline than Catholicism has experienced. So that suggests this isn’t a Catholic Protestant issue. This is much closer to a theologically liberal versus theologically conservative issue. Another way you can get there is Pew also asks people about whether they consider themselves liberal or conservative. And so just as you’ve got a clear difference in the trajectories of mainliners who are dying and evangelicals who are struggling but surviving well, similarly, you have a slight decline among conservatives in a shocking rate of decline among liberals. So in the words of the Pew study, 37% of self-described liberals today identify with Christianity 37%.

That’s down from 62% in 2007. So they call that a 25 point decline, but it’s obviously bigger than that in terms of relative decline, that in 2007, if you were to approach say three liberals, probably two of them would be Christian today, one of them would be Christian. That’s a big decline. Additionally, most liberals now report having no religion, 51% compared to 27% in 2007. So okay, now you approach four rather than if you approached four liberals and said, what’s your religious affiliation? Chances are one of them in the past would’ve said nothing. Now two of them would say that. So this is a pretty striking case that there are now more religious nuns, so unreligious or unaffiliated people than Christians among the population just of liberals. This is unprecedented. So you can see all of that in the data. In the meantime, 89% of conservatives back in 2007 described themselves as Christian today, 82%.

So you still have a decline, but it is a way smaller decline. So if you think about this, not in terms of Catholic Protestant things, but in terms of liberal conservative both politically or more importantly theologically, then you can see I think a much better explanation for the data. So the difficulty here is we don’t have just as I said before, self-proclaimed evangelical Catholics and mainline Catholics, but we do see something like this in the numbers, and I’ll get into how we can get there in just a second. But first overall numbers. Catholics went from 24% of the population to 19% of the population. Now that is a 21% decline, and actually the real relative decline is worse than that because some of that is immigrants coming in from other places where they were already Catholic, they’re not suddenly converting. So if you look at just like the native born US population, the decline is worse than 20%.

But nevertheless, that’s kind of where we’re at. We fall somewhere in between where evangelicals are and where mainline Protestants are, which makes sense because if you were to think about Catholics in those terms, you’ve got a group of Catholics who would be closer to evangelicals in their view of scripture and theological conservatism and everything else, and then you’ve got a group that are more akin to what you would call mainliners. So in the same way that if you just said Presbyterian, you’d get a kind of misleading number rather than breaking it out into which type of Presbyterian. The same thing I think is happening somewhat with Catholicism. Now, a couple months ago I did a video on liberal Catholicism specifically showing that self-identified politically liberal and theologically liberal priests have all but evaporated. I’m not going to rehash all of that. If you want to watch that, you can go watch it there.

But I will point out one data point that I think points to this in a really profound kind of shocking way coming from the polarization, generational dynamics and ongoing impact of the abuse crisis study by the Catholic project at CU UA, which found that theologically progressive and very progressive priests once made up 68% of new ordinance. So if you were to go back in the sixties and ask a newly ordained priest how he considered himself, he was going to say progressive more than two thirds of the time today, that number has dwindled to almost zero. It is the low 1%, or excuse me, low single digits in terms of the number who identify themselves today in terms of newly ordained priests as being theologically progressive. So liberal Catholic priests have simply failed to inspire a generation of liberal Catholic priests to follow in their footsteps.

That’s one enormous data point. But another one actually comes from this book here, young Catholic America, Christian Smith and his co-authors, Kyle Longs, Jonathan Hill and Kerry Christofferson. This is a little bit older of a book, so I’m hesitant to use it to describe trends in 20 24, 20 25 because the book is 10 years old, it’s from 2014, but it’s looking specifically at what they called emerging adults. So these were Catholics who at the time were 18 to 23, they’re now 28 to 33, and they provided some pretty good data looking just at Catholics in a way that I haven’t seen a lot of people do since. And unlike the Pew research stuff, they break out liberal and conservative in a more helpful way. It’s still not perfect, but it’s I think more helpful for getting a sense of the trajectory and what they found across the board. Things like church attendance, prayer, even things like self-denial.

Those teenagers and emerging adults who’d been raised in liberal Catholic homes were way less religious, way less practicing of anything like Catholicism than those raised in more moderate or traditional homes. Now, there’s a whole bit about how you define those terms, but this gives us at least an impression of a trajectory, say in the words of the authors, they say the most striking finding is the difference in mass attendance. While 27 and 29% of emergent adults do not attend mass at all, among those who survey responding parent is traditional or moderate respectively, fully 52% do not attend mass at all. Who has a teenager who as a teenager had a liberal Catholic parent? So let’s just make sure you’re getting that at least in 2014. And I think there’s good reason we’re going to see this actually stayed pretty stable across the decade. So I don’t think this is radically different today.

If you grew up in a traditional Catholic household, there’s a good chance you still go to mass at least sometime once you’re in college, once you’re on your own, maybe not as often as you should, but the odds that you’re going to mass not at all, are about one in four, maybe a little more than one in 4 27 to 29%. On the other hand, if you were raised in a liberal Catholic household, it’s slightly better than 50 50 odds that you don’t go to church at all anymore already. I mean within five years of leaving home. And in contrast, only 6% of those who grew up in a liberal Catholic house attend mass compared to 17 to 21% of those in a moderate or traditional house. Now, those are still bad numbers, don’t get me wrong. Everyone should be a hundred percent come on. But you can see there is a pretty massive disparity in terms of mass attendance, in terms of participation in anything related to the faith.

So again, you can get more into the data because it’s not just church attendance, it’s also things even like personal prayer. So all of that suggests that there is a liberal verse conservative trajectory. Again, theologically primarily is what we mean here politically. There’s going to be some overlap, but those don’t mean the exact same thing. The second thing I think is worth breaking out is something that I’ve seen almost everybody get wrong about the Pew research data, and I would put it like this. I’d say the bad news is old news, and the good news is new news. Here’s what I mean by that. When you hear these numbers about the number of people joining the Catholic church compared to leaving the Catholic church, the impression it creates is that this is how many people have just joined in the last year compared to just left in the last year. It’s often described that way even by people like my beloved colleague, Trent Horn.

Trent:

To put it another way, the study says that for every 100 people who become Protestant, 180 people leave Protestantism. However, for every 100 people who become Catholic, 840 people leave Catholicism. And for every 100 people who become religious, 590 people give up religion

Joe:

And not to make for a tense situation, but Trent’s actually technically wrong there about the tenses. And it’s not just Trent, it’s everybody I’ve seen cover this data. It’s just I like singling out Trent because I like Trent and because I rarely get to get a point over on him, and I’m happy to try to do so here, but it’s actually not the case that for every 100 people who join the Catholic church, 840 people leave, that puts it too much in the present tense. It’s that for every 100 people alive and being surveyed now who have joined the Catholic church, 840 people have left the Catholic church. That actually matters a great deal because the whole point, and actually the point Pew is making in their overall study is that we’ve seen this massive shift of people leaving Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular, but that massive exodus seems to have slowed quite a bit, which is good news, but not if you think that the 8.4 to one ratio of exiting to leaving is still ongoing.

It’s not. Rather, here’s the case, the median age of people that they’re surveying among all US adults, the median age is 48. Among Christians, it’s 54. Among the religiously unaffiliated, it’s 38. So okay, if you take a 48-year-old just to take the median example, is it more likely that they grew up in a Christian home and left it or grew up in a non-religious home and became Christian? Well, obviously it’s more likely that they grew up in a Christian home and left it because historically we were more of a Christian country and you see all of that very clearly in the data. So of course you’re going to get more of an Exodus incoming convert rate to put it like this. Let’s just imagine a hypothetical, let’s say through a miracle for the next year. Not one person left the Catholic church, nobody gave up on being Catholic.

And let’s say the number of people who converted to Catholicism doubles, triples, whatever. Even in that case, which would be undeniably a revival, undeniably this incredible movement, you would still at least at first have a case where there were a lot more former Catholics than new Catholics. Why? Because there are more former Catholics over the past decades so that even if there are new signs of life, if you’re just looking at the overall number of everyone, whether they converted a week ago or 40 years ago, well then you’re not going to see that in the data, at least not at first If you want to put it like this, if you decide you’re going to get in shape, let’s say after a month you want to track your fitness goals, your best bet is to say, where was I a month ago compared to where am I now?

If you say, where was I 20 years ago compared to now, that’s probably not a very helpful rubric. And so the problem with the Pew data isn’t that it’s wrong, it’s that it’s unhelpfully broad. It actually tells us something important, but not what people think. It tells us. It doesn’t tell us the current state, it tells us the prior state. And as the rest of the Pew data shows, there has been a mass decline in Christianity overall. But as they acknowledge something has happened in the last few years, and we see this actually across demographics, across ages, that as they put it, since 2020 signs of religious stability across birth cohorts in the United States exist. If you look at the number of people who pray daily, the number of people who describe themselves as Christian and then the number of people who are religiously affiliated, we see in the last five years something kind of fascinating.

It’s stabilized. In fact, the most curious thing is that if you look at the youngest generation, those age 18 to 24, the people you would expect to be leaving Christianity in droves, they went from 45% of them self describing as Christians before to now 51%. And so you actually see among a couple of the younger cohorts, also the cohort of those age 34 to 44 like myself, they’re actually more likely to say they’re Christian now than they were in 2020, which is all the more remarkable because in there you also have things like Covid. You also have things like churches shutting down and people being cut off from church attendance and all of this stuff that we thought was going to be absolutely catastrophic in the numbers. And we don’t see catastrophe in the numbers. No, to be clear, in the long term it’s been pretty catastrophic if you say, what’s the last 50 years looked like?

But if you ask what has the last five years looked like, surprisingly good, surprisingly better than I think any of us would’ve expected. Now, this actually dovetails nicely with a point that Christian Smith and his co-authors make, which is that what we find in terms of the story of American Catholics, young Catholics, is that we’re dealing with the fallout of a lot of stuff that’s been going on since the last 50 years or so. So as they explained, when you compare Catholic young adults, again, that 18 to 23 range in 2014 compared to those in the 1970s, they found that with one huge exception, there is relatively little change in their religious beliefs, attitudes and practices. The popular narrative is the modern generation of Catholics is way less religious and the older generation or vice versa. And at least as of 2014, again before this kind of slowdown in the middle of the battle days before the religious decline stopped, young emerging Catholics were looking a lot like young emerging Catholics in the 1970s, but with an important difference, namely mass attendance.

And so this suggests that what we’re looking for shouldn’t be anything in the last couple of years. This is not, oh, this is the story of the new atheism. Taking everyone away from Christianity is not that something else has been going on. And redeem Zoomer pointed it out when he talks about this theological liberalization project that happened in the mid 20th century and all these different Protestant denominations. There’s a version of that in Catholicism as well, and it’s, I would argue, been disastrous statistically. And so the one difference that we see, as I said before, is mass attendance. So you had young Catholics in the 1970s who were so-so, and whether they believed in church teaching and they still often went to mass. And then you have a very similar looking group of young Catholics in the 2010s, and they were just less likely to go to mass.

And when you put it in that 50 year trajectory and you couple it with things, this was pew in 2014 showing the number of religious sisters and the number of priests, the number of priests went down quite a bit. The number of religious sisters plummeted from 180,000 in 1965 to under 50,000 in 2014. That’s enormous loss. And so even if we’ve stabilized, when you compare it to 1965 or even 2007, things are still going to look bad. But if you recognize in a shorter time span, the bleeding may have slowed or stopped. The other thing I would add to this kind of echoing what Christian Smith and his colleagues found is from the handbook of contemporary Christianity in the United States, which found that basically boomers, even when they dropped out of church, still called themselves Christian, whereas younger generations who might believe exactly the same things are just less likely to use the label of Christian.

So some of what we’re seeing isn’t an actual theological difference. Some of what we’re seeing is just how people respond to the theological difference that the person who become disaffected with Christianity in the past might still call themselves Christian, might still go to church. The person with those same beliefs now is less likely to have the kind of cultural social ties that keep them attached to the label after they’ve stopped believing in it. So that’s some of the bad news, but I want to couple that with the good news. And part of t... Read more on Catholic.com