By Jim Coggins

AMERICA is still a ‘Christian’ country – but the expression of that Christianity appears to be changing significantly.

There are indications that some religious realignment is taking place in our neighbour to the south. Some of the trends are similar to trends in Canada, and some are not.

A recent ‘ U.S. Religious Landscape Survey’ by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life has found that the United States is still largely a ‘Christian nation.’

Of the 35,000 Americans surveyed, 78 percent said they were Christians. This is about 10 percent higher than the percentage who claim to be Christian in Canada.

Stability

As in Canada, the Roman Catholic Church has shown remarkable stability; but in the U.S., Roman Catholics represent about 24 percent of the population – whereas in Canada, they represent a dominating 43 percent. Also, as in Canada, it is immigration which is maintaining Roman Catholic numbers.

The Pew survey found that a third of Americans raised Roman Catholic are no longer Catholic; but those losses have been offset by the immigration of primarily Latino Roman Catholics.

The largest religious group in the U.S. is evangelicals, at 26 percent – two or three times the size of the evangelical percentage in Canada. Also, U.S. evangelicals outnumber mainline Protestants at 18 percent – and, as in Canada, mainline numbers are declining rapidly.

The Pew survey also categorizes seven percent of Americans as belonging to “historically black Protestant churches.” While black churches are quite diverse – and it may seem odd to Canadians to categorize a religious group in racial terms – the categorization has some logic.

Black churches have worship styles similar to evangelicals and charismatics, and their theology is often evangelical; but they share with mainline churches a focus on addressing poverty, racism and similar social issues.

The three Protestant groups make up a majority (51 percent) of Americans, but this percentage is declining. Canadian political scientist John H. Redekop suggested to BCCN that this is partly because Christians have been “crowded out” of public education, the media and government in recent decades.

Christians have been restricted to the ‘ghetto’ of Christian schools, radio, television and publishing, decreasing their public influence.

The survey found 16 percent of Americans have no religion (compared to 19 percent in Canada) and that four percent are atheist/agnostic (compared to seven percent in Canada). But 25 percent of those under 30 say they have no religion (compared to only eight percent of those 70 and over), so this segment may continue to grow.

There are small groups of Jews (1.7 percent), Buddhists (0.7 percent), Muslims (0.6 percent) and Hindus (0.4 percent) in the U.S. The latter three groups are slightly smaller than their counterparts in Canada – but, as in Canada, they are growing, largely due to immigration.

The survey also revealed that there is considerable movement between religions. Fully 28 percent of Americans have left the faith they were raised in, and moved to another religion – or to no religion. If movement between Protestant denominations is included, 44 percent have made a change.

It is often been observed that, in spite of its official insistence on separation of church and state, there has been a much closer connection between Christianity and politics in the United States.

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Civic religion

As Redekop explains in his recent book Politics Under God, this is partly because Canada has never had the same sense of civic religion that the U.S. has.

Many Americans, he writes, see their country as “a chosen nation” and therefore consider their nation’s battles to be God’s battles. While American scholars have long debated the importance of religious influences on their nation’s founders, Redekop asserts: “no article in Canada has analyzed the faith” of the Fathers of Confederation.

Almost every political candidate in the U.S. feels compelled to publicly claim a Christian faith. Veteran Canadian journalist and political observer Lloyd Mackey told BCCN the situation is much different in Canada. Here, “politicians try not to talk about their faith very much, and journalists try not to ask.”

Another reason for the more public face of religion in the U.S. is the higher percentage of Christians and, in particular, the much higher percentage of evangelicals. This evangelical strength goes back to the revival movements of the 19th and early 20th centuries, said John Dyck, a political scientist with Trinity Western University’s Religion in Canada Institute.

In spite of their numbers, evangelicals have tended not to be deeply involved in American politics. The Evangelical Press Association’s Doug Trouten said this changed in the 1970s, partly because of the election of President Jimmy Carter – an evangelical and a Democrat.

It was the rise of issues such as abortion, AIDS and same-sex marriage that pushed evangelicals into becoming more politically active, said Redekop. As these issues were pushed by groups on the other side, evangelicals saw their actions as “an assault on Christian theology.”

Ironically, while it was the Democrat Jimmy Carter who had gotten evangelicals involved in political life, evangelicals were welded into a ‘Religious Right’ voting bloc by Moral Majority leader Jerry Falwell – and were instrumental in Republican Ronald Reagan’s defeat of Carter in 1980.

Hot buttons

Evangelicals, rallying around the ‘hot button’ issues of abortion and homosexuality, have tended to vote Republican ever since. As a result, American politics have become an increasingly bitter battle between the secular wing of the Democratic Party and the Religious Right of the Republican Party – with the rest of the country in between.

However, things may be changing. Jim Wallis, founder of Sojourners magazine and the evangelical social action group Call to Renewal, suggested in a news release that a more balanced American Christianity is developing, which rejects both fundamentalist evangelicalism and liberal social action.

“Churches that just merely focus on theological doctrine or on social principles will continue to lose people to churches that offer a personal faith that cares for the world,” he said.

For Wallis, this trend is clearly unfolding in America’s churches.

“What we’re seeing around the country is a new evangelical agenda focusing on poverty, the environment and climate change, human rights, war and peace.”

Wallis also sees one of the main evangelical concerns still in the spotlight – but with a broader perspective. “The sanctity of human life [is being] much more broadly applied to include places like Darfur, and the 30,000 children who died again today globally, of totally unnecessary poverty and disease.”

As the drama of the American election plays out, the role of evangelicals in influencing the outcome may be undergoing a historic change.

April 2008