Is the United States the most religious nation in the world?
Pollster George Gallup, who may know as much about religious trends in the United States as anyone, said earlier this year that perhaps it was. Contrary to the gloomy pronouncements of some, Gallup sees little erosion of religious beliefs in our society. “Americans have in fact held firmly to basic religious beliefs over the last quarter century,” he says, “while a dramatic change has come about in certain European nations during this time.”
On a deeper level, however, it is difficult to claim the title “most religious” for the United States, or for any other nation, for that matter. In the biblical sense of “the nations” (ta ethne), some entire nations are highly religious in their way. The Sawi of Peace Child fame, for example, believed in a multiplicity of evil spirits dwelling in stones, trees, wind, and lightning. There were no exceptions, so it could be said that the Sawi are a totally religious “nation.” And even if we restrict “religious” to Christian, we find peoples in the world more religious than the United States. No area of the world is more thoroughly Christian than northeast India, where large tribes of headhunters have become followers of Jesus Christ during the last seventy-five years. Approximately three-fourths of the people in those tribes are Christian now. The Mizo “nation” leads with some 98 per cent of its population Christian.
Nevertheless, the fact remains that the people of the United States are very religious. One recent Gallup survey found that 71 per cent of adults (eighteen or older) were members of a church or synagogue. This is quite remarkable, given the fact that the government officially neither requires nor encourages any particular religious belief. Religion is a matter of free choice in America, and most Americans choose to be religious at least to the point of associating themselves with a religious group.
At first glance the United States might also seem to be a highly sports-minded nation. Many people, and I am one of them, are keenly interested in sports. I live in the Los Angeles area and I cheer when the Dodgers, the Lakers, or the Rams win. In the Los Angeles Times I find multi-page sports sections seven days a week. And religion? Well, one has to wait until Saturday to find two pages buried in the interior of the paper, with half the space taken up by mediocre religious advertising.
But one day I became curious about what the situation really was. I went to the Statistical Abstract of the U. S. for sports data and to the Gallup poll for religious data, and found to my surprise that more American people attend church in an average week than attend all professional baseball, basketball, and football games combined in the average year! All athletic events of all kinds, professional and amateur, draw about 5.5 million spectators per week, while churches draw 85 million worshipers in the same week.
This ought to be encouraging to Christians. Shocking data can be compiled about drug addiction, prostitution, gambling, alcoholism, crime, pornography, and other prominent activities of the devil. But behind it all, Christians ought to remember that Jesus said, “I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matt. 16:18). By nature, Christians should come down on the side of the optimists. Read the list of the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5 to confirm this. The vocabulary there is anything but pessimistic.
America as a Mission Field
Was America always as religious as it is now? Of course not. Because we send a great many missionaries out from America and receive few from other countries today, we forget that America was once a mission field. As W. Richey Hogg of Perkins School of Theology observes, “During the past two centuries, the greatest missionary effort in history among a single people was concentrated within the United States” (“The Role of American Protestantism in World Mission: A Bicentennial Perspective,” page 3; I derived a good bit of the information in this section from Hogg’s excellent study, presented to the American Society of Missiology at its annual meeting in June, 1976). And this effort met with good success. The result is that America has the largest group of professing Christians to be found in any one country in the world.
American mythology makes us think that all our forefathers were deeply Christian people. Such things as the language of the Mayflower Compact, the tradition of Thanksgiving Day, the Scarlet Letter, and Washington’s prayer at Valley Forge nourish the impression that in the colonial period the person who didn’t attend the Sunday-morning worship service, who hoed corn on Sunday afternoon, or who coveted his neighbor’s ox or ass was the exception to the rule.
Not so. British colonists in America were no different from British colonists in any other part of the world. America was a land of new opportunity for a free-wheeling life-style and substantial material gain. Religious freedom was an added attraction, but in more cases than not it was used as freedom to reject Jesus Christ rather than to serve the living and true God.
Colonial America was definitely a mission field. Some British Christians tried to meet the challenge through the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. But for the first hundred years their missionaries made little impression. Most colonists could hardly have cared less about Jesus Christ and the Church. And the colonial churches themselves were at a fairly low ebb until the Great Awakening swept the colonies about a half century before independence.
The bitter struggle for independence, which was a twenty-year process, tore many of the churches apart. The Anglicans found themselves in disarray, since most of their leaders were loyal to the British. Strong religious leaders like John Wesley were developing biblical arguments why the American revolution was wrong. And as a result, in 1776 when the Declaration of Independence was signed, only about 7 per cent of the citizens of the new United States of America were church members.
At this point American Christians became those most directly responsible for the evangelization of their own people. The British could no longer do it. The task was enormous, and the story is thrilling. By 1850 American church membership was up to 20 per cent; by 1900 it had reached 36 per cent; and so far during our century it has risen to at least 60 per cent. Adding the synagogues and other religious organizations, we approach the 71 per cent registered by the Gallup poll.
One of the most exciting chapters in this story of the spread of the Gospel in America is the evangelization of the Africans who were forced to migrate to America as slaves. Although many of the facts about the evangelization of American blacks are just now emerging, it seems clear that blacks were largely evangelized by blacks. This is not to deny that some white churches made sincere efforts to evangelize the blacks. But black religion in America was mostly self-propagated. In fact, Kenneth Scott Latourette says that “all the extensive Protestant missionary effort of Europeans and Americans in Asia and Africa in the century between 1815 and 1914 had resulted in no greater numerical gains than had been achieved among the Negroes of the United States in the same period” (A History of the Expansion of Christianity, IV, 327).
Missionaries feel their work has been successful not just when a national church has been planted but when the church gets busy sending out its own missionaries. The first United States mission, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, was organized in Bradford, Massachusetts, in 1810. Its first five missionaries set sail for India in 1812. By the end of the century, 4,891 American missionaries were serving overseas, constituting roughly a fourth of the total world Protestant missionary force. Today the number has risen to over 35,000, about 64 per cent of the world’s missionaries. Voluntary giving to the world missionary enterprise has kept pace. American Christians currently contribute over $400 million annually to world missions.
How Well Is America Evangelized?
With a 71 per cent membership in religious organizations, it might seem that America is now virtually evangelized.
No one I know of, however, believes that this is so. There remains a tremendous evangelistic concern not only for the 29 per cent who do not belong to a church but also for many of the 71 per cent who belong to a church in some vague sense but who are not personally committed to Jesus as Lord. They are Christians only nominally. There is a wide gap between what they profess to believe when a polltaker questions them at their front doors and what they practice when the doors are closed.
Finding out how many Americans still need to be evangelized is not easy. Regrettably, through what I consider undue nervousness over maintaining the separation of church and state, our Census Bureau has not collected religious data for quite some time. We know exactly how many Americans attend horse races, how many fly on airplanes, how much Americans spend on shoes, and how many toilets there are in the houses in a given census tract. But the Census Bureau does not find out how many belong to churches, attend worship, go to Sunday school, or practice the Christian code in their daily lives. I think that data on church attendance is at least as valuable for an understanding of our society as data on theater attendance or purchase of toasters, but until some courageous legislators agree and are willing to work to bring about changes, we will be without our potentially most accurate data.
What the Census Bureau does give us, however, is the important figure of how many people there are in the country as a whole. I think that in evaluating past evangelistic efforts or in planning future strategy, it is helpful to deal not with the total population but with the number of adults. It is not that children are unimportant as people. God loves them and wants them to be saved. But for a measurement of the effects of evangelism on a broad scale, children are not nearly so significant as their parents. The figure I like to work with, then, is 143.8 million, the number of adults the Census Bureau says we have in the United States. It is most helpful to define adults as those eighteen or over because the Gallup poll, a most important source of religious data, also works with Americans eighteen and over.
How many of these 143.8 million adults have been evangelized? How many attend church?
The Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches is only partially helpful in answering these questions. The Yearbook publishes official denominational membership reports for about 330,000 U.S. churches. But no attendance reports are given. Furthermore, even the method used to report membership is not as helpful as it could be; a disclaimer that “church statistics are not always comparable” is placed in a prominent place in each edition of the survey. It is true that the established categories for reporting statistics differ from group to group. On that basis the official figures of one denomination cannot always be compared with those of another. But it seems reasonable to suppose that a Yearbook editor could develop formulas for refining the statistics in such a way that apples could be compared to apples across the board.
A relatively simple questionnaire or some type of marketing survey could reduce the official statistics to adults eighteen and over. Then we would know how many Jewish adults are affiliated with synagogues and how many Catholic adults belong to churches, whereas now Jews simply estimate the number of Jewish people in the community as a whole and Catholics count all baptized persons. Some Protestants do the same thing. To mention another problem: of the some 12 million Southern Baptists, 4 million do not reside in the localities of the churches where their names are on the rolls. That membership figure needs to be refined to compare with that of, for example, the Christian and Missionary Alliance, which underplays formal membership but has many loyal non-members who tithe and are active in church life.
Some church-growth experts recently got together in Pasadena, California, to attempt to draw up guidelines for compiling religious data helpful for planning evangelistic strategy for the United States. One of the results of that meeting was what is called the “church involvement axis.” Nine categories of people were described, beginning with those closest to the church and ending with those furthest away. It loooks like this:
1. Active church members who are strong.
2. Active church members who are weak.
3. Active members who are not born again or personally committed to Jesus Christ.
4. Resident members who are inactive.
5. Non-resident members (their names are on the roll in another town or city from where they live).
6. Adherents who attend church but whose names are not on the roll. Some of these people might be faithful believers but for reasons of their own have not taken membership in the church they attend.
7. Non-members who have a church background but who have become indifferent.
8. Non-members who have a church background but who have turned against the church and become hostile.
9. Non-members who have no church background; they constitute the “pagan pool.”
Obviously, the 71 per cent discovered by the Gallup poll to be members would span categories 1 through 5. But many of those people need to be evangelized even though their names might be on the membership roll of some church. They are what I would call “functionally unchurched.” The best approximation I can make is that 106.4 million American adults fall into the “functionally unchurched” category. This is 74 per cent. In other words, three out of every four American adults are lost and need to be evangelized. Most of the 69.2 million children need to be evangelized also.
This, then, is a tremendous challenge. Bible-believing evangelicals have no time to be complacent about the religiosity of the American people when more than 100 million adults still need to be touched personally with the Gospel of Christ. God certainly is not willing that they should perish. And the Scripture reminds us that they will not be able to hear of God’s provision unless there is a preacher to tell them (Rom. 10:14).
Evangelism Is In
Fortunately, things never looked so hopeful for finding lost people in America and bringing them into the Christian fold. The icy cynicism about the church common in the 1960s has now melted. Priorities are being straightened out. Instead of advocating the death of the institutional church, people are praying and working for its renewal and growth. It seems to me that functionally unchurched Americans have never been more ready to hear and accept the Good News. I see eight signs that suggest to me that we have entered a time of ingathering into the Christian Church in America:
1. The steadily increasing strength of the evangelical movement is furnishing a solid base for biblical evangelism. Evangelicals have consistently preached a biblically rooted message of personal repentance, faith, and regeneration. Some fix the number of U.S. evangelicals at 40 million, although the figure is a soft one. People from all socioeconomic strata, and every area of the country, and virtually every denomination count themselves as evangelicals. Participants in the exciting Messianic Jewish movement might well be called evangelicals. The National Association of Evangelicals has never been stronger. Evangelicals do not need to be persuaded that evangelism is God’s will. They know what their task is, and more of them are devoting time, energy, and money to getting it done.
2. Mainline denominations are beginning to recapture the evangelistic priority on high levels. One indication of this was the grass-roots demand for evangelism at the Fifth Assembly of the World Council of Churches (Nairobi, 1975). Both Bishop Mortimer Arias of Bolivia and John Stott of England spoke strongly for evangelism in the plenary sessions. The “Spirit of Lausanne,” a reference to the Congress on World Evangelization held in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1974, clearly made its influence felt in the World Council. An example of how it is also penetrating American churches was seen in the United Methodist Quadrennial Conference held earlier this year in Portland, Oregon. Overwhelmingly, the delegates there voted to place evangelism among the three highest-priority items for the next four years. Less official overtures are being heard from leaders in several other mainline denominations that have begun the process of reinstating evangelism as a matter of importance in their church life.
3. Strong statements on biblical evangelism are coming from Roman Catholic leaders. Reeling from the effects of a startling decline in attendance at mass from 71 per cent in 1963 to 50 per cent in 1974, many Roman Catholic leaders are searching for something that will reverse the trend. In October of 1974 the Synod of Bishops met in Rome under the theme “Evangelization of the Modern World.” One of the outcomes was an exhortation by Pope Paul VI, “On Evangelization in the Modern World,” in which he declared, “We wish to confirm once more that the task of evangelizing all people constitutes the essential mission of the church.” Paragraph after paragraph in the document sounds as if it could have been written at Moody Bible Institute. This, combined with the rapidly growing Catholic charismatic movement, may well signal a new day for Catholics.
4. The rapid growth of independent churches is almost hidden from the public in general. However, in many cities and towns one can find new churches called “Calvary Chapel” or “Bible Church” or “Evangelistic Center” or “Baptist Church.” These churches do not affiliate with any national denomination. They often are highly visible in their communities, but they lack combined national strength. I suspect that the fastest-growing religious movement in America is the Baptist Bible Fellowship movement. The superchurch First Baptist of Hammond, Indiana, is one of them. Although they do not figure in the statistics of the Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches, they are extremely important. One indication of strength is that Pastor Jack Hyles’s seminar at Hammond draws more than 5,000 per session, most of them Baptist Bible or other independent pastors. These independent churches are typically superaggressive in evangelism. As a result, a great many of them are growing well.
5. The church-growth movement, which traces its origins to Donald McGavran of the Fuller Seminary School of World Mission, is gaining wide acceptance. Just two or three years ago, those of us who are advocates of church growth had to devote much of our energy to defending the insights, methodologies, and research findings of the movement. No longer. Now the demand for church-growth teaching from those who are already strongly motivated far exceeds the supply of teaching time. Several Doctor of Ministry programs now have church-growth components for ministers who had no opportunity to study this area when they were in seminary. All this is building a strong theoretical base for highly effective evangelism in the near future.
6. During the last couple of years I have seen what I consider a significant breakthrough in the evangelization of two of our nation’s traditionally resistant peoples, the Jews and the Navajos. The Messianic Jewish movement, which encourages Jews to be born again, to follow Jesus (called “Yeshua”), and yet to remain Jews, is proving to be a powerful evangelistic force. A recent survey by the Jews for Jesus organization indicates that since 1976 somewhere between 14,000 and 35,000 Jews have become followers of Yeshua.
A week on the Navajo reservation recently has led me to believe that Navajo evangelism has turned an important corner. Navajos constitute about one-fourth of American Indians, and the tribe is increasing rapidly. The vigorous growth of some independent Pentecostal-type churches on the reservation is very encouraging. A change in missionary attitude and approach to culture also promises more effective evangelism. Missionaries are now recognizing that the old-school approach has not always been an effective evangelistic tool. They are beginning to use indigenous church-planting principles. A number of missionaries are now studying the Navajo language for the first time. To date, only a couple of missionaries are fluent enough to preach in Navajo, but this will change. Some of us may see the day when half of the Navajos are Christian.
7. Some parachurch organizations are beginning to relate to local churches much more creatively than they have in the past. The Evangelism Explosion program, one of the strongest new forces for evangelism training, originated in Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church, Fort Lauderdale, Florida. This evangelism is designed to produce church growth. The Fuller Evangelistic Association, founded by the late Charles E. Fuller, began a Department of Church Growth last year. It offers consultation services to churches and denominations that want professional help in developing evangelistic processes that will help their churches grow. Campus Crusade’s new “Here’s Life, America” program is working directly with local churches and is using a system specifically designed to incorporate converts into local churches. If other parachurch organizations take steps to gear their evangelistic efforts to church growth, tremendous spiritual power will be harnessed for God’s glory.
8. A new national mood of receptivity to spiritual truth is prevalent. The religion issue in the 1976 presidential campaign probably stirred as much interest in the claims of Christ as any hundred evangelistic crusades could have done; Jimmy Carter was not afraid to let the voting public know that he is “born again.” The dramatic conversion of former Nixon aide Charles Colson, told in his own words in the book Born Again, has made a strong impression on many readers. All this serves to create receptivity, especially among what I am calling America’s “functionally unchurched.”
There is much to be thankful for, and there is much to be done. New and growing forces for evangelism plus unprecedented openness to the message bid fair to make this last quarter of the century a very exciting time to be an evangelical and evangelistic Christian.
