A closer look at the Pew Research Center’s newest Religious Landscape Study which prompted headlines last week about the apparent demise of Christianity in America, reveals that it’s not quite as dire as it seems.

Kirsten Andersen, senior writer at Aleteia, took a closer look at the numbers in the latest Pew poll and found many interesting facts that were glossed over by the mainstream media.

As for the so-called “sharp drop” in Christian belief, here’s what Pew had to say about it.

“To be sure, the United States remains home to more Christians than any other country in the world, and a large majority of Americans – roughly seven-in-ten – continue to identify with some branch of the Christian faith,” Pew admits in a summary of its findings. “But … the percentage of adults (ages 18 and older) who describe themselves as Christians has dropped by nearly eight percentage points in just seven years, from 78.4% in an equally massive Pew Research survey in 2007 to 70.6% in 2014.”

As Andersen points out, this translates into roughly 784 out of every 1000 Americans who identified as Christian in 2007. That number only dropped to 706 in 2014 – which is not so shocking decline.

So where did those Christians go, she wondered. Have they turned their backs on God completely?

“Not exactly,” she writes. According to Pew, “during the same time period from 2007 to 2014, the number of people describing themselves as ‘unaffiliated’ with any religion rose roughly six percent. But only three percent of American adults describe themselves as atheist. The rest of the ‘unaffiliated’ are either agnostic or ‘nothing in particular,’ meaning they haven’t ruled out belief in a higher power, they just don’t identify with a specific church.”

Anderson also cites a recent Gallup poll which found that Americans are attending weekly church services at about the same rate today as they did in the 1940s. In an essay about this finding, the executive director of evangelical LifeWay Research, Ed Stetzer, said he thinks the apparent decline in Christianity may be more a matter of semantics than faith. He believes the difference between the 1940’s and today is that people don’t feel as pressured to hide their religious apathy. This results in a decrease not of the faithful but in the number of ‘Christians in name only’ who claim the faith but don’t practice it.

“Simply put, the strains of a funeral dirge aren’t being played at the graveside of American Christianity because there is no body for burial,” Stetzer wrote. “Those who value their faith enough to wake up on Sunday morning and head to their local church are mostly still going. … Christianity and the church are not dying, but they are being more clearly defined.”

Perhaps the most interesting finding of all in the latest Pew study comes from the number of adults who were raised in atheist or unaffiliated households.

“While one out of every five people who grew up in religious homes now identify as non-religious, nearly half of those raised in non-religious homes grew up to become believers,” Andersen writes.

“Now, the cynic in me is tempted to say that every generation has its rebellious children, and those raised by atheists are likely to rebel by getting religion. But the disproportionate percentage — nearly half — of next-generation atheists who abandon their disbelief, and the powerful stories of redemption they tell, give me hope that this is more than backlash.”

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