One other important piece of data: Almost all the decline among Christians in the United States is among white Americans.

The reality is more complicated. People join a church or other religious group, or remain part of that group, because of some combination of all three factors.

the trust revolution—

Men with power and privilege have used religion to abuse children and harass women and to rob their congregations blind, and they have used spiritual power to gain sexual pleasures by coercion in the name of God. Priests and bishops and elders and other leaders have looked the other way, silenced survivors of abuse, or labeled women abused by pasto

All told, just under half of Americans (43 percent) get to a service at least once a month, if not more.

“Mainline Protestants comprised over half of the population until the early 1960s, and together with Roman Catholics and Southern Baptists they accounted for upwards of 80 percent of Americans,” James Hudnut-Beumler, a historian of American religion from Vanderbilt University, told reporter and scholar Tara Isabella Burton at Vox.com in 2018.7 “The

That’s reorganized American religion in a nutshell. It’s not that one thing is changing after another. It’s that everything is changing “all at once, all the time.”

“Live Better, Help Often.”

To bolster his point, Packard points to the disconnect between belief in God and participation in religious institutions. Even among younger Americans, belief in God and interest in spirituality remain high. Faith is not the problem. The number of younger Americans who pray and believe in God remains steady while participation in organized religion