Smartphone | Pixabay, 2016
Key Terms for this Section
The Nones · Secularization · SBNR · The Transcendentalists
Televangelism · Digital Religion · The Four Questions · Religio
14.1 | The Decline of Mainline Christianity
Westphalia to the Mainline Peak | 1960s-2020s
• 1910 | The Fundamentalist–Modernist split draws the Mainline’s line
• 1960s | Mainline membership peaks
• 2025 | Pew reports the decline of Christianity “may have leveled off”
Section 11 taught the great modern reversal: before about 1500, religion in the West was universal, public, and obligatory, and after the wars of religion and the Peace of Westphalia (1648) it became local, private, and voluntary (cf. Sec. 11.4). That reversal is the ground beneath this whole section. The question this lesson asks is what happens to religion, several centuries on, once it has fully become a private and voluntary thing. The answer, at least in America, is that a great many people are quietly choosing none of the above.
Start with the churches that were, for most of American history, simply what “American religion” meant. Section 13 defined the Mainline (cf. Sec. 13.4): the historic Protestant denominations that made their peace with modern scholarship after the split of 1910, among them the United Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church (USA), the Episcopal Church, and the United Church of Christ. On the other side of that line stood the churches that would take the name Evangelical by the middle of the century. For the Mainline, membership peaked in the 1960s. When the General Social Survey first asked Americans their religion in 1972, about 6 in 10 said Protestant, and the Mainline denominations held much of the country’s cultural center: its university chaplaincies, its presidents, its Supreme Court.
They no longer do.
Mainline, Southern Baptists, & the LDS Church | 2000–2024
Now, for the first time in American history, the majority of Americans no longer identify with Protestant Christianity. Only 40% of Americans identify as any form of Protestant — including Nondenominational Christians (Pew, 2023–24). The Mainline’s share of the country fell from 18% in 2007 to about 11% in 2023–24 (Pew). The Episcopal Church, about 3.5 million strong in the mid-1960s, counted about 1.6 million baptized members in 2022. The Presbyterian Church (USA) fell from more than 4 million in its predecessor bodies to about 1.1 million in 2023.
Nor is the story only a Mainline one. Southern Baptist membership peaked in 2006 at 16.3 million and declines each year. In 2019 specifically, 288,000 congregants left Southern Baptist churches, and by 2024 the Convention counted 12.7 million members, its lowest since the early 1970s. The United Methodist Church and Presbyterian denominations are also in decline: between 2019 and 2023, about 7,600 congregations, roughly a quarter of the UMC’s American churches, left the denomination over its disputes about sexuality. American Catholics, at 19% of adults, have held steadier, sustained in large part by immigration (Pew, 2023–24).
Even the once-growing LDS Church (ie. Mormons) is facing decline (cf. Sec. 12.2). By the church’s own count, more than 70% of Utah was Latter-day Saint in 1990 and about 60% in 2019, and Salt Lake County fell below half in 2017. A 2023 study of self-identification put the statewide share at 42%. Of those identifying as Mormon, only half of Millennial Mormons are confident that Joseph Smith was a prophet (Next Mormons Survey, 2016).
The point is not that one wing of Christianity is failing. It is that the whole inherited Protestant map of American religion is being redrawn.
The Nones & Secularization | 2007–2025
Where are the departed going? Overwhelmingly, to no religion at all. The fastest-growing category in American religious life is the religiously unaffiliated, the group researchers simply call the Nones: those who, asked their religion, answer “none.” The Nones are Americans who claim no religious affiliation, whether as atheists, agnostics, or “nothing in particular.” In Pew’s 2023–24 Religious Landscape Study, the Nones were 29% of American adults, up from 16% in 2007. And they skew young: about 4 in 10 adults under 30 claim no religion at all.
But most Nones are not atheists. Of that 29%, 5% of all adults call themselves atheist and 6% agnostic. The largest share, 19% of all Americans, choose “nothing in particular.” Most Nones say they believe in God or some higher power, and many still pray and call themselves spiritual (Pew, 2024). What has come apart is not belief but belonging: a person can now believe without practicing, and practice without joining, in combinations the old categories never anticipated.
There is a classic idea in the study of religion called secularization. Secularization is the thesis that modernity erodes religion: that as societies grow wealthier, more educated, and more scientific, religious belief and belonging recede. The sociologist Peter Berger predicted it in 1968 and took it back in 1999 (cf. Sec. 12.2). The American data both supports the thesis and complicates it, in the same breath. It supports it: affiliation is down, sharply, across two generations. It complicates it in two ways. First, most Nones still believe something. Second, the decline itself appears to have slowed — and may have leveled off. Pew found the Christian share of the population roughly stable since 2019 and the Nones’ rise, at least for now, flat (Pew, February 2025). The secularization thesis is not simply true and not simply false. It named a real trend and then watched that trend do something it did not predict.
One set of churches has weathered the change differently. Pew counted the historically Black Protestant churches at 6.5% of Americans in 2007 and 5% in 2023–24, a gentler slope than the white Mainline’s (cf. Sec. 13.3).
Key Terms for this Lesson: The Nones · Secularization
14.2 | Spiritual but not Religious
SBNR
The pews have emptied, but belief has not drained away. It has gone somewhere.
Discontent with organized religion, about 22% of Americans now identify as some variety of “spiritual but not religious” (SBNR) (Pew, 2023). SBNR is the stance of keeping a spiritual life while rejecting organized religion: spirituality retained, institution refused. The Spiritual but not Religious view appeals to those with a diversity of beliefs or who simply do not find creed-based religious communities appealing. Only 11% of the SBNR belong to a religious community, yet 45% still claim a religious affiliation of some kind (Pew, 2023). A churchgoer and a None can equally take the stance.
What do they believe? Like most Americans, the SBNR say people have a soul, that there is something spiritual beyond the natural world, and that some things science cannot explain. Only 20% believe in God as described in the Bible, and 38% say religion does more harm than good (Pew, 2023). The figure for the group itself depends heavily on how you ask. Pew’s simpler self-description question gives 25%, and looser surveys push the “spiritual” number as high as a third.
Emerson, Thoreau, & the Transcendentalists | 1836–1854
Historically, the SBNR view can be traced back to the Transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, who celebrated the individual spiritual journey amidst the backdrop of the sublime mystery of nature. The Transcendentalists are the circle of New England writers of the 1830s–1850s who held that genuine religious insight comes not from church, creed, or clergy but from the individual soul’s direct encounter with the divine, most readily in nature. The name was borrowed from Kant’s transcendental knowledge, what the mind knows prior to any experience, and it stuck to the circle that began meeting around Boston in 1836 as the Transcendental Club.
Emerson (d. 1882) was a Unitarian minister who resigned his Boston pulpit in 1832 rather than keep administering communion. His essay Nature (1836) opens by asking why we should not “enjoy an original relation to the universe” rather than one inherited from our fathers. His “Self-Reliance” (1841) made the argument that the SBNR make today, a century and a half before the survey category existed:
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” 1841
In 1838 he told the graduating class of Harvard Divinity School that the churches preached a dead faith and that each of them should “go alone.” Harvard did not invite him back for nearly 30 years. His younger friend Thoreau (d. 1862) went to the woods at Walden Pond (1845–1847) because, he said, he “wished to live deliberately,” and Walden (1854) was the result. For these writers, individual virtue and happiness arises from self-discovery — wherein one focuses on the ‘spirit’ and eschews outward social rituals. Read Emerson beside a 21st-century seeker who finds God on a hiking trail rather than in a sanctuary, and the family resemblance is plain.
Advocates, Critics, & the Seeker’s Practices
What to make of this turn is itself contested. Advocates argue that SBNR is the final historic consequence of the modern value of individualism (cf. Sec. 11.4). Now, every American is their own church. The sociologist Robert Bellah (d. 2013) recorded the stance in 1985 from a young nurse he called Sheila Larson, who described her faith as “Sheilaism,” her “own little voice” (cf. Bellah, Habits of the Heart). Critics argue that SBNR represents a modern trend toward selfishness, pointing to the loss of community involvement. In defense of church attendance, theologians are quick to point out that church attendance correlates with longer-lasting marriages and larger charitable contributions. Despite the critiques, the SBNR trend remains a significant movement of our 21st century society, and it skews young: Pew finds the spiritual but not religious younger, on average, than religious Americans (2023).
Whatever we make of it, the practices are everywhere. The meditation app puts a guided sit on a phone screen for millions who would never enter a meditation hall, and about 1 in 6 American adults meditated in 2022 (CDC). Yoga, whose Hindu roots Section 4 traced (cf. Sec. 4), is practiced by about the same share, most of them with no thought of moksha. Astrology has had a revival among the young, and “wellness” culture braids nutrition, mindfulness, gratitude practice, and the language of the sacred into something that functions, for many, as a religion in all but name.
The course gave you the vocabulary for this in its first two weeks (cf. Sec. 1.4, 2.1). The morning meditation is a ritual. The crystal on the desk is a totem. The self, tended and set apart, has become the sacred thing.
Key Terms for this Lesson: SBNR · The Transcendentalists
14.3 | Religion & the Media
Radio, McPherson, & Sheen | 1920s–1950s
For the last century, religion has happened wherever the newest technology reached.
• 1924 | McPherson’s Angelus Temple goes on the air (KFSG)
• 1952 | Sheen’s Life Is Worth Living premieres
• 1987 | The PTL ministry collapses
• 2020 | COVID-19 moves worship online
Radio was barely a decade old as a mass medium before American preachers understood it. Aimee Semple McPherson (d. 1944), the Pentecostal evangelist who opened Los Angeles’s 5,300-seat Angelus Temple on January 1, 1923, began broadcasting from her own station, KFSG, in 1924, one of the first churches in the country to own one. Her illustrated sermons were staged like the Hollywood productions down the road, with costumes, sets, and a brass band, and the denomination she founded, the Foursquare Church, counts millions of members today. In the same decade the Black pulpit went out over the radio, and gospel music with it (cf. Sec. 13.3). In the 1930s the Catholic “radio priest” Charles Coughlin (d. 1979) drew an audience estimated in the tens of millions, until his antisemitic broadcasts cost him his airtime by 1940 and his archbishop ordered him to stop in 1942.
Television followed. The Catholic bishop Fulton Sheen (d. 1979) carried the instinct onto the new screen: his prime-time Life Is Worth Living (1952–1957) drew tens of millions of viewers of every faith and won him an Emmy in 1953. He shared a Tuesday time slot with Milton Berle, the biggest star on television, and beat him. Berle called him “Uncle Fultie.” Billy Graham (d. 2018) belongs to Section 13’s Cold War story (cf. Sec. 13.4). What matters here is the medium he mastered: the televised “crusade” — which made him for decades the most-heard preacher in the world. His 1957 New York crusade ran 16 weeks at Madison Square Garden, and ABC carried it live on Saturday nights.
From the first, the American religious impulse reached for the largest available audience, and the largest audience was always on the newest machine.
Televangelism & the Prosperity Gospel | 1950s–1980s
By the 1980s the machine had built empires. Televangelism is the marriage of evangelical preaching to the television broadcast, funded by viewer donations. Its leading figures presided over networks, universities, and mailing lists of millions. Pat Robertson founded the Christian Broadcasting Network in 1960 and Oral Roberts chartered his university in 1963. Jerry Falwell’s Old-Time Gospel Hour funded Liberty University (1971) and the Moral Majority (cf. Sec. 13.4). Robert Schuller preached the Hour of Power from a glass sanctuary in Orange County, the Crystal Cathedral (1980). In 1987, Jim Bakker’s PTL ministry collapsed in financial and sexual scandal, and other ministries followed it within the year.
One theological strain traveled especially well on television. The prosperity gospel is the teaching that faith is rewarded by God with health and material wealth, and its promise of blessing suited the medium’s optimism and its donation model. Its teachers called it the Word of Faith, and its best-known pulpit today is Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church in Houston, which meets in a former basketball arena and is the largest congregation in the country. The megachurch that Section 13 described (cf. Sec. 13.4), the vast, denominationally unmarked, “seeker” congregation, found in broadcast and then in video projection its natural amplifier, the sanctuary itself becoming a kind of studio. For a generation, televangelism was one of American religion’s most visible faces.
Digital Religion | 2000s–2020s
Then the screen got small enough to carry into everyone’s pocket.
Digital religion is the practice of faith through internet and mobile technology: not religion advertised online, but religion conducted there. Every tradition this course taught appears in it. Christian and Muslim congregations stream their Sunday liturgy and their Friday jummah prayers (cf. Sec. 10.4). Hindu temples offer online darshan, the sacred sight of the deity, by live video. Buddhist teachers release dharma talks as podcasts (cf. Sec. 5). The smartphone itself has become a kind of ritual object: the Quran app that sounds the call to prayer and points toward Mecca, the Siddur app that carries the Jewish prayer book, the digital yahrzeit reminder that tells a mourner when to light the candle (cf. Sec. 8.4).
When the COVID-19 pandemic closed sanctuaries across the world in 2020, this shift went from margin to mainstream in a matter of weeks. On March 27, 2020, Pope Francis blessed the city and the world from an empty, rain-soaked St. Peter’s Square, and the world watched him on a screen. The Kaaba stood nearly empty that Ramadan (cf. Sec. 10.4). Families held Passover seders over Zoom (cf. Sec. 8.3). Entire congregations met only on screens for months, and many never fully returned to the building. By 2023, about a quarter of American adults were regularly watching religious services online or on television (Pew).
The newest experiments put artificial intelligence in the pulpit. In June 2023 a Lutheran church in Fürth, Germany, held a 40-minute service written and delivered by a chatbot, avatars and all, to a packed house of the curious.
Across the whole century the pattern holds. Religion has migrated, pew to radio to television to phone, and it is learning to live on whatever screen comes next.
Key Terms for this Lesson: Televangelism · Digital Religion
14.4 | What is Religion? (A Review)
Section 1 | The Scholar & the Four Questions
We have arrived where we began.
• Section 1 | Religion in a Public College
• Section 2 | What is Religion?
In Section 1 we drew the line this whole course has walked. A theologian (a pastor, rabbi, imam, or monk) represents a tradition and tells its adherents what they ought to believe. A scholar of religion takes no public position on the rectitude of any group’s beliefs, and reports instead what people believe in a specific time and place, why they believe it, how those beliefs developed, and what they have meant in practice (cf. Sec. 1.1). The two jobs ask two questions:
The theologian’s question is: What should you believe? The scholar’s question is: What can you know about what people believe? (Sec. 1.1)
Neither question cancels the other. The line runs between jobs, not people. In a public college the line is also the law: since Abington v. Schempp (1963), a public school may teach about religion but may not establish one (cf. Sec. 1.1). We are here to study religion, not to practice or prosecute it.
Section 1 also gave the scholar a method. A century ago, courses in “Comparative Religion” assigned each tradition an essence (Judaism as law, Christianity as love, Buddhism as mysticism) and compared the essences. We called that essentialism, and we set it aside for functionalism, the study of how a religion functions in a specific place and time (cf. Sec. 1.2). In practice, functionalism meant asking The Four Questions of every tradition in turn. The Four Questions are the course’s standard model for every tradition it studied: Formation, Internal Logic, Texts & Practices, and The Modern Age.
• Formation | How and where did the tradition arise, and who shaped it as it changed over time?
• Internal Logic | What are the tradition’s own categories? What problem does it name in the world, and what counts as the good?
• Texts & Practices | What written and oral works, rituals, and disciplines carry the tradition, and how do different communities use them?
• The Modern Age | How does the tradition function in the modern world and in American life?
Run any section back through them. Section 10 opened in Arabia with the Messenger ﷺ (Formation), turned to the Quran and its world (Texts), to the community’s law and succession (Internal Logic), to the Pillars (Practices), and closed on a Muslim life in America (The Modern Age) (cf. Sec. 10). Four questions, no single definition required. That is what it means to study religion functionally.
Section 2 | Ritual, Belonging, & the Scotsman
Section 2 began with a football game, and it began there on purpose. Ritual came before religion. Émile Durkheim showed that when a community gathers around its totems and moves, sings, and acts as one, it generates a shared feeling that binds the group more tightly than any argument could (cf. Sec. 2.1). The stadium wave and the anthem before kickoff are the serious business of social life. Every tradition in this course has been, first, a community doing something together: the congregation facing Jerusalem, pilgrims circling the Kaaba, the Diné singing a patient back into balance. Belief came after, and in several traditions it never came to the front at all.
That is the course’s second theme: belonging over belief. Jewish and Hindu identities rest on familial belonging rather than creed. Daoists offer little certainty. Buddhism is nontheistic. The Navajo seek personal rather than institutional allegiance. And few of these traditions proselytize or preach a universal salvation (cf. Sec. 2.4). Prothero’s list made the point in a single page: the world’s religions are not all headed up the same mountain, and asking a Muslim how Islam ends the cycle of reincarnation is asking a baseball player how many touchdowns he scored. Each tradition follows its own internal logic, and the scholar’s job is to learn that logic on its own terms.
Section 2 also handed you a guardrail. The No True Scotsman fallacy protects a generalization about a religion by redefining the religion to exclude the contradictory cases: the hate-spewing priest, the well-dressed charlatan, the violent terrorist (cf. Sec. 2.4). Every tradition in this course has had admirable and destructive actors. The scholar reports them. The theologian cleans the house. That is the third theme: a tradition is the whole of its history, not its best self.
The Evolution of “Religion” as a Concept
The last theme is the word itself, and it is the one this course has carried from the first week to the last. Religion is a word with a history.
In the 440s BCE Herodotus coined threskeia, “the state of being devoted,” for the priestly duties he saw abroad. In the first century BCE Cicero and Caesar wrote of religio, from the Latin ligare, “to connect.” Religio is the Roman term for the set of social rules and obligations that connected citizens back to the Roman state: courtesy, duty, Rome, and not private belief (cf. Sec. 2.3). In 405, St. Jerome chose religio to translate threskeia in the Vulgate and carried every Roman connotation of obligation and allegiance into the Christian text. For the next thousand years, religion was universal, public, and obligatory: one true religion, practiced in the town square, and no one asked what John the Smith believed in his heart (cf. Sec. 11.4).
Then the word turned over. Luther made faith a matter of conscience; Westphalia (1648) made it a matter of territory, and then of choice (cf. Sec. 11.4). The Enlightenment finished the reversal: Mendelssohn classified Judaism as a “religion” to win Jews the civil rights already extended to Catholics and Protestants (cf. Sec. 2.4, 12.1), and by 1791 the United States declined to establish any religion at all (cf. Sec. 12.4, 13.2). 500 years ago, religion meant the opposite of what it means today: a universal, public, and obligatory practice led by the state became a local, private, and voluntary belief that one feels in the heart.
The word then went abroad, and the second half of this course lived with the consequences. Europeans translated din, daht, and dharma, words for law and duty, as “religion”: George Sale’s Qur’an in 1734, Sir William Jones’s “Hinduism” in the 1780s (cf. Sec. 2.4, 4.3). The label brought assumptions the traditions did not share: belief, certitude, universalism, proselytizing. A billion Hindus now live inside a “religion” that only learned to call itself one after the United States declared its independence, and many Diné still treat the word as an external label (cf. Sec. 3.1). That is why this course asked how each tradition orders life rather than what it believes.
And the word is still moving. This section watched it: the rise of the nones (cf. Sec. 14.1), the spiritual but not religious who kept the private, voluntary half of the modern definition and dropped the institution (cf. Sec. 14.2), and a religious life now conducted on a screen (cf. Sec. 14.3). The American who answers “none” on a survey and still prays, still lights candles, still marks a death with a ritual, is a reminder that the concept and the practice have never been the same thing. Religion, the word, is five centuries old in its modern sense. Ritual, belonging, and the sacred are as old as the species.
So, what is religion? Religion is a word with a history, and the traditions it names each follow their own internal logic. That is what you should be able to say and defend by the end of this week: that every religion follows its own internal logic, that every religion has held admirable and destructive actors, and that every religion has shaped the world you live in. Reflection 4 asks you the opening question directly, in your own words. To read the religious dimension of the world accurately and in context, whatever your own convictions, is religious literacy, and it is what this course was for.
This concludes our lectures on World Religions.
Key Terms for this Lesson: The Four Questions · Religio
Recommended Sources
• Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion (Macmillan, 1962)
• Stephen Prothero, God Is Not One (HarperOne, 2010)
• Putnam and Campbell, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (S&S, 2010)
• Fuller, Spiritual, but not Religious: Understanding Unchurched America (Oxford UP, 2001)
• Campbell and Tsuria, Understanding Religious Practice in Digital Media (2022)
Last Section: Religion in America
This Section: Religion Today
Course Home: World Religions