Hansen Wendlandt, Pastor, NCPC.  When my maternal grandparents were young adults in rural New Jersey, they brought their children to the local Catholic parish and school. That whole experience haunts my mother to this day, as I hear it does for many of you…. I don’t know what grandma and grandpa got out of church, or believed about it, or whether it changed how they lived. Still, going to church was expected, so they went.

Sometime in my childhood, they moved to Arkansas to help me and my mother. In the south during the 1980s, everyone went to church. The Baptists and Pentecostals went two or three times a week, so that if you only attended one worship service, that was pretty suspicious. In that culture, my grandparents completely skipped it.

I don’t know if they faced any problems for not going. Maybe more folks knocked on their screen door trying to save them. Maybe other folks begged them to fear eternal damnation. I do know that my grandpa was welcome at the bluegrass gatherings, which he attended religiously. It sure was more fun for me to catch crawdads in the creek while the banjos picked on Saturday, than it was to sit quietly in a pew with my Godparents on Sunday.

Well, the times, they are a-changin’. There are more people than ever like my grandparents, who just don’t give time or concern for religion. And at least in America, there are fewer and fewer places where you are culturally expected to believe, behave, and belong in a certain way. Surely you’ve noticed that shift over the last couple of decades, but the latest statistics are telling us interesting things about the religious landscape.

The Pew Research Center unveiled their latest research about two months ago. Pew is a highly respected, non-partisan think tank that studies, among other things, religion and public life, without any biased influence.

In 2007 and 2014, they talked to over 35,000 Americans. Many of the findings were not surprising to people who pay attention to these things. Others stood out in interesting ways.

Self-described Christians are down to 70.6% of the population (from 78.4% in 2007). Atheists and agnostics are up to 7.1% (from 4.0%). And people who identify as “nothing in particular”, some with a mishmash of personal spirituality, and others who are just uninterested—they are up to nearly 15.8% (from 12.1%). That leaves Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, and other faiths at a combined 5.9% (up from 4.7%).

When you dig deeper, you find out that, spread across all those categories, 44% of us (down from 48%) still find religion “very” or “somewhat” important. So, while many people identify as Christian without making any real commitments, another large group of people who don’t identify with any tradition are now more likely to find God or Spirit or whatever, on their own terms rather than through their parents’ or culture’s expectations.

Also, we see that between 2007 and 2014 Catholics were losing six members for every one they gained; and yet, since Pope Francis came on board, other research shows that many people are re-engaging. Catholic churches are more full and diverse than they have been in years. And many so-called “lapsed” Catholics have been drawn back even to other churches.

Young people aged 18-25 are much more likely to be unaffiliated, with 36% answering to atheist, agnostic, or nothing in particular; and yet other research shows that the young people who are interested in Christianity are flocking especially to higher, more formal liturgical traditions, like the Catholic, Orthodox, and Episcopalian.

We learn from the Barna Group, which focuses on religion with a slant toward evangelicalism, that young people are leaving loud, trendy mega-churches and aiming for relationship and sanctuary. They don’t come regularly, and they certainly do not follow the moral or theological teachings with blind devotion; but even non-religious millennials find home and meaning in faith communities. (The assumption is that rites and sacred language, architecture, and music offer a stability that this generation has never experienced, whereas they can get rock concerts and TED talks anywhere.)

There is also some fascinating data on faith and science. Would you believe that Quakers and Reform Jews are more environmentally active than atheists and agnostics? The United Church of Christ, Episcopalians, and Presbyterians (which happen to be the three most highly educated Christian denominations) are leading the way for Christians who embrace evolution and environmental stewardship, and for that matter, gay marriage. In fact, the largest anti-science Christian denominations are shrinking the fastest.

Why are people leaving organized faith? Many of you have great personal answers for that. According to the Harvard academic Diana Butler Bass, there are at least three general reasons. First, in the last 15 years we’ve seen scandals of extremism (9/11 & Westboro) and immorality (priest sex abuse & continued financial indiscretions) that make faith seem ugly.

Second, there are just more options and demands for our time. And third, fewer people want to commit, even to their local house of worship, when the loudest voices for faith tend to preach with such anger about homosexuality, abortion, and other political matters. Compare that to Billy Graham, who may have been against many of those things, but he spoke with grace and focused far more on the things he believed that God supported, like forgiveness and helping the poor.

Or, maybe a more positive reason that people are leaving organized religion—this is a Hansen guess, not careful research—is that the great values faith traditions hold up with stories and structure, have become more assimilated into normal American culture, without the mythology and paternalism. That is, when we see non-religious people scolding faith traditions for not holding the very values that holy men and women built those traditions upon, we have to wonder where those non-religious folks learned about love, peace and justice, if not a culture shaped by faith systems that taught about love, peace and justice.

Perhaps, despite the terrible examples we can all point to, religion has actually worked so well in spreading its central message, that it is making something about itself somewhat obsolete. Or at least, perhaps the means of promoting religion are becoming irrelevant, especially to those who are anonymously holding up those sacred ways of living that religions are meant to promote.

Either that, or the whole thing is a damned mess, and some people are over the farce while others are just trying desperately to hold onto the best stories and practices that work for them.

These national trends may have nothing to do with your experience. But as I look toward what the research may say about your future experience, or that of the next generation, I have two hopes.

First, I think and hope that the ethos that has founded all worthwhile faith, spirituality, and pro-social behavior is growing, despite the changes in its containers. Love is winning, even slowly, even with invisible steeples.

Second, I think and hope that people of all faiths can do more to lead the way, through their deep traditions and through their shared commitment to reach continually toward expressions of life that are more holy than we can ever achieve. I do believe Big Religion should know its place in the changing world we live in, and I do hope that that place will become redemption and humble inspiration for all people.