Is America Losing Its Religion?

Last weekend, hundreds of conservative churches participated in “Pulpit Freedom Sunday”, during which pastors preached about electoral politics and sent recordings of their sermons to the Internal Revenue Service. It’s a provocation: these pastors and their legal counsel hope to challenge the rarely-enforced IRS rule prohibiting candidate endorsements by tax-exempt organizations, including houses of worship, and take it all the way to the US supreme court.

A new survey from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life , which confirms previously observed trends of Protestant decline, accompanied by a rise in religiously unaffiliated Americans, casts serious doubt on whether the self-styled church freedom warriors are fighting a politically popular battle. Among the survey’s findings, two thirds of Americans (66%) believe churches shouldn’t endorse candidates. And 54% say churches should stay out of political matters entirely. Even a majority (56%) of white evangelicals agreed that churches should not endorse candidates.

Would these data cause the churches clamoring for a legal war with the IRS to pack their bags and go home? Of course not. In fact, in spite of these trends away from organized religion and away from the entanglement of organized religion in politics, I would expect these culture war battles to ramp up – at least for the time being.
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