Photo courtesy of Ryan Burge
Collapse or Realignment?
Ryan Burge spent decades at the pulpit of a church that had been standing since 1868. By 2025, it was gone.
First Baptist Church of Mount Vernon, Illinois had faced no scandal or sudden crisis. Still, Burge blamed himself for his church’s closure.
“I couldn’t keep it going, and it feels like I let down all those people who had come before me, who devoted their time and energies and money to building that church. It feels like I failed them in some way,” Burge said.
Burge expected First Baptist’s decline. As an associate professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, he studies trends in American religion for a living. As a pastor, he witnessed firsthand his Midwestern congregation’s population aging as its pews grew emptier.
“Everything I saw in the pews was grey hair and a lot more funerals than weddings or baptisms or births,” Burge observed.
The closing of Mainline Protestant churches like First Baptist reflects the decline of Christianity in the United States spanning several decades. As recently as the early 1990s, roughly 90 percent of U.S. adults identified as Christian. Today, that number is 63 percent. The number of religious unaffiliated Americans—which some scholars like Burge have dubbed the “nones”—have increased sixfold in that time.
Yet an astonishing trend has emerged since 2019: Christian religious affiliation and church attendance rates have stabilized. As younger generations begin to shape the future of American Christianity, one story emerging from the shifting landscape of faith is not just one of decline or stagnation but of realignment. While traditional institutions falter, new forms of faith communities are taking root, offering a redefined vision of what religious life can look like in America.
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The Fall of the Traditional American Church
Burge’s church in Mount Vernon was merely a symptom of the disease. In Midwestern cities with dwindling populations, Mainline Protestantism is hollowing out.
The story is markedly similar in the deep American South. Though distinct in size, structure, and geography, the Southern Baptist Convention now faces its own form of institutional decline, as the influence of the megachurch pipeline begins to wane.
Zach Lambert felt the Evangelical megachurch pipeline pressure firsthand when he was selected by Jack Graham—megachurch pastor and member of President Donald Trump’s Religious Advisory Council—to be his intern.
Lambert called his boss’ church the “mecca of the culture and community of [Evangelicalism].”
“You’re convinced there’s no higher form of Evangelicalism than this church and these roles that you have. It’s massive. It has 40,000 members. It’s a massive campus with a full K-12 school. It has a Starbucks inside of it, a full restaurant, two bookstores,” Lambert said.
Lambert had every reason to believe that this path would guarantee upward mobility through the evangelical ranks. “Being Jack’s intern really was supposed to fast-track you into being a pastor over an area, then campus, then pastor over a megachurch.”
But Lambert grew disillusioned by the traditional megachurch culture. The over-zealous advocates of the institution who missed the point of Jesus’ teachings wore him down.
“People are stepping away because the Christians that they encounter are so unlike the Christ they read about in Scripture. The pastors they encounter are preaching one thing and then doing another thing. The systems and structure they encounter within church settings do not yield good fruit—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness—that Scripture says are the fruit of God’s spirit. They see a toxic version of that, and so I think eventually they step away,” Lambert said.
The doctrinal hypocrisy frustrated Lambert so deeply that he ultimately decided to step away and start his own church over a bed of mozzarella sticks, sliders, and chicken tenders.
“I remember a final conversation with my wife sitting at a Chili’s, eating a Triple Dipper and eating my feelings, and she said, ‘Can you really keep doing nothing?’ I just said no. And so I stepped away,” Lambert concluded.
Lambert is not the only member who has left the traditional Evangelical institutions and looked elsewhere. Nascent factions, like his, have eaten up the once-booming institution that defined the group.
Burge disagreed that doctrinal hypocrisy has caused the mass exodus from Christianity. “It’s actually much simpler than that.” Perhaps people throw out theological disputes as a post hoc justification for their abandonment of church, but Burge thinks that it is unlikely those disputes caused many to exit.
“It’s logistical. ‘I moved,’ or ‘I got married,’ or ‘I got a new job,’ or ‘we had kids,’ or ‘other priorities took up my time.’ Most people leave religion and stop attending church not because they have a theological or political dispute with the congregation, but because of real practical stuff,” Burge emphasized.
Further, the bulk of those who leave traditional Christian institutions do not leave suddenly or loudly. Burge says that they “slowly slip away over time. They go from being weekly [church attendees] to twice a month and then once a month, and then six times a year, and then they’re gone.”
“When we ask [newly unaffiliated Christians] about why they leave, they kind of pick the easiest thing to say—things like, ‘Oh, the hypocrisy of people in the church is why.’ There’s always been hypocrisy by people who call themselves followers of Jesus. I mean, that’s from literally the beginning.”
In contrast, Burge continued, “It’s [harder] to say, ‘I don’t really know, man. I just didn’t get a whole lot out of it, and I got lazy, and it was easier not going than it was going, and so I stopped going.’”
Dr. Matthew Taylor, the senior Christian scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies, thinks much more broadly about why institutional Christianity has declined.
“There’s kind of an open marketplace where new actors are coming on the stage: new movements are coming on the stage, and attracting young people. There’s a lot of flux in that system. After the Second Great Awakening, it’s the Baptists and the Methodists who’ve gotten old. Now, it’s the conventional Evangelicals who atrophied,” Taylor acknowledged.
Those “conventional Evangelicals” constitute the Southern Baptist Convention that Lambert left in addition to thousands of fellow congregants.
“The Southern Baptist Church is the largest Protestant denomination in the world with pillars of organizations or leaders that everyone looks up to. My grandparents were early founding members of a Southern Baptist megachurch in Austin. And one of the places that they always looked up to was the president of the Southern Baptist Convention and the handful of leaders and pastors who were very influential in the movement,” Lambert said.
But the Southern Baptist Convention that Lambert’s grandparents extolled is not as ordered as it once was. As people leave, either disaffiliating with Christianity or entering independent non-denominational sects, Evangelical factionalism has increased.
Burge said that “the Southern Baptist Convention is not top-down anymore. Evangelicalism has factions or pockets. You’ve got your Franklin Graham, Billy Graham’s son, and he’s an old school, traditional Evangelical, but then you’ve got Paula White, who Donald Trump loves, but mainstream Evangelicals do not like her at all because, first off, she can’t be a pastor because she’s a woman and she’s been divorced and she speaks in tongues and she preaches the prosperity gospel.”
Because of the factionalism that has characterized Southern Baptism over the past several years, Burge wishes journalists focused less on the actions of the Southern Baptist Convention.
“I think [journalists] need to stop going to the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting and reporting on what they do on the front page of The New York Times—that’s not helpful because, again, the Southern Baptist Convention is not what it used to be in terms of influence inside the Evangelical movement. It’s easy to cover because it’s a big, fancy convention, and you can get press passes. But the harder stories are the disorganized, real Evangelical religion that’s cropping out.”
Photo courtesy of Ryan Burge
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What’s Growing as Old Churches Die?
Churches like First Baptist in the Midwest are shutting their doors. The Southern Baptist Church’s influence is fading. Yet the data is clear that Christian religious affiliation has been stable for over half a decade. In other words, some movements are rising from the ashes of the traditional American church.
One of those budding movements is the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR—a right-wing Christian supremacist group Burge associated with Paula White, the inaugural leader of the White House Faith Office under the second Trump administration.
The NAR is one network of leaders within a broader independent charismatic movement that has skyrocketed in popularity. Leaders of the NAR dub their great revival the “Third Great Awakening.” Independent charismatic Christians believe in the direct experience of the Holy Spirit, including practices like speaking in tongues, healing, and prophecy. In 1970, there were about 44 million independent charismatic followers in the world. In 2020, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary estimated that number to be 312 million.
“Peter Wagner, a seminary professor at Fuller Seminary who specialized in church growth, was one of the first to recognize this trend of people migrating and moving into these more non-denomination and charismatic spaces. He then got deeply involved with that trend and felt that he needed to help spur that on [in America] and join in,” Taylor said.
Wagner began networking with independent charismatic leaders who identified as apostles or prophets facilitating the Third Great Awakening. Through the power of prophecy as evidenced in the Hebrew Bible, they hoped a billion people would convert to charismatic Christianity in the 21st century.
In 1999, Wagner retired from Fuller Seminary to begin building NAR networks. Taylor tracked the extraordinary growth of these networks in the course of only a decade.
“[Wagner] spent, basically from 1999 until retirement in 2010, building out massive networks. There were hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people joining in with these networks. And they were influential leaders—some of the most talented, charismatic pastors and leaders in the country who were hanging around with Wagner. Multiply that with the number of churches they had, and it had a larger impact.”
The NAR initially branded itself as an effort to reform the church. Sometime along the way, Taylor said, its purpose radically changed.
“Suddenly, it became about: ‘We need to conquer societies. We need to take dominion over societies. We need to lay claim to our Christian entitlement over the broader nations of the world.’”
In other words, the NAR radically shifted into a fight for Christian supremacy.
In 2008, Sarah Palin—the former Governor of Alaska and then-candidate for Vice President of the United States—was mentored by an NAR prophet. When Palin entered the political scene, the leaders of the NAR anticipated that they would “conquer the government mountain through Sarah Palin,” Taylor said. The following years created the perfect theological storm for Donald Trump to enter the political arena.
“Of course, McCain and Palin lost. [The NAR] experienced the Obama years as a time of desolation—where the liberals are taking over our society, and God wants us to take it back. When Trump appeared on the stage in 2015, they were primed for someone like him, and they wound up having a lot of prophecies.”
In 2016, Wagner endorsed Donald Trump—the only presidential candidate he ever endorsed. That choice institutionalized the religious fervor surrounding Trump that has persisted today. To the NAR, Trump was the God-sent emblem of an existential struggle for Christian dominance.
Witnessing this energy for Trump as a pastor in Texas, Lambert expects the NAR will grow.
“What I see [in Texas], honestly, is this right-wing Christian nationalist church on the backs of the NAR. Those churches are growing like crazy all over the country, and I think that’ll continue to happen over the next few years, especially during Trump’s time in office,” Lambert said.
Lambert emphasizes that the NAR will not be the only movement that will grow—in fact, he’s fighting to grow ostensibly the opposite of the NAR. After parting ways with the Southern Baptist hierarchy, he founded Restore Austin, an independent church that caters to those disillusioned by the Evangelical churches they once attended.
According to Lambert, many of his attendees tell him, “‘I’m not going to compromise on these values around justice and inclusion and equality for all people. I’m not going to go somewhere my queer friend can’t go.’ [Sometimes] they’re queer and say, ‘I’m not going to go somewhere that makes me hide that part of myself.’ But they miss Jesus, and miss talking about the Bible, and miss a faith community, and didn’t know you could have both of those things until they saw Restore.”
While Lambert admits the NAR is growing rapidly as Trump has become enmeshed with contemporary American Evangelicalism, he thinks his church—and churches like his—will grow as well.
“I see [the NAR] continue to grow. I also see [progressive independent] churches like ours continuing to grow, ones that are committed to Jesus-centered justice, living out faith and values in the public square, and aren’t afraid of speaking out boldly against things that are against the ways of Jesus,” Lambert expressed.
Lambert has faced challenges as a counterbalance to the NAR and its related sects. He was accosted at an Austin dinner after voicing his opposition on social media to a law promulgated by Governor Greg Abbott (R-TX) that required that the parents of transgender children be reported to Child Protective Services.
“I walked into this dinner, and the first thing this guy says is, ‘How dare you talk about our governor like that! Don’t you read the Bible? We’re supposed to respect the governing authorities.’ He yelled at me in the lobby of this fancy dinner for pastors,” Lambert said.
Other times, the frustrations of ideologically conservative pastors are quietly voiced.
Lambert shared, “I had an old pastor friend in the city who asked me to go to lunch—we hadn’t seen each other in a while. He sat me down, we small-talk for a little bit, and then he said, ‘Hey, there’s this group of pastors I meet with, and a lot of us are frustrated by the things you teach about and what you post online, because our people see it and ask why we’re not talking about racial justice or whatever. We talked about it, and they asked me to come have lunch with you and tell you to stop.’”
Some young people argue that the solution to this politicization is to embrace even more traditional, intense forms of faith. Skye Graham is from Hudson, Ohio, and attends Hillsdale College. She is in the process of converting to Eastern Orthodoxy, a small but growing sect that embraces fasting, rigid liturgical worship, and an ascetic approach to spiritual discipline.
“People are looking at these [divisions], and they’re seeing no options for them. The appeal of something like the traditional Latin mass or Eastern Orthodoxy is that they are bigger and broader than whatever conflicts are going on in the American Protestant church,” Graham said.
Taylor takes Graham’s argument about the appeal of ancient Christian traditions more broadly. Institutional traditions feel new to people coming from Evangelical backgrounds.
“Even though Eastern Orthodoxy is arguably the most ancient Christian tradition, it feels fresh to people coming from Evangelicalism. That’s actually been a trend: since the 1980s, you’ve had Evangelical Christians migrating out of Evangelicalism and populating this growing Orthodox community,” Taylor asserted.
While Graham grew up with a mainline Protestant spiritual tradition, the Orthodox Church offered something different to her.
Graham said, “There wasn’t any particular moment [that led to my conversion]. I went to my first [Eastern Orthodox] liturgy, and it was different and unlike anything I’d ever experienced. I kept doing research, and the historical arguments for the Orthodox Church convinced me.”
Being a part of the Orthodox Church is a lifestyle, and integrating into the Orthodox culture has been physically demanding for Graham.
“During Lent, we go [to church] every single day. Even people at my school—we live 40 minutes from the church—go every single day. We have a fasting calendar, where we fast for almost half the year. You’re expected to go to coffee hour after church. [Orthodox Christianity] is expected to be your lifestyle, not just a building that you go to,” Graham said.
Graham admits that these rituals are not attainable right away. Her priest told her that the rituals are about keeping expectations high as a follower of Jesus.
“He told me that they set a high bar, but if you don’t feel like you can attain that right away, then maybe you just go without meat for 40 days [during Lent],” Graham added in comparison to fasting completely.
These three radically different approaches to Christianity—the NAR movement, justice-centered Evangelicalism, and Eastern Orthodoxy—are assembling as traditional American religious institutions disappear. What unifies them?
Father Casey Cole is a Franciscan friar and runs Breaking In The Habit, a blog and social media handle under which he’s accumulated hundreds of thousands of followers on platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. He reconciles the tension between the three traditions—partisanship versus nonpartisanship and ancient versus modern—by arguing that people have a hunger for faith no matter where they seek it.
“People are looking for belonging. In a blase world in which everything is corporate and pre-packaged and approved by legal, people want authenticity. While I don’t think that they’re equal responses in some ways, they’re so far different that they come back together and meet in the center, which is that they’re a rejection of the suburban parish that is boring and unengaged,” Cole stated.
For those enveloped in the New Apostolic Reformation, people are angry about and frustrated by a neoliberal order and want to see something different so much that they will commit theologically to modern-day prophecy and apostolicism. For those seeking out a traditional Latin mass or an Eastern Orthodox liturgy, Cole said “they’re tired of the blase of church and going through the motions and want to commit themselves to something.”
“One thing I found in religious life that we’ve done terribly wrong in recent decades is trying to craft the message and saying, ‘Oh, it’s not that hard. Our life is a lot like yours.’ We try to find connections [this way], but it’s the opposite—people want something rigorous and difficult,” Cole emphasized in reference to the rise of Eastern Orthodoxy.
Cole “can connect it, in a weird way, to the movie Fight Club. It’s responding to that late 90s corporate, everything’s boring, everything’s cookie cutter, [by saying] ‘No, I want to do something significant.’ I think that spirit is still alive.”
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Gen Z and the Digital Pulpit
Surveys show between 40 and 50 percent of Gen Z (born between 1997 and 2006) Americans identify as nonreligious. The religious disaffiliation of younger Americans has accelerated the decline since 1990. But Cole’s argument that people will continue to look for belonging and meaning in life stands. The more complicated reality might be that Gen Z isn’t fully abandoning religion but engaging with it differently through social media.
Gender matters in understanding Gen Z and faith: young men are both more religious than young women and are returning to church in larger numbers.
Burge thinks the online trend of “maxxing”—and the related young male lingo that comes with it—could help explain the rise of Gen Z male church attendance.
“Young men are ‘maxxing,’ right? The whole thing of [Gen Z] ‘jaw-maxxing.’ Those phrases have a religious component to it. The idea of staring at the chair in front of you on a plane for four hours with no food and no water and no entertainment is a form of prayer and meditation and skepticism, which is a very Christian concept,” Burge said.
Social media’s amplification of “male” traditional values accelerates the gender gap in religious affiliation. Beyond notorious social media phenomena and performative asceticism, social media content is not just about conversion. It can spread community.
Cole has found joy as a Catholic content creator in the digital world in the Internet’s capacity to connect people in extraordinary conditions. Some of that is negative—it allows people to access fringe ideas—but it can create profound goodness, too.
“I think there’s also a connection with religious groups [because of the Internet] where you can say, ‘Hey, I’m in some podunk town, and there are no Catholics here. But I can watch Father Mike Schmitz or Father Casey Cole or Bishop Robert Barron, and I can say, ‘Oh, I feel a part of something and have strong faith.’ They can connect on chats or message boards or Zoom meetings, and it connects small minority groups that allow faith to flourish,” Cole observed.
In Cole’s experience, reception on social media depends on the platform.
“I’ve done parodies—they’re just jokes, like ‘cooking with St. Francis, here’s how you put ashes in your food.’ It was an infomercial that was very silly and stupid, and people on Facebook either didn’t get that I wasn’t serious or got offended by it as if I was mocking St. Francis. On TikTok, people thought it was pretty funny,” Cole said.
As a Franciscan friar, Cole’s content aims to bring Catholics closer to their faith. According to Taylor, however, other content creators can weaponize social media to accelerate radical charismatic Christian movements.
“[Radical] movements have thrived online. They have a lot of influencers; they’re technologically savvy, they’re good at producing slick videos, and they’re offering forms of religious belonging that are assertive and more misogynistic, playing into the Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson ‘young men need a purpose’ kind of vibe,” Taylor said.
That fringe concerns Cole. “The Internet connects people in a way that physical space can’t. The negative of this is that it allows silos to exist. It allows people to connect across the world with fringe ideas—and so terrorist groups grow, and hate groups grow.”
The amplification of fringe ideas gives anonymous viewers reason to target mainstream creators. In a recent video with a secular creator, Cole received thousands of negative hate comments toward him and his faith. “You kind of enter into the lion’s den where you realize a lot of people don’t have any basis in Scripture or religion. They see me as one of the sex abusers. They see me as a face of MAGA. Sometimes, they’re so intertwined that Christianity [becomes] such a mess that that’s all they can see.”
Burge qualified Cole’s belief that many on social media have no Scriptural grounding by saying that young people lack a grounding in Christianity that isn’t Evangelical.
“[Conservative] Evangelical Christianity sucks up all the oxygen in the room. Young people don’t realize there actually are religious Christian traditions that are cool with women in leadership and same-sex marriage and transgender people. Evangelicals are 60 percent of all Protestant Christians. I think they’re like 90 percent of the discourse around Protestantism,” Burge said.
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The Story We Tell About Faith: Today and Tomorrow
At its most theologically toxic, American Christianity substitutes spiritual identity for political identity.
Graham has witnessed this substitution living in the Midwest.
“American Christianity in particular has been hyper-politicized. It was around the Trump era [many liberal churches] started adding rainbow flags to people’s pins. On the other end, a lot of these conservative churches are literally flying American flags on Easter.”
By extension, it has become easy to apply political language to traditional faith institutions. But Cole thinks it is wrong to apply a distinctly political lens to every aspect of faith.
“I think journalism can feed into this problem [of radical faith], which is applying an American political lens to the church. There’s fighting in the church. The movie Conclave presented the sense of power-hungry people and conniving behind the scenes. I don’t think that’s as true as the media would like it to be; that’s implanting on the church the only lens they can look through,” Casey said.
Traditional religious institutions are declining as new, non-denominational Christian sects rise. In turn, Cole encourages journalists to “not pigeonhole or label or put people in those camps. I think it just self-perpetuates.”
While traditional institutions are declining, Lambert cautions Americans from thinking that they are no longer influential. Some within the Southern Baptist church, for instance, have grown more radicalized by the institution in spite of others’ disillusionment.
“You have a lot of pundits, pastors, politicians, who preach that ‘hey, anybody who votes for a Democrat is going to hell.’ Then, you sit with them later, and you ask: Do you really think this? They say, ‘Ah, who knows.’ But people are radicalized by statements like that, and they go back to their family and friends. They’ve been radicalized by people who don’t even necessarily believe the things they’re saying,” Lambert admitted.
While the past five years have seen a stabilization of faith in America, the decline is far from over. The stabilization is temporary. Young people are still less religious than their parents and grandparents. As older generations age out, religious affiliation is expected to continue shrinking, with projections showing the U.S. Christian population could fall below 50 percent. If the decline is more aggressive, Christian affiliation could decline to a low of 35 percent.
That reality rattles Burge, not only mourning his own church but similar losses nationwide.
“We’ve sanitized the Christian aspect of history. We don’t talk about the fact that Martin Luther King, Jr. was a pastor and that he used the black church network in the South to get his aims. The only thing people know [today] is the religious right. They don’t understand that Christians, throughout all of history, have fought for human rights,” Burge said.
Christianity has anchored America’s moral vision and collective identity. Whether it still can—or whether its legacy will be rewritten as institutions fade—is an open question.