Ahead of the Trend — Retention Rates and Boundary Maintenance

Ahead of the Trend Newsletter

Each month, Dr. Ryan Burge, author and political scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, publishes two columns highlighting the latest news in religion research utilizing data from the ARDA. Other authors from the ARDA team contribute practical analysis on resources and stories of impact on occasion. We are excited to share these Ahead of the Trend articles with you.

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The First Wave Left with Conviction. The Second Wave Just Drifted.

If one were to guess a random person’s current religion, the answer is almost always the same: whatever religion they were raised in. The share of Americans who indicate that their current religious tradition is the one in which they were raised is 66%. But how and why people switch may be changing.

The political premium that came with religious exit has nearly vanished. Younger “dechurchers” don’t look like political refugees; they look more like people who simply stopped going—gradually, quietly, without it meaning much ideologically one way or the other.

The Purists Are Losing: How American Catholics Are Rewriting the Rules

The average American Catholic disagrees with the teachings of the Church on all kinds of issues like sex outside marriage, the use of birth control, and the legality of abortion access. Data from the American Catholic Laity Poll strongly shows Catholics, even the ones who go to Mass every week, seem more willing to reject the Church’s teachings on a number of controversial topics.

They are also unwilling to cut people off from the Catholic Church or label them as "bad Catholics." For instance, 80% of Catholics believe that someone could be a good Catholic without going to Sunday Mass and 64% believe someone could be a good Catholic without following the Church's teaching on abortion.

Previous Ahead of the Trend Articles:

Should America Have a Christian Culture? The share of Americans who say that it’s “extremely” important for the United States to have a culture based in Christian religious beliefs is not that large at all: just 16%. It does seem that this contingent is really loud, but they aren’t that numerically large. There is not a strong sense here that huge swaths of the country think that having a “Christian country” is that important.

Gen Z Doesn't Trust Anyone There is no generation that is less trusting of other people than Gen Z. Gen Z trust levels started low and have only slipped from there. This is an empirical fact: unless they experience a significant increase in trust (which we haven’t seen in fifty years of polling data), Gen Z will be the least trusting generation in modern American history.

Context for Community Engagement: ARDA’s Community Profile Builder The ARDA team recently interviewed two Indianapolis-based faith and civic leaders who routinely utilize the Community Profile Builder to understand the neighborhoods in which they live and serve. While their roles and contexts may differ, the value they have found in researching and detailing their communities has similarly shaped how they conduct their work in local outreach.

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