{"id":8404,"date":"2021-04-16T05:00:02","date_gmt":"2021-04-16T05:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/runyourownwebsite.uk\/sorteddev\/?p=8404"},"modified":"2021-04-16T06:53:54","modified_gmt":"2021-04-16T06:53:54","slug":"church-slump-will-boost-purity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/runyourownwebsite.uk\/sorteddev\/church-slump-will-boost-purity\/","title":{"rendered":"Church ‘purity’ set to grow"},"content":{"rendered":"

While the number of adult Americans attending church has fallen below 50 per cent of the population for the first time in more than a century \u2013 one leading UK academic believes the slump will be beneficial \u2018in the long term\u2019.<\/h2>\n

Church membership across the pond has been dropping steadily since the start of the century, culminating in a three per cent decline between 2018 and 2021, as revealed last month in a Gallup poll<\/a><\/p>\n

But Stephen Bullivant, a professor of theology and sociology at St. Mary\u2019s University in Twickenham (London) describes the revelation of just 47 per cent of Americans identifying themselves as church-goers as a symbolic marker.<\/p>\n

\u2018This is one more little data point alongside a great many that are all, for the most part, pointing in a single direction,\u201d he said. \u2018And that is the waning of Christian America.\u2019<\/p>\n

Bullivant believes that although the decline started just over 20 years ago, the factors were generations in the making.<\/p>\n

Committed ones<\/h3>\n

Interestingly, the trends highlighted by the latest study seem to be especially exaggerated in Catholic circles. Since 2000, the rate of church membership has dropped twice as quickly among self-identified Catholics (down 18 per cent) than it has among Protestants.<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, men like Bullivant aren\u2019t without hope.<\/p>\n

\u2018You always hear things like, \u2018If present trends continue, the last Christian in Britain will die in 2070,\u2019 which is [rubbish], because present trends don\u2019t continue,\u2019 he told the National Catholic Registe<\/em>r<\/a>, pointing to places like Sweden and Estonia \u2013 deeply secularised countries where church membership is actually growing \u2013 as examples of places where trends have been reversed.<\/p>\n

And the UK academic remains hopeful in the long-term.<\/p>\n

\u2018It\u2019s not that we want a smaller, purer Church,\u201d he continued. \u2018It\u2019s just that\u2019s the way secularization is heading: the Church will be smaller. And if it\u2019s smaller, then it has to be purer, because only the kind of more committed ones will still be there.\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While the number of adult Americans attending church has fallen below 50 per cent of the population for the first time in more than a century \u2013 one leading UK academic believes the slump will be beneficial \u2018in the long term\u2019. Church membership across the pond has been dropping steadily since the start of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":692,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,1546],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8404","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-free-content","category-homepage"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/runyourownwebsite.uk\/sorteddev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8404","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/runyourownwebsite.uk\/sorteddev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/runyourownwebsite.uk\/sorteddev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/runyourownwebsite.uk\/sorteddev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/692"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/runyourownwebsite.uk\/sorteddev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8404"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/runyourownwebsite.uk\/sorteddev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8404\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8429,"href":"https:\/\/runyourownwebsite.uk\/sorteddev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8404\/revisions\/8429"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/runyourownwebsite.uk\/sorteddev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8404"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/runyourownwebsite.uk\/sorteddev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8404"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/runyourownwebsite.uk\/sorteddev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8404"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}