So is Christianity dying? No. Like Mark Twain’s demise, the report of the inevitable death of Christianity is also exaggerated because of mistaken identities. It will frustrate its critics and comfort its followers, but Christianity is still alive and well.

Prompted by Pope Francis’s recent historic visit to the United States, Bill Hemmer did a special broadcast for Fox News called “Losing Faith in America.” Fox claimed, “Church attendance has been going down for decades, and fewer and fewer people identify as Christian. Will this troubling trend continue, or is there hope? And what’s behind the decline?”

Search “Christianity is dying” online and you’ll find some groups gleefully proclaiming the church’s demise and then evangelical Christians wringing their hands and fretting, especially about the “Nones” and Millennials, both rumored to be the beginning of the end of Christianity.

The only problem is it isn’t true. It reminds me of Mark Twain’s famous note to the New York Journal in 1897 after newspapers reported him to be ill or dead: “The report of my death was an exaggeration.” Instead, it was a case of mistaken identity. His cousin, James Ross Clemens, was seriously ill and the newspapers mixed up their Clemenses.

In a similar way, the people who pronounce that evangelicals or Christianity is dying are mixing up the identities of the Nones (those who have no religious affiliation) and evangelicals — and are inadvertently distorting the data.

I’ve spent substantial time studying generations and faith, so I was especially excited when Pew Research Center’s study on America’s Changing Religious Landscape came out just as my publisher was typesetting my next book, Generational IQ: Christianity Isn’t Dying, the Millennials Aren’t the Problem, and the Future Is Bright. We were able to “hold the presses” so I could use Pew’s latest data to explain why so many folks are jumping to the wrong conclusions.

Let me explain four ways they’ve gotten it wrong — and why Christianity isn’t actually going away any time soon.

1. Nones are not the same as dropouts.

We have mistaken the Nones for people who have dropped out of Christianity, when in reality, many of them were never practicing Christians. It is true that more people now select “None” when asked their religious affiliation.

In a 2014 survey, Pew found that 22.8 percent of Americans — including 35 percent of Millennials — are Nones, the highest percentage the organization ever polled. Nones are tied with Baptists for the second largest group in the United States. Only Catholics are larger.

But this dramatic increase in the Nones does not mean that younger generations are suddenly rejecting Christianity. In the past, people who never attended church or even lived a “wild” lifestyle still selected “Christian” as their affiliation, even though their nonreligious neighbors would have laughed had they known. They were Nones, but told researchers they were Christians because of the social stigma.

Read More

[Editor’s note: One or more original URLs (links) referenced in this article are no longer valid; those links have been removed.]