The decision to leave the Church necessarily entails leaving a particular congregation, which could include leaving long-term relationships. Additionally, if the Christian Right were the cause of a decline in church membership, it would not explain the decline of Mainline Protestant churches, which have little connection to the Christian Right.

WASHINGTON — Contrary to popular opinion and previous research, the Christian Right was not responsible for people leaving their church, a new study finds.

While those who have left the Church appear to mostly have sympathies on the left side of the political spectrum, a correlation between those who have left the Church and views of the Christian Right does not imply that the Christian Right caused them to leave, according to researchers Paul Djupe, associate professor of political science at Denison University, and Jacob Neiheisel, assistant professor of political science at University of Buffalo, SUNY.

In their paper, “The Choice That Matters: Politics in the Role of Leaving Congregations,” presented Aug. 30 at the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, Djupe and Neiheisel found that politics was related to the reason some chose to leave their congregations, but not in the way many imagine.

In a 2012 interview with The Christian Post, for instance, David Campbell, professor of political science at University of Notre Dame, discussed his research showing that young people were turning away from the Church because they associated Christianity with the Republican Party. Other researchers, Djupe and Neiheisel point out, have also found relationships between national politics and the decline of Church membership. While Djupe and Neiheisel do not doubt that the relationship exists, their study raises doubts about the implication that the relationship is causal, or that people are leaving the Church because of the Christian Right and the Republican Party.

After all, they point out, the decision to leave the Church necessarily entails leaving a particular congregation, which could include leaving long-term relationships. Additionally, if the Christian Right were the cause of a decline in church membership, it would not explain the decline of Mainline Protestant churches, which have little connection to the Christian Right.

“It seems highly dubious that evaluations of a social group out in society would have any bearing on a relationship with a particular congregation,” they wrote.

Djupe and Neiheisel used a combination of national surveys and local panel data, where the same people are polled several times over an extended period. Partly through their efforts and partly by happenstance, they were able, by and large, to focus on those who actually left the Church, rather than move or switch congregations.

They found that those who left the Church did so due to circumstances related to the congregation they left, rather than how they feel about the Christian Right.

Read More