A prime example of the countervailing trends is Calvary Chapel in Grand Forks. The Rev. Seth Wetter has led a “church planting” effort nearly five years old, starting as Bible study. About a year ago, a group now numbering about 20 began meeting at 5:30 p.m. on Sundays for services in an office building.

What do North Dakota and Utah have in common? Both states, while highly religious, are bucking a national trend by having the lowest percentage of people who go to nondenominational and independent religious congregations.

A new survey released last week found that swelling numbers of religious Americans are attending evangelical Christian congregations, such as Willow Creek near Chicago or
Calvary Chapel in southern California or the Lakewood Church in Houston headed by Joel and Victoria Osteen, which have no ties to a larger denomination.

The survey found that nondenominational and independent churches considered as a whole could be considered the third-largest religious group in America, with 12.2 million adherents in 3,500 congregations, according to the 2010 U.S. Religion Census, released last week by the Association of Religion Data Archives.

Roman Catholics, at 59 million in 2010 – down nearly 6 percent from 2000 – and the Southern Baptist Convention, with about 15 million members, are the largest single denominations, according to the ARDA survey.

Mainline Protestant denominations continue to hemorrhage members, while evangelicals, denominations as well as nondenominational congregations, are growing.

But only in North Dakota and Utah do less than 1 percent of religious adherents go to a nondenominational congregation.

Why Utah and North Dakota?

Why are the two conservative, religious states impervious to this national trend?
Utah, of course, is dominated by Mormons, officially known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as no other state is dominated by a single denomination: 69 percent of the population is LDS.

In North Dakota, Lutherans of all types (about 31 percent) and Catholics (about 24 percent) added up to 55 percent of the population of 672,400 in 2010.

While mainline Protestant denominations, including the two largest Lutheran churches, as well as the Catholic Church, lost members the past decade in North Dakota, they still dominate the landscape.

One expert points to history and ancestry.

“We are still close to the immigrant experience, so that if you are Norwegian you tend to be in the Norwegian (Lutheran) synod, if you’re German, you tend to be in the Missouri (Lutheran) Synod, if you are Polish, you tend to be Polish Catholic,” said the Rev. William Sherman, a retired Grand Forks priest and sociology professor at North Dakota State University in Fargo. He’s studied religion and ethnicity in North Dakota for 60 years and written several books about it all.

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