For decades, the dominant religious narrative has focused on the decline of liberal Protestant Christianity. The new PRRI/Brookings analysis suggests a distinctly different future pattern, at least as far as one can be read the future from the tea leaves of the present: the declining appeal of religious conservatism, coupled with the increasing appeal of both a diverse religious progressivism and religious disaffiliation.

Since the rise of the Moral Majority movement in the 1980s, there has been considerably more ink spilt on examining religious conservatives than religious progressives.

In 2008, I wrote a book based on qualitative interviews with nearly 100 self-identified progressive religious leaders (Progressive & Religious, Rowman and Littlefield) that provided one of the few contemporary systematic treatments of this group. Five years later, there continues to be significantly more academic, media, and popular interest in the religious right than in the religious left. For example, an analysis of global monthly keyword searches on Google reveals over 27,000 searches for “Christian Right,” the most popular related keyword term on the right, compared to just over 8,000 searches for “Christian left,” the most popular related keyword term on the left.

Despite the lack of attention given the religious left, a new religious orientation scale developed by PRRI and Brookings finds that a significant number of Americans—approximately 1-in-5 (19 percent)—are religious progressives.
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