Nominal Christians have long been the church’s “warm market.” They don’t have major obstacles to faith and are the most likely people to become committed believers. Yes, their exodus will purify the church. But, to continue with the marketing terms, when people are rushing to shed your label, it means you have a branding problem. And I wouldn’t be surprised to see this negative public perception lead to greater attrition.

For one brief moment last May evangelicals and atheists celebrated the same thing. What had these disparate groups clapping in unison? The Pew Research Center’s report on “America’s Changing Religious Landscape.”

Atheists trumpeted the continuing rise of the “nones,” those who affiliate with no religion. The study showed that, in the space of seven years, the number of unaffiliated had jumped from 16.1 to 22.8 percent of the population.

Evangelicals celebrated a less obvious victory. Though the number of Christians in the U.S. fell precipitously (from 78.4 percent to 70.6 percent), evangelicals held steady, slipping only slightly, from 26.3 percent to 25.4 percent.

To careful observers, the real story was between the statistics. Yes, Catholics and Episcopalians were hemorrhaging. But those are traditions with high numbers of “Nominal” (name-only) Christians. Their losses merely affirmed what many had felt for years — that there is now less pressure to identify as a Christian. With the cultural winds shifting, Nominals were merely coming clean on where they’d been all along. In other words, Christianity isn’t dying; nominalism is.

I predict that nominalism will continue to decline and that the church will be stronger for it. Whenever Christianity becomes culturally and politically established, the purity of the church suffers. When ancient Rome received its first Christian emperor, it seemed like a godsend. And in many ways, it was. Constantine overturned the illegality of Christianity and ended state-sponsored persecution of Christians. But suddenly it was politically advantageous to be a Christian and the church was presented with the new challenge of nominalism. That’s what drove the first monastics into the wilderness, to seek a spiritual purity they felt the church lacked in the new majority-Christian empire.

Today, we’re seeing a similar development, but in reverse. Whether or not the U.S. was ever a Christian nation, it is clearly not one now. And most commentators believe we will continue down the post-Christian path. As we do, only serious Christians — ones who are willing to be unpopular, and perhaps even persecuted — will remain committed to the faith.

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