One of the marks of evangelical Christian
churches is their emphasis on evangelism. They encourage their members to go
out and "win souls for Christ," emphasizing the belief that Christ
sent his followers out into world to bring the world to Him. These churches
hold classes in evangelizing, their youths and college students are taught
techniques for "witnessing" to non-believers, and their worship
services often include testimony from people who entered the church as a result
of evangelizing.
But does Evangelism work? Does it bring
non-Christians to Christianity? The U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, just
published by The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, provides an opportunity
to test that question with some solid data. The Pew survey was a massive
undertaking, interviewing more than 35,000 people across the United States. It
carefully distinguishes between Evangelical Protestant and Mainline Protestant
denominations. When the survey compares the two groups, the results are mixed
about the effectiveness of evangelism.
To start, when one compares the
characteristics of the two groups' membership, Evangelical and Mainline
Christianity look almost identical. They are so close that the difference lies
within the statistical margin of error. Fifty-four percent of the members of
Mainline churches still belong to the denomination in which they grew up, while
the same is true of 51 percent of Evangelicals.
About 30 percent of the membership of each
group were raised Protestant, but in a different denominational family from the
one to which they now belong. For example, a person may have grown up Baptist
but now attends a Methodist church, or an Episcopalian child may have become
Pentacostalist as an adult. Finally, 9 percent of Mainline Protestants are
former Catholics, while 11 percent of Evangelicals were once Catholic.
Added up, 93 percent of both groups
consist of people who have been Christians from childhood. Evangelical and Mainline
Protestants retain approximately the same percentage of people born into the
religion, they attract the same percentage of other Protestants, and about the
same number of Catholics. About 2 percent of the membership of each group come
from other religions and about 5 percent come from the
"unaffiliated." So despite all the emphasis on winning new souls for
Christ, percentage-wise the Evangelicals are no more effective at it than the
Mainline churches.
Or are they? According to the General
Social Surveys from the 1970s and early 1980s, Mainline churches accounted for
more than 33 percent of all Americans, while only about 16 percent of Americans
belonged to Evangelical churches. But according to the 2008 survey,
Evangelicals now outnumber Mainline Protestants, by 26 percent to 18 percent.
There has been a precipitous drop in Mainline membership over the past three
decades, while Evangelical membership has increased 10 percent.
So evangelism works, right? Well, not
really. It turns out that the reversal between the two groups is largely due to
the 30 percent of Protestants that change denominational families. When
Evangelicals switch, they usually switch to another Evangelical denomination.
When Mainline Christians switch, about half of them change to the Evangelical
group. So the growth in Evangelicalism has largely been fueled by the decline
in Mainline churches, not by winning new converts from outside Christianity.
This conclusion is supported by two
further observations. Even as both Protestant groups have brought 5 percent of
their membership from people unaffiliated with Christianity, the ranks of the
unaffiliated have grown from 8 percent of Americans in the 1970s to 16 percent
today.
Finally, the overall percentage of
American Protestants is dropping. In the 1970s, these two Protestant groups
combined comprised 50 percent of all Americans. Today, they constitute less
than 45 percent. Indeed, even when all Protestants are combined, the Pew Survey
indicates that America is about to lose its standing as a Protestant majority
nation for the first time in its history.
So while Evangelical Protestantism has
successfully become the largest Christian group in the United States (Catholics
comprise just under 24 percent), it has done so not by bringing new Christians
into the fold, but by drawing them from other forms of Christianity.
Correction: In my previous column I wrote
the statement, Catholic theology holds "Catholicism provides the only path
to salvation." This is incorrect. Catholicism believes that baptism brings
non-Catholics into salvation. I apologize for any confusion my misstatement may
have caused.