In the 2010s, Christians began noticing that their religion had entered a period of decline. For a while, the hints of it were subtle enough to ignore, so most of them did just that. But eventually, it got too obvious and protracted to do that anymore. Evangelicals in particular evolved three different coping methods that still shape their ongoing decline today—and which have made it impossible for them to change course in any significant way.
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SITUATION REPORT: Three coping methods and one decline that just refuses to go away
For some years in the 2000s, evangelical leaders could ignore the signs of impending decline. The hints were subtle: Church pews looking sparser at services, Sunday parking becoming much easier to find, breakfast restaurants fuller than usual in that peak 10am-noon window that church attendance used to occupy.
The lid blew clean off their excuse bin in the mid-2010s with the publication of the 2015 Pew Religious Landscape Study. This study made the truth impossible to ignore: Yes, Christianity was indeed in decline in America. All flavors of it were losing members. The lower-control flavors—mainline, Catholic, progressive churches—were losing people faster than high-control ones, but all of them were shrinking nonetheless. Unaffiliated Americans, however, were gaining ground. In only seven short years, they’d gone from 16% of Americans to nearly 23%. Nothing indicated these trends would reverse, either.
Faced with the unavoidable and stark truth, though, evangelicals clearly saw little reason to engage differently than they had been for years. They’d already developed the coping methods they’d deploy in the crucial years after that study’s debut. Those strategies would make fixing the decline impossible.
The coping methods evangelicals developed before 2015
I got intensely interested in the Religious Right in general in the early 2010s. A chance blog post from an evangelical pastor caught my eye: It blamed a lack of parking space for declining church attendance. Another pastor blamed the rise of youth sports leagues that played on Sundays. These sounded like ludicrous excuses to me. For the stakes pastors claimed were in play around their religion, they couldn’t possibly believe that parking and kiddie baseball were the stumbling blocks here.
As I’d soon find, though, evangelicals in particular had a very low opinion of those skipping services on Sunday morning. Soon, I could identify some trends in their coping process. Here’s how evangelicals tended to respond to their own decline before 2015:
- Some claimed that Christianity was just being purified of all those ickie fake Christians who clogged membership rolls.
- Others insisted that with compulsory Christianity becoming less of a factor, Christianity could become the weird, strange, countercultural force it was always meant to be.
- And more than a few redoubled their efforts to enshrine their religious privilege into law.
Today, we’ll go through these coping methods—and then discover how they prevented any hint of change that might have helped stabilize or even reverse that decline.
Cope 1: Insisting that Christianity was fine, just being refined and purified at last.
Ed Stetzer was right out in front with his chosen coping mechanism by 2013: Insisting that only “cultural Christians” were leaving, which was great news! They weren’t TRUE CHRISTIANS™, see, so he didn’t want them anyway. Their absence left a stronger, more pure remnant of “convictional Christians” who would carry the religion forward and ensure a stronger future for churches. But he wasn’t the only one. A 2009 viral post from Michael “iMonk” Spencer had already landed on the exact same themes (and BTW, we talked about that post here). Spencer wrote:
We can rejoice that in the ruins, new forms of Christian vitality and ministry will be born.
And this self-soothing reassurance popped up in many other places (like the Church Leadership Wiki) before and after the 2015 Pew Study. Though some Christians pushed back against it, the evangelicals remaining in the pews clearly liked it. In the early to mid 2010s, I saw it everywhere, though sometimes with different labels for the groups. Barna Group in particular liked making up labels—like “Nomads/Prodigals/Exiles” to describe the young adults who were drifting toward disaffiliation.
At the time, evangelicals just exuded this raw contempt for those who’d left their ranks. They regarded them as inferior creatures who hadn’t been able to hack the capital-T Truth.
By 2016, though, the purification myth seemed less common. Evangelicals didn’t need it anymore. Enough ex-evangelicals were loudly speaking the truth about their former fervor and devotion, yes. But as we’ll see, they’d simply found a far more effective source of optimism.
Reality 1: How the purification myth stymied any possible fix for decline
In systems built around gaining and guarding personal power, like evangelicalism as a whole, the group’s message must always be seen as perfect. It is sacred and cannot be questioned, let alone altered. If someone leaves the group, it is because they couldn’t properly live out the message. That departure can never be because the message just didn’t work for that person. The message always works, you see, when properly applied.
Early in Roll to Disbelieve’s history, I still thought there might be time for evangelicals to do something to fix their decline. Nowadays, I think that fix was already impossible by the mid-2010s. The mere fact that purification had become a popular excuse for decline tells us that. If the Church (meaning all Christians generally) needed purification, that means it had somehow become corrupted. If those leaving were the corrupted or corrupting elements, then what was left was what evangelicals thought was pure and perfect.
Nobody wants to fix something that’s already pure and perfect. Nobody even sees it as needing a fix of any kind. We rightly say: “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!”
But in this case, something’s very broken indeed—and evangelical leaders actually prefer it that way.
(But here’s the punchline: An August 25, 2026 piece on Christian Post. Its writer still thinks this way!)
Cope 2: Rationalizing countercultural weirdness as a desirable outgrowth of decline
At least since the fusion of evangelicalism with fundamentalism, which completed in the 1990s, evangelicals have loved thinking of their flavor of Christianity as bizarre, counterintuitive, countercultural, weird, strange—and most of all, compelling. In 2012, Jefferson Bethke went viral on YouTube with his spoken-word poem “Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus.”
Bethke himself was a hard-right evangelical in an extremely high-control authoritarian church. And he was speaking his tribe’s language in this video.
Evangelicals really like to believe that they have a Jesus Aura that is so incredibly weird that it draws people in like moths to flame. They don’t have a “religion,” but instead a “relationship” with an actual god. And that god loves subverting expectations, reversing roles, and inverting tropes. So of course his most devoted followers look odd to outsiders!
We see this desire to be the “God kind of weird,” as LifeChurch.tv pastor Craig Groeschel put it in 2011, everywhere in the pre-2015 Christ-o-sphere. The same year, a Calvinist evangelical at The Gospel Coalition bristled at the mere notion of “hipster Christianity.” But another in 2011 sneered at “normal” as a descriptor, not realizing he was describing his own tribe. And in 2013, World Challenge declared that Christians couldn’t “afford to be normal.”
Even Rachel Held Evans, while she still identified as evangelical, held to this myth of Weird Christianity. In her famous April 2015 Washington Post op-ed, she wanted evangelical pastors to “stop trying to make church cool.” She insisted that Millennials hungered for “classic” churches and a more authentic feel instead of a marketing-slick worship package.
And decline, many evangelicals hoped, would bring about more of that weirdness. They hungered to share it with new recruits. Russell Moore, at the time one of the top leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), even said he welcomed the news of decline in the 2015 Pew Study:
Christianity isn’t normal anymore. It never should have been. The increasing strangeness of Christianity might be bad news for America, but it’s good news for the church. [. . .] The churches that are thriving are the vibrant, countercultural congregations that aren’t afraid to not be seen as normal to the surrounding culture.
Indeed, if Christians acted like any other earthly club of people, they thought, then their fortunes would rise and fall in purely earthly ways. Jesus rewarded weirdness, they thought.
But they were wrong.
Reality 2: Weird isn’t always good—and more importantly, it’s rarely economically viable
Even in the very earliest scraps of New Testament writings, experts think their writers altered details to suit their current audiences. They needed to do that, and they knew it.
Especially once those earliest evangelists pivoted to Gentiles as recruitment prospects, they needed a religion that would appeal to people who’d never bothered learning anything about Judaism. Those people expected big things from their gods. Staying the course as a tiny little anti-elite Jewish movement would not win them, so it changed into something far more cosmic (also, see this Gnostic take on the changes).
Had the earliest evangelists not made those changes, I’d no doubt be complaining about some other, completely different dysfunctional-authoritarian religion right now! (I don’t know, like “Oh look, another sex scandal out of the Sol Invictus church!”) But they did make those changes, and so they did survive.
Weird didn’t pay the bills then, and weird doesn’t pay the bills now.
The problem with countercultural movements is that they tend to be underpowered and not economically viable. Churches may get a lot of tax perks that they do not tend to deserve or earn, but they don’t run for free. Staff need to be paid; grounds need tending; buildings need construction, upkeep, and cleaning.
A movement that’s too niche, meaning too weird, won’t attract enough supporters to do that. And as we’re seeing nowadays, even pretty mainstream churches are having trouble with that as it is.
Cope 3: Fine, then they’ll just regain cultural relevance through sheer temporal power
After 2016, a lot of the coping mechanisms had fallen by the wayside. They didn’t quite work anymore. The comforting self-soothing wasn’t quite doing the job. Not a single reputable survey or study indicated that the decline was anywhere near even stabilizing, much less ending and reversing.
Worse, evangelicals had lost almost every major court fight they’d started over culture-war topics for the past decade or two. From school prayer in Lee v. Weisman (1992) and Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe (2000) to Creationism in Kitzmiller v. Dover, 2005, to displays of the Ten Commandments in taxpayer-funded buildings in McCreary County v. ACLU (2005), the Religious Right racked up decisive losses. Their few wins, like Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014), might have felt satisfying, but they didn’t usually help evangelicals sneak indoctrination into public schools—a critical need they’d identified early on.
In 2015, they lost Obergefell v. Hodges—which concerned same-sex marriage. They’d fought like lions for that one. Some of them even committed to virtual fasts to get Jesus to strong-arm the courts into denying same-sex couples that right. (Not real ones, of course. With Jesus, the thought counts just fine.)
But something much bigger and grander was coming up that would ease all their worries: The rise of Trumpism as a political force.
A merger anybody could have seen coming to fix a decline that just wouldn’t end
The merging of evangelicalism with hard-right conservative politics might have astonished a lot of people. But anyone who’d been observing Christianity shouldn’t have been surprised at all. Really, it was inevitable. The kind of Christianity that authoritarians like is a very specific kind that has always thrived best with temporal power. The second their leaders got that kind of power, they began using it. They didn’t—and don’t—let it go until some greater power pries it out of their hands.
Once that happens, membership in churches becomes optional. And at that point, people stay only if they want to. Most simply don’t want to. It’s just not that appealing or relevant of a religion, if it ever really was.
Church leaders need to be able to punish dissenters and unprotected rulebreakers, silence victims of their ministers’ abuse, keep community residents scared to criticize church leaders or prominent members, and enforce attendance rules—including tithing. Everyone must play along, or the game starts looking awfully silly.
That loss of power explains why an evangelical pastor, Joe Morecraft, openly wished in 2013 that he could literally enslave those who defied his rule. It’s also likely why evangelicals went through a horrifying phase in the mid-2010s in which they tried to rationalize “biblical slavery” as a moral good. There’s just something in the evangelical heart that craves that kind of absolute power over others.
Little wonder evangelicals glommed right onto a shady con artist who promised them explicitly that he would get them that power back. Or that they worship golden idols of him, blew shofar horns when he won the 2016 election, and praise him as the reincarnation of ancient Old Testament kings.
Reality 3: The Tarkin Effect applies to religious decline too, it turns out
In Star Wars: A New Hope, Princess Leia Organa famously tells Grand Moff Tarkin:
The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.
The “Tarkin Effect” can be pictured as a graph:
Most people were absolutely horrified by evangelicals’ slavery apologetics phase. At least one person I know of deconverted amid it. More than that, though, most people don’t want to be controlled by religious fanatics, especially not extremely hypocritical ones that play rigged games. The more control evangelicals try to flex over others, the more repulsed they get.
Paul Djupe’s research here has been invaluable. His coauthored 2018 paper closely linked evangelicals’ culture wars to increased numbers of unaffiliated Americans. In 2025, he helped describe the sharp rise of Christian nationalism in recent years—a movement that openly seeks to turn America into a theocracy ruled by evangelicals.
As well, when evangelical leaders preach about political topics at the pulpit, they actively alienate and drive away anyone who isn’t completely on board with their opinion. Evangelicals have known the same thing for a while. The sheer tension between pastors and congregations around politics contributed mightily to pastoral burnout in the early pandemic. And yet even this past May, Pew Research found that when any religious leader speaks on political topics, it’s almost exclusively the conservative ones.
Even worse, though, is a 2025 paper Djupe contributed to that discovered that the more religiously diverse a society is, the more extreme apocalyptic religious people get in their politics. In their desperation to dominate their culture, religious extremists start walking down some very dark paths.
Hypocrisy starts the engines of doubt
Control-lust and violent extremism isn’t a great look for the ambassadors of the Lord of Love and Prince of Peace. As a mother in one very controlling movement discovered in 2017, rigid discipleship indoctrination only seems to push kids further away from faith. And that’s when it’s working well, otherwise. And that’s when it’s not helping abusive ministers gain power over vulnerable victims.
But when all people have is a power drill, every problem looks like drywall. Even as the house begins to collapse, they’ll keep drilling holes in the walls.
I don’t think that people deconvert specifically because of hypocrisy, but hypocrisy definitely jars believers out of complacency. That’s what happened to the person I mentioned a moment ago. Hypocrisy is one of those things that strikes a spark. Once believers see one thing they know is wrong, like sexism, they begin to ask what else is wrong.
If evangelicals had any sense, they’d do everything they possibly can to avoid those collisions with hypocrisy. But all too often, they’re quite proud of being hypocritical! Exhibit A is this actual photo taken of an actual evangelical men’s conference in 2024:
WWJD? He’d hire monster trucks. And he’d buy and shoot off tons of fireworks to really wow the crowds. Hey, these days a lot of people avoid bread and don’t like fish.
Coping about decline means never having to change
In the end, evangelicals have dithered away whatever time they might have had to fix anything about their decline. Even if they could have changed anything important enough to matter, they never wanted to do it anyway.
All the way back in the mid-2000s, when the signs of decline started peeking through the blinds at evangelicals, the only solutions they contemplated were just marketing and packaging gimmicks. They always thought that they could fix their decline by just explaining themselves differently. Explaining better. Maybe explaining more extensively. Or using more Bible verses. Or they could try indoctrinating more deeply. Start younger. Take more control.
None of it worked.
By 2015, though, the thing was done. The book was closed. All the writing was on the wall. It was already happening. From there, evangelicals could do nothing but make things worse for themselves.
In future years, I suspect the banner of authoritarianism and increasing political grabbiness will appeal to a large segment of extremist alt-right-leaning people, especially some men. But whatever they gain with that demographic, they’ll be losing a lot more people who are upset with evangelicals’ increasing bigotry, racism, sexism, abuse enablement, and theocratic leanings.
That won’t make evangelicals change, of course. They’ll ride the authoritarian train all the way to the bottom of the cliff before second-guessing whether or not they’re actually the “baddies” here.
They are the source of all of their own problems. There’s something just fascinating about watching people destroy their own legacy in real time. We’re pretty lucky that they’re this fixated on grabbing power over reversing their decline, or they might have gotten a lot further in transforming America into the Republic of Gilead.
NEXT UP: In hypothesi, veritas. Speaking of compulsory Christianity, a major SBC leader has just made a ‘hypothetical’ breathtaking suggestion about forcing all Americans to bow to his religion. See you soon! <3
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