Tough future for evangelicals, numbers reveal

Here are titles of three recent books about evangelical Christianity:

"The Great Evangelical Recession: Six Factors that Will Crash the American Church ... And How to Prepare." "The American Church in Crisis."

"A Call to Resurgence: Will Christianity Have a Funeral or a Future?" (Spoiler alert! The cover illustration is of a hearse.) None are anti-Christian screeds. All are written by evangelical pastors.

And they're all part of an intense, active debate – in books, magazines, conferences and anxious church offices – about the future of evangelical Christianity.

Signs of the debate are everywhere. When Christianity Today magazine landed an interview earlier this year with Rick Warren, pastor of Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, the second question was: Is "America becoming less Christian?" (I'll get to Warren's answer in a minute.)

Ed Stetzer, a prominent researcher and consultant affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention in Nashville, Tenn., weighed in last month with a statistics-rich essay, also in Christianity Today, that began reassuringly, "The church is not dying."

But in the next, clarifying (if less reassuring) sentence, Stetzer wrote: "It's in transition."

Where that transition will lead in an increasingly diverse and secular America – to a future or a funeral – is the question. So far, no one has a definitive answer.

Last week, I wrote a column about the difficulty of providing such answers, since there's no universal standard for measuring the size and health of religious movements in America.

The problem is particularly vexing for evangelicals, who can't even agree among themselves who counts as evangelical.

Still, there's a lot of information out there. And that information, properly sifted, tells a story.

For evangelicals, the story doesn't have a happy ending.

Few evangelicals know that story better than John Dickerson, author of "The Great Evangelical Recession" and leader of a medium-sized church in Arizona.

Dickerson is worth paying attention to when it comes to parsing statistics. Before he became a pastor he was an award-winning investigative reporter at an alternative Phoenix newspaper. He knows his way around facts and figures.

The son and grandson of fundamentalist Baptist preachers, Dickerson left journalism in 2009 to become pastor of Cornerstone Evangelical Free Church in the mountain town of Prescott.

He recalls a baffled Charles Gibson, host of ABC World News, urging him to remain a reporter at a 2009 journalism awards luncheon in New York. Replied Dickerson: "For me, the pursuit of truth extends into the spiritual realm." That pursuit led Dickerson to an uncomfortable realization when he left the skeptical, profane world of the newsroom and began meeting other evangelical pastors.

"I realized, wow, I don't think these folks realize how fast the world is changing outside our little bubble," Dickerson said in a recent interview.

He did some research and discovered that much of what he and other evangelicals assumed about their faith – that evangelicalism was politically powerful, culturally influential and on the rise – was either wrong or rapidly becoming untrue. Church attendance figures, Dickerson found, were often inflated. Secular Americans were alienated by evangelicals' divisive political activism. Young people were leaving the faith in droves.

"The Great Evangelical Recession" was Dickerson's reportorial attempt to wake up his fellow pastors with a welter of statistics. The book's endnotes fill 12 pages. Dickerson devotes an entire chapter to determining just how many evangelicals currently live in America. (Not many, he concludes.)

"Those who ignore... change – and the speed of it – become its victims," he writes in the introduction. That message has not been universally welcomed.

In his Christianity Today interview, Rick Warren dismissed the idea that "Christianity is dying."

"Cultural Christianity is dying," he said. "Genuine Christianity is not. The number of cultural Christians is going down because they never really were Christian in the first place. They don't have to pretend by going to church anymore."

"I don't trust all the surveys out there," Warren added.

Consultant Stetzer said the same thing to me in a recent interview. "No serious researcher believes Christianity in the U.S. is dying," he said. "I'd be really famous (if) I said Christianity today is dying and I have the answer. ... People are conflating data."

So, which is it? Is evangelicalism entering a "Great Recession"? Or are pastors like Dickerson sounding a false alarm to sell books?

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