Christians are Beginning to Study their Decline

I've seen only three pieces of analysis about the future or Christianity and the denominations it contains. One was by a pastor in the Missouri Synod. He used a similar study from the Lutheran Church of America. Now, for the first time, a projection has been published by a Catholic in a publication for a Catholic audience. It's inevitable staff in all denominations have done these projections in their back offices. Few are out in public.    

Any projections have to choose which assumption they will make, will that line into the future be a straight line (linear), will it bend downward accelerating the decline or bend upward reversing the decline (curvilinear)? The assumption always chosen is for a straight line but is remains only an assumption.

Then there is the quality of the current data used to project into the future. For churches, is it the number of people coming to church, the church membership rolls or, as in the case of Catholics, the number who have been baptized? The most accurate number would be found from a tally based on actual observation of church attendance plus the number who give money. It would be best if the counting of those in the pews was done by a neutral agency not motivated to over or under count. So far as I can tell no data about churches today nor projections into the future are of this quality. My hunch is all numbers submitted are collected by parties whose interest is to present membership as better than it would be had a third party done the tallies. 

The link concludes, as have many others, "nones" will continue to grow and all other branches of the faith will continue to fall. Nondenominational Protestant churches will suffer the least, Catholics will be smaller than nones but will do better than mainline Protestant denominations and the latter will do worse than all others. "Nones" will become much larger than the largest surviving groups, Catholics and nondenominational Protestants. 

In the discussion after the link, one person points out there are reasons the link overestimates Catholic size in the future. One, of course, is the Catholic is from baptisms instead of actual participation. The link's Catholic projections assume children of immigrants will stay in the denomination at greater numbers than the current white population. Time will tell. 

My own projections about Christianity into the future would a.) interest in the Christian God will decline like interest in all gods in history, b.) there will be successful Christian churches for a long time to come in larger cities where the large populations will keep some churches alive and c.) some Christians will give money to keep parts of the faith alive for some years ahead. As witnessed in the votes in favor of abortion rights, however, influence of Christianity will fall.  

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