Mainline churches lose more members than evangelicals and Catholics, while Catholics gain very few new believers

The new Pew survey on religion in the United States found America's unaffiliated population boomed from 16 to 23% between 2007 and 2014; the Catholic population declined from 24% to 21% and Mainline Protestants declined from 18% to 15% of the population. In contrast, evangelicals almost held steady, going from 26% to 25%, and historically Black churches, whose members generally identify as evangelical, also held steady at 7%.

Pew writes:

"While the mainline Protestant share of the population is significantly smaller today than it was in 2007, the evangelical Protestant share of the population has remained comparatively stable...As a result, evangelicals now constitute a clear majority (55%) of all U.S. Protestants."

So why are Evangelicals holding steady? I can think of two explanations:

1. Evangelicalism is more distinct from being unaffiliated; there are higher barriers to moving in and out of evangelicalism and so people are less likely to leave. The fact it's a form of Christianity that generally holds its members to stricter, more traditional standards than, at least, mainline churches, could bolster their sense of belonging and its distinctive value from being unaffiliated. Looking at mainline churches, they might ask, "If your church doesn't require anything special or distinctive from Christians, what's the point?"
2. Evangelicals lose as many members as Catholics and Mainlines, but they make up for it by gaining members, too. So, Evangelicalism's stricter standards don't seem to be holding members in; but on the other hand, evangelical churches do seem to be more capable of attracting new members to make up for the members that they along with the other churches are losing.

We can look at Pew's numbers; they published the following table:

At first glance it looks like the second explanation might be more plausible. 10% of all US adults weren't raised evangelicals, but joined an Evangelical church at some point, while 9% left an evangelical church having been raised evangelical. In contrast, mainline and Catholic churches lost even more adherents but more strikingly, only gained 2% and 6% of members between them.

But perhaps a better way to characterize each of these religious groups and how they relate to members is to measure who leaves and joins as a proportion of the church group rather than as a proportion of US adults. Fortunately that's just a little bit of simple math. Rearranging the figures on the above table, we get:

Here, the numbers change a little. Evangelical churches are similar to Catholic churches in that they've both lost around 40% of their members to other groups. Both church groups are losing fewer members than mainline churches, who lost almost 60% of the proportion of people raised in mainline churches. But evangelical churches are similar to mainline churches in that both groups pick up quite a few members from other traditions, unlike the Catholic church, which picks up very few new members. Evangelicals' combination of gaining quite a few new members and losing quite a few contrasts with mainline churches, who gain members but lose even more, and Catholic churches, which lose as many as the others and gain very few.

How does this reflect on the groups? The Catholic church seem unattractive to outsiders, either because they don't actively work so hard to convert others, have high entry barriers, or are just not appealing to people raised in other groups. Mainline churches are reasonably attractive to outsiders (more than half of whom are coming from evangelical or Catholic churches rather than unaffiliated) but lose over half of the members raised in their groups. Evangelical churches have both a moderate level of joining (principally from the other churches, not from people raised without religion) but also lose a moderate number of believers to other groups. As a whole, it seems around half of people leaving various Christian groups are not joining other Christian groups, though we can't tell from these numbers which Christian groups tend to go unaffiliated rather than to other Christian groups.

So, in summary, relative to mainline churches, it seems like conjecture (1) above is true of Evangelicals: people are less likely to leave the Evangelical church than mainline churches. But relative to the Catholic Church, (2) is truer: people do leave, but many more people join the Evangelical church compared to the Catholic Church, suggesting Evangelicalism is not better at holding on to members than the Catholic church, but is especially good at attracting new ones.

All that said, the most striking image from the graphs is the change of the unaffiliated groups. About 40% of people who are raised without religion tend to join one, a similar proportion of people who are raised evangelical or Catholic who change their affiliation. But simply because so few people were raised without religion, the proportion of people who are religiously unaffiliated now but were raised Christian is very high. Of people who aren't members of a religious group, across the ones who weren't raised in a religion and those who were, more were atheists or agnostics, and fewer said religion was even somewhat important to them.

How straight people react to photos of straight, gay, and lesbian couples

• Straight people rate photos of straight couples more highly than gay or lesbian couples
• Researchers found neural markers that probably influenced the ratings
• The ratings were strongly connected to the raters' general Attitudes Toward Lesbians and Gay Men
• Spending time with gay and lesbian people seemed to positively influence the ratings they have the gay and lesbian photos
• What does it mean?

The gay rights movement has made huge strides in the last couple of decades. Here in the United States, state after state are currently removing prohibitions on legal recognition of same-sex marriages. Yet as of the time of publication, many states still prohibit same-sex marriage. If attitudes toward racial minorities is anything to go by, even after formal discrimination in law is removed, other forms of discrimination are likely to linger on.

"Social categorization" is the term social psychologists use to describe humans percieving each other as members of social groups rather than as individuals. It's a very natural and human thing to do. Without some kind of social categorization, we would know a lot less about anyone we haven't met and got to know personally and it would be much more difficult to interact with strangers! But it's clear that this process also underpins prejudices and therefore discrimination against disadvantaged minority groups.
Cheryl Dictker, Catherine Forestell, and Blakely Mulder at the College of William and Mary took at look at how heterosexuals responded differently to pictures of gay and lesbian couples, compared to pictures of straight couples. This would give them a way to measure biases that heterosexuals might have against gay and lesbian couples.

The researchers found some pretty definitive differences (Figure 1) in the way their heterosexual research participants behaved. They asked their participants to rate each picture they saw, and dismiss each photo to move on to the next when they'd made a judgment. You might expect that in today's society, people would want to avoid appearing prejudiced by giving a lower rating to gay and lesbian couples than straight couples. On the other hand, because participants were rating each individual couple photo independently, they mightn't have been able to make the right adjustments to compensate from automatic prejudice even if they were trying. In any event, participants rated gay couples as well as lesbian couples significantly lower than straight couples, and they also dismissed photos of gay couples faster than straight couples. Incidentally, women may have rated the gay couples even lower than men did. These ratings didn't seem to be just accidents related to the photos either. Participants took an Attitudes Toward Lesbians and Gay Men survey, and the lower their attitude was, the more negatively they rated the gay and lesbian couple photos.

Figure 1, from the article: "Reaction times to dismiss (top panel) and explicit ratings of (bottom panel) pictures of gay, lesbian, and straight couples. Error bars represent standard error of the mean."

The researchers also measured electrical activity in the brain (Figure 2). They examined signals known to appear when people view racial "out-groups", called "N1" and "P2" signals, and a signal that has been associated with negative judgments, the "LPP" signal. Participants had the "out-group" P2 reaction for gay couples more than straight couples¹, and they also had the LPP 'negative judgment' signal more with gay and lesbian couples compared to straight couples.

Figure 2, from the article: "ERP amplitudes in response to pictures of straight, gay, and lesbian couples." The top image shows the "Fz" location with the N1 and N2 measurements highlighted, and the bottom image shows the "Pz" location with the P2 and LPP measurements highlighted.

The good news is that the more social contact with gay people participants said they had, and the more genuinely personal contact they had, the smaller the differences between ratings for straight couples and ratings for gay/lesbian couples were. There were some relationships between the electrical signals the researchers were tracking (N1 and P2 signals) and the proportion of GLBT friends and experiences with GLBT friends subjects had, although they weren't strong relationships and their statistical significance is questionable given the number of non-significant relationships. All might mean that as gay and lesbian couples become more visible in society, the bias against them will disappear, or at least decline. It's hard to know this for sure, though: do people with more positive attitudes towards gay and lesbian couples spend more time around them, or does spending more time around gay and lesbian people lead to the more positive attitudes?

It's notable that the clearest results from this study weren't from measuring electrical activity in the brain; they were from the ratings participants gave themselves, and from their reaction times. In particular, although there were some statistically significant correlations between electrical signals and the amount of social interaction with gay and lesbian people, they were weak and we probably couldn't draw any conclusions from them if the photo ratings hadn't indicated the same things so clearly. Additionally, of all the neural signals the researchers examined, only the LPP signal is clearly associated with negative judgments. The others tell us that participants thought the gay and lesbian couples were out of the ordinary, but not necessarily in a bad way. That's a good reminder that although neuroscience tools can be useful, the hype in the media might be out of proportion to their usefulness.

If this all sounds a bit depressing, we might also consider that people are capable of adjusting their implicit biases during overt actions. These tests are designed to see past those actions. For a society without prejudice, ideally no-one would have any unfair biases, implicit or explicit. But it also seems natural that straight people might relate better to photos of straight couples than gay or lesbian couples. As far as prejudice goes, we might get a long way simply asking people to be aware of their own biases and be willing to adjust for them. Studies like this remind us that, at least at present, the biases exist, and so it's important we consider how that might affect how people are treated.

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1 The difference between lesbian couples and straight couples was in the same direction, but not statistically significant (p=0.10). Taken with the difference between gay couples and straight couples, it's probably reasonable to infer that with more participants, the researchers would have seen a result with lesbian couples, too.^↩