Book Review: The Great Dechurching
Davis, Graham, and Burge offer a data-driven, sobering, yet hopeful account of the decline of American Christianity. Will the church listen?
Forty million Americans have left the church in the last generation. For every church that opens, three close their doors. The numbers are staggering. But these are not just abstract statistics. Much like countries and cities facing the fertility crisis, churches everywhere are dealing with that cluster of problems inevitably associated with shrinking populations and diminishing resources. Jim Davis and Michael Graham’s The Great Dechurching is a book about these trends, particularly the reasons why people have left the church and how we should respond to them. Their book is based on a thorough (and expensive) quantitative survey that explores who has left the church, why they left, what they believe, and what might cause them to return. As pastors Davis and Graham (along with social scientist Ryan Burge) explain, the survey data gives many reasons for both lament over losses in the church and hope for renewal as America experiences what they rightly identify as the greatest religious shift in the history of the country.
There is a very real sense in which The Great Dechurching is a book about awareness. When speaking about a phenomenon that involves tens of millions of people, anecdotes are useless. This judgment applies to media accounts, especially the various deconversion and dechurching testimonies that occupy the conscious deliberations of our journalistic class, which is now largely educated at elite universities and concentrated in a few urban areas unrepresentative of the country at large. It’s not that these accounts are necessarily wrong (even if it is the case that they are sometimes caricatures of the movements they critique), just that they occupy our attention for reasons that have little to do with why the majority of people have left the church and much more with the status incentives of market-based media consumption. There is probably a significant audience for yet another gripping memoir of a 37-year-old White male leaving Evangelicalism due to serious disagreements over conservative theology, reactionary politics, or pastoral hypocrisy, but who is going to read an account of a small Christian family moving to another part of a mid-sized city and simply failing to attend church because they became too busy and no one invited them to join another one?
Yet it is clear from the data in The Great Dechurching that the prosaic reasons for dropping out are by far the majority. The number-one reason many categories of the dechurched stopped attending is simply because they moved. We might add to this that the majority of people who stopped going to church, including those who would never consider returning, still hold what we might call evangelical or broadly orthodox beliefs and practices, such as a belief in the Trinity, a high view of God’s Word, and personal prayer. In fact, most Evangelicals who left the church are even generally willing to return, a notion you will find almost totally absent from the currently available popular accounts of theologically orthodox Christianity.
In this way the book operates as a corrective, perhaps even a counter-narrative. You will find all sorts of counterintuitive and fascinating statistics in Davis, Graham, and Burge’s analysis of their thorough quantitative study of the dechurched. Particularly interesting to me was the implication (if I am reading the data correctly) that many Christians dechurched because their churches were insufficiently politically conservative, suggesting pastors receive immense pressure from all directions on these kinds of questions (which would also serve as one explanation for the rise in non-denominational churches). Furthermore, there is strong evidence that college does not play any meaningful role in deconverting or dechurching Christians. In fact, Evangelicals with graduate degrees were much more likely to stay churched than those without. So much for the fearmongering about higher education propaganda corrupting the faithful through indoctrination programs. If anything, the data suggests the rigorous building of trenches and fortifications around our children pushes people away from the faith once they mature into adulthood.
To focus more on this though would be to suggest we should treat the book as a resource to be mined for ammunition against our ideological opponents. To be sure, there is a great amount of data and insight here that should be studied by pastors and those adjacent to ministry, especially Davis, Graham, and Burge’s remarks about streaming or online church. But the primary approach and tone of the book is pastoral, not confrontational or defensive. The Great Dechurching is not a book borne of insecurity, and it displays an aversion to the culture war polemics of our partisan age. A pastoral and gracious demeanor is particularly evident in their treatment of dechurched "casualties," the relatively small group of people who left the church because their local leaders ignored or even participated in unethical behavior such as financial corruption or abuse.
There is much to write about their methodology, but the short version is that Davis and Graham’s model of engagement with the dechurched follows what they call a "comprehend, commend, and critique" framework. This is based on Paul’s encounter at the Areopagus in that it tries its best to understand our cultural moment, praise what is good in it, and only then offer a critique. It is critical for Davis and Graham, and this is vindicated in the data on why some Christians have dechurched, that we listen with the aim of understanding before criticizing. While this seems obvious when made explicit, it is clear that a major reason people left the church is because of relational immaturity—many Christians departed because they felt other Christians around them, such as their parents, refused to listen to or understand them. The book itself implicitly follows this model, as it first spends a great deal of time trying to understand the quantitative data upon which their recommendations are based. Only then do Davis and Graham offer specific, often highly sympathetic, diagnoses of why various groups have left the church, giving critique of the offered reasons where necessary.
As I read through the book, it was clear that hospitality and relational maturity are major themes of the problems plaguing the modern church. To take one example, from reading the data and explanations, it seems there are currently at least a couple million dechurched Christians who would return to regular attendance if someone they knew simply gave them a phone call. The fact that this category exists at all is a searing indictment of our lack of hospitality, particularly at the leadership level. Are we really too busy to offer this barest of relational goods—a half-step above a handshake—and what Christ calls in another context "a cup of cold water" (Matthew 10:42)? As Davis and Graham remark toward the end of their book in a chapter exhorting church leaders, there is no category in the New Testament for shepherds who do not know their people. For all the challenging work ahead of us, some of our problems are clearly due to sins of relational laziness.
I found the last two chapters to be particularly rich and encouraging. Here Davis and Graham offer exhortation and encouragement to the church as Christianity in America enters a period of exile. For Davis and Graham, exile is a time of refinement and opportunity, and perhaps even more importantly, it is the normative experience of the church both in the Old and New Testaments, and for most of history. (Nothing reveals character like external pressure.) While I’m less convinced the Reformed or Evangelical traditions ever truly held much power beyond perfunctory deference from the mainline WASPs, the loss of power and respectability among American Christians remains true, and so Davis and Graham’s discussion of how to handle diminishing social credibility and political capital are timely. These reflections are based on exegeting a number of key biblical texts, especially the parable of the wheat and tares as applied to church ministry. And their approach to Acts 11 as a lens for understanding the shift and loss of cultural power and influence and their application of Revelation 2 to our context are particularly insightful.
Unlike many books that make their points in the first two or three chapters and then pad out the rest to reach a certain word count, I never felt as if Davis and Graham were wasting my time. This is one of the benefits of writing a book about data; you are analyzing what is real. Furthermore, Davis and Graham bring decades of ministry experience to bear on these questions, having seen first-hand in Orlando the great dechurching phenomenon. The book does not present itself this way—it is a remarkably straight-forward and earnest read—but its content is clearly one of subject matter experts speaking authoritatively about what they know. We would be wise to listen. Nothing less than our lampstand is at stake.
The Great Dechurching: Who’s Leaving, Why Are They Going, and What Will It Take to Bring Them Back? (Zondervan, 2023), by Jim Davis and Michael Graham. Highly recommended.
An excellent review!!
I chuckled and then sobered up at this:
"There is probably a significant audience for yet another gripping memoir of a 37-year-old White male leaving Evangelicalism due to serious disagreements over conservative theology, reactionary politics, or pastoral hypocrisy, but who is going to read an account of a small Christian family moving to another part of a mid-sized city and simply failing to attend church because they became too busy and no one invited them to join another one?"
I'm always appreciative of people who do the work of the collecting, sorting through, analyzing, and sharing the data, the hard facts behind these social phenomena. That goes for dechurching, technology & young people's mental health, the fertility crash, etc. Like you said, anecdotes are not enough for understand these phenomena, and getting honest, big-picture views are sorely needed. Thanks for writing this!