The title of this blog is Then there were 12, and, without giving it away completely, it’s about the decline and fall of Christianity in America. That means that it’s a bit too soon to say that now there are no Christians in the United States. Suffice to say that there are fewer.

As I look back at mileposts along this path, I think about This Morning on CBS, a stalwart on that network for the better part of 40 years. It’s no accident that the show runs from 10-11:30 on Sundays, time traditionally reserved for Church, or at least to Church on TV. Well, fewer people go to Church today, and Sunday Morning is a resounding success. What’s more, its success has shown TV stations that Sunday mornings can be advertising cash cows, and religious programming has been forced out, cast into the outer darkness of TBN, a network eschewed by many Christians or Christian “seekers”. TBN is what Marshall McLuhan called “hot communication”, which slaps viewers in the face with the least subtle and attractive parts of Christianity, boring or alienating all but the most faithful and least intelligent.

More ominously, you can tell Church services have fewer attendees. Church parking lots are emptier; there are fewer traffic delays in front of mega churches, and Sunday brunch restaurants are jammed. If you happen to go to religious services, less people are there, and those who are there are older. Anecdotally, in my Church, which I attend infrequently, attendance went from 300 people a service in 1995 to less than 100 today. I’m told that membership is actually up and giving is robust, but if you don’t go, both of those things are probably going to decrease over time.

Before we breakdown the specific numbers, the most relevant one seems to be that on any given Sunday, only 17.7% of Americans attend a religious service. However many people claim to believe in God or say they are Christian or say they go to services, only just under 18 actually attend Church. I don’t think we fully understand how much of this is to Covid restrictions, but the trend was moving downward before the epidemic virtually closed our places of worship.

What follows next are the raw figures, which are skewed unfortunately by the “halo effect” – no one wants others to know they are closet atheists or that they don’t go to Church as often as they say they do. People may not hold faith as closely as they think they should, and certainly not as much as they want others to think they do. Raw numbers come next.