After a surge in religious observance and attendance following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the last 20 years have seen a steady decline in church attendance. Writer Casey Chalk digs into the reasons why.

Last year, a Gallup poll attracted considerable attention for discovering that for the first time in 80 years of surveys, Americans’ membership in houses of worship had dropped below 50 percent. That event marked a few decades of decline, given that 70 percent of the country belonged to a church, synagogue, or mosque as recently as 1999 (amazingly, the number was 73 percent when Gallup first measured church membership in 1937). Why this terrible drop-off?

Don’t ask the opinion editors at The Washington Post, despite their publishing the March 13 op-ed by columnist Brian Broome proactively titled “Why the decline in church attendance won’t end here.” For although there is ample data suggesting what is behind slackening church attendance, it has nothing to do with Broome’s empty bravado and bromides.

Broome, says Chalk, is “really only interested in explaining why he stopped going to church.” Thus, Chalk explains at length why Broome’s all-too-common complaint about a good God allowing human suffering is a very shallow way to look at the world, before reminding readers that a God who took on flesh to save people “actually knows our pain in all of its grief and emotional complexity.”

So the question remains regarding most Americans and church attendance.

According to 2020 data collected by Barna Group, one in three practicing Christians dropped out of church completely during Covid-19, much of this having to do with various state-imposed restrictions on attendance levels in houses of worship (although these were often not imposed on other places where lots of people congregate, like casinos). Even when Covid-related restrictions lapsed, these people have not returned to church. In other words, once many people stopped going to church for a year or two, they decided to live without it.

Chalk cites data showing that “this trend is common not only among liberals but also conservatives.”

Another factor is that younger generations are less religious than their forebears. According to Gallup, about 31 percent of millennials have no religious affiliation, which is up from 22 percent a decade ago. The numbers are similar for Generation Z: about 33 percent of them reach adulthood with no religious preference. Now it’s certainly possible that these generations suddenly became convinced by the kinds of arguments leveled by Broome, although given his best one about suffering is as old as the Book of Job (6th century B.C.), I doubt it.

He concludes with a call to action — and to faith:

Given Americans are more depressed than ever — which is especially true of the “Nones” who have no religious affiliation — we can already perceive how foolhardy it is to abandon religion. In our desperate search for autonomy and self-realization, we find only dead ends that leave us empty.

The answer … is not to dig in our heels and assert our independence in the face of our brokenness. We must look for a healer who knows and can redeem our plight. He awaits us in a transformative encounter within the walls of churches across our nation.

Read the whole thing here.