40 Million People Dechurched in 25 Years

[R]eliable quantitative research around this has brought some helpful insights to light. Jim Davis, Michael Graham, and Ryan Burge have released the largest study ever done on dechurching in America in their book The Great Dechurching: Who’s Leaving, Why Are They Going, and What Will It Take to Bring Them Back? Forty million Americans have left the church over the last twenty-five years. 

It’s the largest religious shift in American history—and it’s away from the church. The reality is that not everyone who has dechurched has deconstructed—not even most of them. 

The authors profile five different types of people who have dechurched, and they split the five profiles into two groups: the casually dechurched and the dechurched casualties. The casually dechurched are those who left the church for casual reasons: they got too busy, they moved and never found a new church, they stopped going to church during the Covid-19 pandemic and never went back, and so on.

The other group, dechurched casualties, make up about ten million adult Americans who have “permanently, purposefully exited evangelicalism.” These are the people who have left the church because of real, negative experiences they have had in the church. My book is about the dechurched casualties. 

According to the study, these dechurched casualties—who the authors call exvangelicals—are 82 percent white, 13 percent black, and 2 percent Hispanic. They’re 65 percent female and 35 percent male. Maybe most surprisingly, the average age is fifty-four years old. What the study shows is that the average exvangelical is a white, Gen X female who didn’t feel like they fit in with their church, didn’t feel loved, found it inconvenient to attend, had negative experiences, and disagreed with the politics and beliefs of their church. This may or may not describe the person you know who is deconstructing. But I would bet it describes the progressive voices they’re listening to in their deconstruction journey.