San Antonio resident Betty Curry, 60, grew up going to church. Her father was a prominent and beloved Methodist minister.
As an adult, she continued in that tradition, raising her kids in the faith and faithfully attending a large downtown congregation that has a ministry to the homeless population.
“Basically, Methodism is in my DNA,” she said. “For decades, the church was the center of my life, my community. I have loved that connection, loved the history and loved the people. I’ve loved my local church and still admire its mission.”
But over the last few years, Curry’s decades-long discomfort with her denomination’s struggle over the issue of LGBTQ rights in particular and organized religion’s drift into polarization in general contributed to her loss of interest in attending church.
She stopped showing up in the pews.
“My local church was always on the right side of the issue [on LGBTQ inclusion], but I got tired of the broader fight,” she said. “I just don’t have the energy for that conversation anymore.”
What’s more, Curry, a higher education professional, found a late-in-life career “that brings me a community and a sense of meaning and purpose and lots of connection with other people.”
Curry is far from alone.
Starting in the late 1990s, America began undergoing a dramatic shift away from organized religion, as more people began identifying themselves as “nones” — those who claim no affiliation with any church, denomination or place of worship.
Currently, around 3 in 10 U.S. adults — almost 29% — are non-affiliated, meaning they describe themselves as atheists, agnostics or “nothing in particular” when asked about their religious identity.
About 40 million Americans have left the church in the last 25 years.
This trend toward secularization shows no signs of slowing, according to a 2021 Pew Research Center report.
The data showed that the portion of the country claiming no organized religious affiliation was 6 percentage points higher than it was five years ago, and 10 points higher than a decade ago.
People who identify as Christian comprised 63% of the population in 2021, down from 75% a decade ago, with most of the drop concentrated among Protestants.
Within Protestantism, evangelicals outnumber those who are not evangelical, but the former group is also seeing a downward trend. Fewer people report praying daily, according to the Pew survey; and fewer say religion is “very important in their lives.”
But at the same time, many non-affiliated folks still describe a hunger for the spiritual, a longing for the transcendent that they seek in places other than church pews, such as in nature, meditation and other practices.
Many in this demographic — two-thirds, or 68% — claim to still believe in God. They’re just not finding Him (or Her, or It) within the walls of organized religion.
One of the biggest reasons for the drift away from organized religion? A growing dislike, even a deep repugnance for the way religion has become politicized in America, where the term “Christian” is now practically synonymous with right-wing beliefs that are viewed as being harmful to women, gay, lesbian and transgender people and immigrants, Pew found.
The pews and the pulpits have become infected with the culture wars, so much so that many have simply taken their belief systems (and their money) somewhere else.
The public embrace of Donald Trump, particularly by white evangelical Protestants, was the final straw for many nominal Christians, who can no longer stomach that association, according to Pew.
The secular drift follows the cultural trend in other developed countries, which studies show tend to become less religious as they become more educated and prosperous.
A third of adults under 30 have no religious affiliation (32%), compared with just 1 in 10 who are 65 and older (9%). Young adults today are much more likely to be unaffiliated than previous generations were at a similar stage in their lives.
Aside from politics, the child sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church is another factor that has put many Catholics off their communion wine, studies show.
So, too, has the church’s refusal to enter the modern age, in its teachings on birth control, divorce, same-sex relationships, priestly celibacy and the forbidding of ordained female leadership.
The same can be said for Southern Baptists, who at their conference last June voted that women can’t serve as pastors or elders.
The strife in the Methodist denomination over the inclusion of LGBTQ congregants in the life of the church — the same fight ripping apart other denominations and religions — was pivotal in Curry’s decision to leave.
But there were other reasons.
Part of her move away from church began, she said, in Sunday school, where over the years she learned of “the historical Jesus” — who Jesus was and what he may have actually said and did versus what countless writers (all male) through the millennia have said about him, piling on and enlarging and sometimes distorting the original message to fit with various political and religious agendas.
She felt her theology evolve into a more “metaphorical lens” in understanding Jesus’ life and the Bible, and away from the whole brutal blood sacrifice, “Atonement Resurrection” paradigm, which Curry believes “sometimes can get in the way and is no longer meaningful to me and actually feels harmful.”
I can relate.
I, too, grew up in the church, only our brand was Episcopalian. My mother was an overworked and stressed-out single mom raising three young daughters by herself — Dad had split the scene early — and she leaned heavily on our neighborhood church, St. David’s Episcopal in Terrell Hills, for support and connection.
Every Sunday morning found us in the pews and every Wednesday night saw us bringing casseroles to the potluck supper. My sisters and I grew up going to vacation Bible school and Sunday school and Christian summer camp. I remember as a little girl gazing up at a wooden structure nestled at the apex of the sanctuary’s ceiling and imagining that God lived there.
By high school I’d stopped believing in God, but by the time my husband and I were married and raising a child, we decided to return to the church, a progressive Methodist one, if for nothing else than to give him a spiritual foundation, even if he wound up rebelling against it as his own parents did. (My husband Mark was raised Catholic and says he still bears the psychic scars.)
Like Curry, I relished learning about the real Jesus, who from my reading of the Gospels seems to have been an unrepentant, all-out, bleeding-heart liberal, given his unceasing focus on those who comprise the last, the least and the lost, and his message that we must take care of and love each other, especially the marginalized.
These days, I like to envision Jesus returning to Earth and, in a frothing, turn-over-the-temple-tables rage, storming the banks of the Rio Grande, pulling up the razor wire and floating river buoys along Texas’ southern border to safeguard his children.
(And, no, I don’t buy the specious argument that the purpose of razor wire and buoys is to protect migrants).
But like Curry, I had a hard time squaring what are doubtlessly the Bible’s many timeless truths with those archaic ideas and concepts embedded in its pages that spring from a far more barbaric, less enlightened time than the one we live in (or at least some of us live in) today.
But also like Curry, my spouse and I still hungered for the spiritual, which we both eventually found in our respective 12 Step fellowships. (Me, in Alcoholics Anonymous, he in Al-Anon.) Thankfully, in the 12 Step world, your “Higher Power” can be your own personal conception, as long as it’s not you (because you’re the one who got you into this mess).
The messages of personal redemption we regularly hear in meetings are more powerful than anything we’ve ever heard in church, and the people in the program are some of the most humble, authentic, spiritually-minded folks you’ll ever meet.
It’s a big, expansive, determinately non-creedal spirituality meant to accommodate the wide range of folks from all spiritual and religious backgrounds who wind up in “the rooms.”
The little joke in 12 Step: Religion is for those who are afraid of hell. Spirituality is for those who’ve already been there.
Curry’s husband still attends church, she said, and her departure causes no conflict between them.
These days, she thinks of herself as a Universalist, a theology which holds that no truly loving God would doom a segment of his creation to everlasting torture in a lake of fire, simply because they were raised in a part of the world or a household that doesn’t hew to a certain creedal — read, Christian — flavor.
She likes the writer Anne Lamott’s idea of a “a big God, not a little God,” one large enough to enclose loving arms around everyone. Curry said she does worry some about when she retires and loses her work community.
“But I don’t picture myself going back to church, to that way of experiencing God,” she said. “I think it’s just so full of baggage.”
She has no regrets; by the time she left church, her grieving was done. It was no longer her father’s denomination, one that, like the moral arc of the universe, was “bending toward justice.”
“But I’m very grateful for the journey, and I do feel like it formed me into the person I am,” she said “But my needs have evolved and the way I spend my energy has changed.”
Can she get an “amen?”
