In the graph you can see a 3% drop in the last year or two alone. And the fallout from covid probably hasn't reached membership rolls yet. Culture shift aside, we will likely see a big drop this year as well, since faith needs to be cultivated, and relies heavily on community.

I'm personally holding out for a resurgence, as people see how morally bankrupt our culture has become (e.g., the Emmys viewership dropped almost 50% this year), and how uninterested our elite are in doing anything substantial for the econimic underclass, aside from manipulate them for their own political ends.

I've often considered joining a church for fellowship, social opportunities, and networking but I'm an atheist and I just can't bring myself to do it. It's such a shame that the community around faith does not apply to people without it.

Participation in church-like, non religious organisations used to be more common.

That's kind of what freemasons, lions club, rotary and such are/were kind of like that. Social clubs. Unions sometimes played that kind of a role. Union meetings, barbeques, bars. Even personal identities tied into union memberships. A lot of organisations with names like "X society of Y" were actually "societies" at one point.

We are just far less affiliated than we used to be. Less church membership, probably less gang membership, social club affiliation, etc.

Some propose that those kind of clubs exist because of Christianity.

Paul told people to treat their wives like they were the Church, which lead to the end of tribes, the replacement of those large social/family groups with a more varied interest based group structure, which lead to more intermixing of ideas, the industrial revolution, and Western thought processes.

You might consider the Unitarian Universalists. They welcome everybody, including atheists, and they're pretty good people. I mean, people are people everywhere, but I don't think you'll find the same kind of problems that you find with other faith groups.

You might consider checking out Sunday Assembly[1].

[1] https://sundayassembly.online/about-sunday-assembly/

Membership vs. attendance, though, unless I'm reading the title too literally.

I think another great data point to give clarity would be college degrees. 1999 is basically the start of millennial generation college attendance. Millennials are between 30-40 years old now and are the largest generation with the highest education ever in the history of the world (I believe China might be beating this record soon, if not already). Lots of correlations between level of education and lack of religion.

I wonder what this correlation looked like 150 years ago, when most colleges were religious too (including the Ivy League). Did the educated end up more religious? More likely to attend church?

If so, that’d add credence to the argument that it’s not education itself that makes modern day students more liberal, it’s the educational environment that does it.

this is insightful.

there is an anti-Christian slant in the education world.

I'm surprised that 1999 number is so high. Anecdotally, when I think back to living in the 90's the majority of my friends and their families did not attend church. I would say maybe only a third actually attended church on a regular or semi-regular basis. I'm not including the Christmas and Easter crowd but maybe this 70% number is?

I think it has to do more with religious organisations interfering with politics and therefore influencing people's lifes.

IMO as soon as a religious organisation get's involved into politics it should lose it's tax exemptions and be treated the same way as any other lobby organisation.