Are We a Christian Nation?

Bottom line upfront: America has never been the Christian nation we keep arguing about.

I’ve spent the better part of this year buried in a question that sounds simple and isn’t: Were we ever really a Christian nation? Our country turns 250 in a few days, and I wanted to better understand the history of Christian faith in our country. So our research team at the Center for Scripture Absorption worked through more than sixty peer-reviewed studies of American church membership going all the way back to the founding.

What I found wasn’t what I was expecting, and I think you’ll be surprised by it too.

On July 4, 1776, the day the Declaration of Independence was signed, only about seventeen percent of Americans were formal members of a church. Seventeen. When we think of the founding generation we picture them as a sea of praying believers. In reality, people like this were a religious minority. Many believed, worshipped, and spoke the language of faith every day of the week — but most of them were never enrolled anywhere at all.

Then America entered one of the most astonishing spiritual expansions any nation has ever seen. By 1850 that seventeen percent had doubled. By 1890 it was forty-five percent. By the 1950s, somewhere around ninety percent of Americans claimed a denomination, and half the country was in a pew most weekends. America went from three hundred thousand Protestants in 1800 to forty-three million in 1950 — a hundred-and-forty-three-fold increase, growing at five times the rate the population itself was growing.

For those of us over 50, this is probably the America we remember most. An era when everyone was in church on Sunday morning. An era when your faith in Christ was simply assumed.

Then, somewhere around 1990, the numbers started dipping as another number began to rise. The share of Americans claiming no religion at all — flat at seven percent for two decades — started climbing. By the early 2000s it was sixteen percent, and twenty-three percent by 2014. Today roughly twenty-eight to thirty percent have walked away from the church. Christian identification slid from about ninety percent in the early nineties to around sixty-three percent now. That’s twenty-four percent in thirty years which makes it the biggest religious shift in our history.

The first wave left, the researchers tell us, for mostly political reasons. They were moderates backing away from a faith they’d inherited and come to associate with a movement they didn’t necessarily agree with. But the  second wave, after about 2006, was different. Private belief itself began to slip: belief in God, the habit of prayer and Bible reading, all began to fall by the wayside.

Our 2025 SALT Index — a nationally representative survey of more than six thousand U.S. adults — found that while sixty-one percent of Americans still call themselves followers of Jesus, only thirty-three percent trust His grace alone to save them. Only thirty-five percent open Scripture in a typical week. And only thirty-one percent have ever personally discipled another human being.

Sit in that gap for a second. Sixty-one out of a hundred call themselves a follower of Christ. But roughly half of them — or fewer — actually live by the principles He taught. This is tragic and has largely gone unnoticed. For thirty years the story everyone has focused on has been the shrinking numbers in church. But it’s the quieter story—the story that says that even those who remain in church don’t nurture their own faith or disciple others—that is the story that matters most.

Jesus saw this long before our survey results did: “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.”   — Matthew 7:21

The label “Christian” was never the point. A living, vibrant, reproducing faith in Christ is what truly matters. A checked box on a survey card is not the same as a life bent toward the will of the Father — and deep down, every honest one of us has known that all along.

Now hear me, and hear me clearly: we are not watching American Christianity die.

Because here’s the strange grace in the long view. The faith those signers of the Declaration carried in 1776 was not the comfortable, culture-wide Christianity of 1955. It was sparser. Costlier. More deliberate. A faith you couldn’t inherit by simply being born on this soil. And doesn’t that look a lot like the situation we’re in today? We’re back to a place where Christian faith can no longer be assumed. It’s a faith that has to be chosen.

“Choose this day whom you will serve … but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”   — Joshua 24:15

And here’s why it matters to those who are reading this. Somewhere along the way, our culture handed people our age a quiet lie: your season of usefulness is over; leave the real ministry to the young and the professional. You are one of the few people who can tell the next generation what a living, chosen faith actually looks like — and then show them. Those among the thirty-one percent who discipled another person in their faith are carrying the future of Christianity in America on their back.

In a nation learning all over again that faith has to be chosen, you matter more now than ever. The seventeen percent of 1776 didn’t have numbers, or culture, or assumption on their side. They had conviction, and they had each other. So do you.

Before this week is over, choose one person — a grandchild, a neighbor, a younger believer, a drifting friend — and invite them into one simple rhythm: Scripture, conversation, prayer, and obedience. Show them that Christianity is more than a label, it’s a relationship with our Savior that can change their life — and their nation — forever.

In it, to Kingdom win it — 

P.S. Be sure to join us this week on Spiritually Fit Today where I talk with my longtime friend Paul Abbott  about Jesus’ call to care for the hungry, stranger, and prisoner and consider why that command so often gets sidelined in Christian life.