There is a well-developed narrative about the decline of Christianity in the United States. As I have covered extensively in this blog already, there are a variety of statistical reports that point to the percentage of Americans who affiliate with any stripe of Christianity decreasing while the percentage of Americans who refuse to affiliate with any religion is increasing.

I have also argued that these broad statistical trends do not tell the whole story. Just as the United States comprises multiple peoples with different cultures and subcultures, so the church in the United States is comprised of various theological, ethnic, and racial streams that have different perspectives on the cultural and religious shifts in the United States.

A new report by the Pew Research Center, unfortunately entitled “White Evangelicals See Trump Fighting for Their Beliefs, Though Many Have Mixed Feelings about His Personal Conduct,” dedicates its second chapter to exploring these differences. Moving away from questions about the Trump presidency, it focuses on how differently affiliated or unaffiliated religious groups in the United States view the current state of American Christianity.

There are three charts worth particular notice in this report. The first reports the response of various groups to the question of whether they think the influence of Christianity is decreasing in the United States, and if so, if that is a temporary or permanent change.

There is a clear racial difference in the answers. Whites are more likely to believe that Christianity is decreasing in influence and that this decrease will be permanent than both Blacks and Hispanics.

It is well-established that people in different racial groups experience the United States differently. From access to the marketplace to interactions with local governments and law enforcement to educational opportunities, the color of a person’s skin has an enormous impact on how people live. The same is true for how people of different races view Christianity in the United States.

Why is there such a difference related to the way Whites, Blacks, and Hispanics view the decline of Christianity in the United States, with Whites having a much more dire outlook than the others? This might be answered by another question, which measured the extent to which people felt their religious beliefs conflicted with mainstream American culture.

When answering this question, Whites were more likely to see their religious beliefs or lack of religious beliefs as conflicting with American mainstream culture. This sense of conflict is strongest among those who have the most defined beliefs: White Evangelicals, Atheists, and Jews.

This suggests that one of the ways that Whites carve out a distinctive identity within the culture of the United States is through their religious beliefs or lack thereof. Blacks and Hispanics would not need to use their religious beliefs in the same way, since skin color is already one of the most powerful distinctive features in American culture. As such, Blacks and Hispanics have significant struggles they face in the United States, but they do not see religion as contributing heavily to these. Whites, who are usually accepted on face value in mainstream American culture, find cultural differentiation in their belief structures. This leads especially to Whites with the most defined beliefs feeling more at odds with the culture.

An outlier among Whites in these statistics are White Non-Evangelical Protestants, a group comprised of White Mainline Protestants. This group is less convinced about the decline of Christianity in the United States and is much less concerned about being in conflict with mainstream American culture. This is not surprising. The White Mainline Protestant denominations have historically tracked closely to mainstream American cultural values. (I explain how this relationship formed throughout the 19th century and early 20th century for the Methodist Episcopal Church in Methodist Evangelism, American Salvation). As such, even if White Mainline Protestants may feel that Christianity is on the decline in the United States, that would not translate to them sensing conflict between their beliefs and mainstream American culture.

This analysis is supported by another set of questions, which asked those who think that Christianity is declining in the United States why they think that decline is occurring.

For White Evangelicals, the two highest ranking reasons were the change in cultural values in a way that disagrees with evangelical teachings and the ways that they believe Christianity (likely their own Evangelical Christianity) is depicted in the larger culture. Coming in third place is the growth of those who are unaffiliated with religion. Given its location in the answers, my sense is that White Evangelicals would see the growth of those who are unaffiliated as more of a consequence of the moral shift in the culture than a driver of it.

This stands in contrast to White Mainline Protestants. They are far less concerned about the changes in mainstream American cultural values. Instead, they are focused on the growing numbers of Americans who are religiously unaffiliated. Again, this makes sense. Since White Mainline Protestants have historically understood themselves to be walking in line with mainstream American culture, there is less concern about the culture shifting (since the White Mainline Protestant denominations will shift with it) and more concern over White Americans not naturally affiliating with their denominations. (This is especially concerning because this lack of affiliation is happening along generational lines, showing that the White Mainline Protestant strategy of tracking with mainstream American culture has not been effective in retaining the younger generations of families that otherwise had been engaged in the White Mainline Protestant congregations.)

There are other items worth recognizing based on these statistics, such as Catholics (a group heavily populated by Hispanics) and Black Protestants are far more concerned about abusive leaders within the church than they are with cultural divisions between their religious beliefs and mainstream American culture. This points to a need to address internal failures within these churches to encourage the faithful within them. Also, while White Mainline Protestants are less concerned about conflict between themselves and the culture, they are evenly split over whether the more permissive cultural values are a problem for them, suggesting that the White Mainline Protestants are not a homogeneous progressive bloc.

Together, the takeaway from this second chapter of Pew’s report is that there are multiple views of the decline of Christianity in the United States among American Christian groups. Whether defined by race or by theology, we discover not only different views of Christianity’s place in the American culture, but of different narratives of what it means to live in the United States.