A recent report from Pew Research Center about the role of religion in the United States had some surprising results. While it included general agreement that the influence religion has in the United States is shrinking (80% of respondents agreed with this), it also found that most people also find religion to be generally good.

A quote from the Pew report explains:

Most Americans who say religion’s influence is shrinking are not happy about it. Overall, 49% of U.S. adults say both that religion is losing influence and that this is a bad thing. An additional 8% of U.S. adults think religion’s influence is growing and that this is a good thing. Together, a combined 57% of U.S adults – a clear majority – express a positive view of religion’s influence on American life.

If the majority of Americans think that religion is generally a good thing for the country, why is the role of religion simultaneously decreasing in American life? Wouldn’t the positive view of religion mean that more Americans would seek to bring religion into the public life of the country? No.

The reason for this is that, when people respond to a survey like this, they are not offering an opinion on “religion” in the abstract. What they are reflecting on is their experiences with people who are religious.

Insofar as people who are religious hold strong personal beliefs that guide them to make good moral decisions, give them events to celebrate (e.g., the birth of Jesus at Christmas) and lead them to volunteer in various ways to make the world a better place, then religion is good. In the lives of these individuals, religion helps form people in a way that most of us would find commendable. They are welcome to their beliefs and the positive impact those beliefs make through them.

However, people who hold beliefs that cause them to be judgmental toward others, condemning what others believe or do, are not the kind of people we want to be part of our lives. Among those of us who are Christian, these sorts of people are the ones who perpetrate what we have come to term “church hurt.” Even if they do some good things, they ultimately wield their religion as a form of enforcement to try and make others align with what they believe.

The good news is that it seems more Americans have experienced the positive types of religious people, or at least been more affected by the positive types of religious people, than the negative. So, overall, the sentiment is that religion is a positive force in American life.

However, this comes with a caveat. While most Americans may see religion as a positive force, they are wary of it ever crossing the boundary of becoming judgmental. As a result, Pew reports:

Here’s what U.S. adults say when asked what they think is the best way to proceed when someone disagrees with them about religion:

• 41% say it’s best to just avoid discussing religion altogether, up from 33% who said this in 2019.
• 53% say it’s best to try and understand the other person’s perspective and agree to disagree, down from 62% who said this in 2019.
• Just 5% say the best approach is to try and persuade the other person to change their mind. This is virtually unchanged since 2019.

There is relatively little appetite for trying to change someone’s mind about religion among any of the religious groups analyzed in the survey, peaking at just 14% among White evangelical Protestants.

This should give those of us who value the practice of evangelism pause. Both the religious and non-religious Americans heavily agree that it is best not to invite people to change what they believe, preferring either to avoid discussion about religion altogether or agreeing to disagree. Even White evangelical Protestants are reading the cultural room and are backing away from inviting people to respond to their message.

Does this mean that evangelism as a practice is no longer possible in the United States? No. Does it mean that certain practices of evangelism should be retired, at least for this cultural moment? Absolutely yes.

Now is not the time to press crisis conversions on people or to debate in the public square about why individuals or the nation needs Jesus. Christians of all stripes are uncomfortable doing this and those who are not Christian are not interested in hearing it. The operative idea of evangelism being a practice that involves anonymous, nameless evangelists trying to reach out to passersby with street preaching, door knocking, and unbidden public proclamations of the gospel are simply out of sync with the cultural mood. Christians have to force themselves to do this and others have to be forced to encounter it.

These practices made more sense when there was a broader agreement as to the importance of the Christian faith in the public sphere. They do not when religion has been relegated more and more to the realm of private meaning making.

How, then, can evangelism occur in this setting? This takes us back to the opening point. Most Americans have had some positive experience of a religious person who they felt has done good in the world. That is the clue. To evangelize in the current culture is to live into this opening. Show the people around us that we are doing good by how we live. Show that we help beautify and strengthen the world through how we act and speak toward others. Show that we care for the people who are hurting, lonely, hungry, forgotten, and cast aside. Show that we are willing to be interrupted from our daily routines to be a blessing to others.

This is a process. It takes time, and it means engaging in real, mutual relationships rather than controlled settings where we can just share a message. We need to be vulnerable and honest in how we demonstrate our faith in our lives, how we use our money, and how we use our time and words.

If we are faithful in this, then we are not a nameless, anonymous evangelist. We are friends and colleagues and family members who love the people around us. And, then, not as part of a public display, but as a welcomed, organic engagement within our relationships, we can share the “reason for the hope we have within us” when the time is right.

Christians do not need to own or claim the public square. We just need to live out our faith in real, non-hypocritical ways in public and in relationships with others. As we do this, the positive experience people have of our faith in action will be enough to generate individual invitations to consider that faith for themselves. For more on how I address this, see my text, Participating in Abundant Life: Holistic Salvation for a Secular Age.