But I have to also say this: Sadly, no matter the denomination, the decline is real. And the reason does go further than people opting to attend via “virtual church service” instead of in-person.   

I would posit that in most cases “the Church” itself has done more to drive people away (especially young people) than anything! Too often “the church” comes across as unwelcoming in its message to younger generations and this includes predominantly Black churches.

And the lies and grift (the “prosperity gospel”), hypocrisy and extremisms (Talibangelicals and other Religious reich fanatical groups). Young people see right through all of it.

And they’re simply saying No!

Decades of disaffiliations, which at one point made ex-Catholics the second largest religious demographic in the United States, have been joined in recent years by an accelerated decline in Mass attendance in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Every parish is seeing it,” says Michael Sennett, director of communications and coordinator of social justice programming at St. Ignatius of Loyola Church in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. Whether in the form of no longer giving, volunteering, or showing up at all, he sees “people willing to put down their foot and say, ‘I’m done.’ ”

Collectively, it’s led to a sense that the church has to do something about those who walk away and don’t come back. At the global level, Pope Francis has called a synodal listening and discernment process for the whole church slated to run into late 2024. The U.S. bishops have initiated their own call for renewed teaching and understanding of the Eucharist. Beneath the surface of each initiative are foundational questions about who gets to call themselves Catholic, who gets to call anything Catholic, and who even wants to be called Catholic.

In the United States, the church hierarchy has continued largely undeterred on a path of making clear that certain identities—whether sexual, political, or otherwise—are irreconcilable with being Catholic. This includes pushes to oppose gay marriage and deny communion to politicians who support legal abortion.

This matters because, when a church—or any group—seeks a strident sense of identity for itself, the members who feel it most are people whose identities place them at the outermost edges. Those people are also most vulnerable to the aggression of other members who police those edges and declare definitively who’s in and who’s out. In the Catholic Church, many people can’t articulate their misgivings with the atmosphere created by the latter group, so instead they simply leave.