According to survey data, 1993 was the last hurrah for white Protestants as a majority of the population. Today, even when Catholics are tallied in, white Christians comprise less than half the population. The author of this eye-opening work, Robert P. Jones, is the founding CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and a leading scholar and commentator on religion and politics. He writes a column for The Atlantic online and regularly appears on the public radio religion news magazine Interfaith Voices.

In their nearly 248-year reign in America, white Protestant Christians shaped the country with their idealism, emphasis on service, educational outreach, social action programs, colleges, congregational vitality, and emphasis on Sunday school and youth ministry. But not even the rise of the ecumenical movement could avert the downward spiral of mainline churches in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Jones charts how this trend is affecting American politics and social values. He looks at the recent responses to Barack Obama's election, the politics of nostalgia, gay rights and same-sex marriage, and race relations.

Meanwhile, white evangelical Protestants have chosen to set themselves apart from their more liberal brothers and sisters with their anti-gay rhetoric, extreme anti-abortion activities, and their conservative and avid nationalistic politics. Many cultural commentators view these developments as signs of a beleaguered minority battling to keep their traditions alive in the face of the nation's new ethnic diversity. The numbers of both mainline and evangelical Protestants declined in the face of demographic change and religious disaffiliation. Neither group fared very well with racial tolerance. That is why Sunday morning worship has remained the most segregated hour in America.

A new study of the religiously unaffiliated by Public Religion Research Institute shows that "nones" (those who choose "none of the above" when questioned about their religion), who make up 25 percent of the American population, left churches not because of any negative experience, but because they just "stopped believing." More facts to think about:

  • Only a fraction — seven percent — say they are looking for a religion to belong to.
  • Only 18 percent of nones say "religion is important in their lives" and only 40 percent say they are "moderately spiritual."
  • The majority of the unaffiliated — 53 percent — describe themselves as neither religious nor spiritual.