The shift in religious affiliation, or away from religious affiliation, has the most correlation, in my view, with that range of religious cultural assumptions than with any specific doctrine. And when people move from one affiliation to another, they are choosing a better cultural fit.

The losses in American Catholicism are dramatic. “Catholicism has experienced the greatest net losses as a result of affiliation changes. While nearly one-in-three Americans (31%) were raised in the Catholic faith, today fewer than one-in-four (24%) describe themselves as Catholic.” I believe that a great many Catholics left the church over the clergy sexual abuse scandals, though there are certainly other reasons as well, many of them cultural. Many Catholics I know who have become Protestant have done so because they are seeking a less authoritarian faith and more autonomy in their own beliefs.

This major decline in Catholicism has been less visible because of the large number of Catholic immigrants who have increased their ranks even as traditional Catholics have moved out. This also explains the current social advocacy of many U.S. Catholic leaders on immigration and what is called “the new sanctuary movement.” I regard this as a good trend because it has enabled the U.S. Catholic church to retrieve a lot of its solid social teaching on issues like poverty that had been swamped by the almost exclusive pre-occupation with abortion and homosexuality in the last decades.

Here’s what this looks like on the ground. There is a large United Church of Christ (liberal Protestant) church in a western suburb of Chicago where 90% of the large and active church membership was not raised in the Congregational tradition. More than half of this church’s growing membership were formerly Catholic. The pastor told me that in a meeting on stewardship, a church member of several years and now a member of the senior leadership of the church, raised a hand and queried why this committee was spending so much time on fund-raising. “Doesn’t the diocese just send us a check?” he wondered. And that is just the tip of the iceberg. Protestant churches cannot count on their members knowing anything about the history and faith commitments of their particular tradition. These folks who are migrating from Catholic to Protestant or from liberal to evangelical or evangelical to progressive or whatever the pattern know more what they don’t want in a church than what they do want or believe.

This is true at our seminary as well. We are a graduate school that trains people for religious leadership. We stand in the Congregational tradition (we’re the Pilgrims!), and yet today our student body has between twenty-five and thirty different denominations and even religions (Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist). Our faculty is very diverse as well, with United Church of Christ, Baptist, and Catholic representatives among others.

What holds us together? We are a progressive institution and known for our commitment to social justice. Our seminary motto is “Ministry for the Real World.” We teach on the corner of church and society, and clearly now also on the corner of synagogue and society and even mosque and society.

These trends are examples of both strengths and weaknesses within the American religious experience. Clearly, the church I describe above where people don’t know the basic structure of Protestantism let alone its doctrines is a problem. It is also fraying the connections between the local church and the regional and national bodies of the church and also fraying the connections with church institutions (like seminaries).

On the other hand, it is wonderful to go to these churches where people used to be all kinds of different faiths and traditions, but they chose this one because they want to be part of this kind of a church. This, I believe, is more dynamic and faithful than just sitting in the pew in the Methodist (Presbyterian, Baptist, Catholic—you fill in the blank) church that your parents sat in and their parents sat in etc. without ever asking yourself “why?”

The extreme of this view, however, is that ultimately everyone’s faith is under their own hat. Could we have millions of faiths, each with only one member? The sociologist Robert Bellah described this phenomenon in the person “Sheila” “whose faith was so private and personal she called it ‘Sheilaism.’ In terms of our [Bellah et al.] categories of basic American values, she was an example of expressive individualism.”

So while the Pew study indicates that the “United States is on the verge of becoming a minority Protestant country,” these trends toward self-direction in faith is the distinctly, even uniquely Protestant ethos.

We may be declining in numbers, we Protestants, but sociologically speaking, in the U.S. we won.