Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson (R-Texas)
Church attendance among Americans continued to decline last year, with the latest Gallup Poll released last Monday (March 29) showing that 47 percent of Americans will be members of a formal religious group in 2020, falling below 50 percent for the first time in 80 years. Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson said on Friday that Gallup’s poll results show that Americans are “enslaved.
In 1937, Gallup’s first survey showed that 73 percent of Americans were members of a religion. The results remained around 70 percent until 2000, but then began a steady decline, with 61 percent in 2010, 50 percent in 2018 and 47 percent in 2020.
Carlson said that to his knowledge, this is the first time that religious membership in the United States has fallen below 50 percent. Speaking on Fox News Channel’s America’s Newsroom, Carlson said, “The reality is that people are not free by running away from the meaning of life, running away from God, running away from religion, they’re enslaved. Look at this country. I would say it’s true that, you know, feminism and all kinds of other freedom movements actually paradoxically put people in bondage, but this one in particular.”
“It’s the result of a long …… freedom movement, a movement that has tried to free Americans from the bondage of traditional religion, and like all freedom movements in this country, at a certain point it becomes the opposite of what it purports to be.” Carlson said.
“Are people really freer than they were when they believed in God, are they less anxious?” Carlson asked on the show, noting that anxiety and despair come from a lack of explanation of the purpose and reason for suffering.
“Look, everybody dies eventually, and if you don’t acknowledge that or provide an explanation for what happens after you die, then people are going to be filled with fear and anxiety about existence, and maybe substance abuse will spike, as will suicide and despair, and all the disillusionment with conventional science that we’re seeing now.” Carlson said.
According to Gallup, there are two main reasons driving the decline in religious membership in the U.S.: more adults have no religious preference; and a decline in the percentage of people with religious beliefs who are full church members, which is evident in every generation.
The Gallup poll concludes by noting that the United States remains a religious nation, with more than 7 in 10 people affiliated with some organized religion. However, specific places of worship have far fewer people with full membership, now less than half. The decline in 2020 may be temporary due to the Communist virus pandemic, but a continued decline in the coming decades seems inevitable.
The poll, conducted from 2018 to 2019, interviewed 6,117 adults randomly by telephone in every U.S. state and the District of Columbia. The poll has a 95 percent confidence level and a margin of error of +/-2 percent.
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