A/ The decline of organized religion has halted (for now)
In 2025, the big news in progressive religion was that religion is not quite as dead as the social scientists want us to believe. A Pew Research Center study released in December was titled “Religion holds steady in America.” At the same time, the study also found that “people in every birth cohort — from the youngest to the oldest — have grown less religious as they have aged.”
However, as usual, religiosity is measured with phenomena that are very much Christian-centric. One of the metrics that Pew looks at is how “prayerful” people are. By that metric, I’m completely non-religious, since I don’t pray. Another metric used by Pew is whether people “identify with a religion.” That means that Pew is measuring religiosity as a function of affiliating with an organized religious group. But we already know that the twenty-first century is a time when people are disaffiliating from all organizations. I would also say that lots of people I know are religious/spiritual without belonging to an organized religious group — I think of the people I know who do yoga or qi-gong, or who create their own spiritual rituals for groups of friends, or who consult Tarot cards, etc.
You also have to consider how organized religion gets defined. If you’re a practitioner of Orisa devotion (such as Santeria) and regularly visit a botanica, you’re not going to be counted as participating in organized religion. If you’re a yoga teacher, spending many hours leading classes and attending ongoing training, you’re not going to be counted as participating in organized religion. The unacknowledged influence of Protestant Christianity on American social scientists is still there. The more something looks like a Protestant Christian church, the more likely it is to be defined as a religion. The more something looks like Protestant Christian spiritual practice (e.g., prayer, regular attendance at religious services, belief in God, etc.), the more likely it is to be defined as a religious practice.
B/ Protest politics remains important for White Christian and post-Christian religious progressives
In a year-end article on Religion News Service, veteran religion reporters Jack Jenkins and Bob Smietana wrote about the Americas religious figures whom they expect to be most news-worthy in 2026. They chose a mix of religious conservatives, moderates, and liberals/progressives — and a range of races, ethnicities, and religious affiliations. The only person they chose who is best known for protest politics is Rev. David Black, a progressive White minister in a majority-White denomination, Presbyterian Church (USA).
Contrast that with the person Jenkins and Smietana picked to represent Black Protestantism, Rev. Frederick D. Hayes, who is running for Congress in his Dallas congressional district. Instead of protest politics, Hayes is using his religious platform to try to add another progressive voice in Congress.
Or consider Brad Lander, a Jew who is running for Congress in New York City. Lander offers a nuanced, liberal Zionist take on Israel — he calls himself a “steadfast supporter of Israel,” while also calling the Israeli campaign in Gaza a “genocide.” But instead of setting up a protest like a tent city, Lander hopes to take his nuanced view of Israel to Congress.
Or contrast that with Mehdi Hasan, a Muslim journalist whose show was canceled by MSNBC. Hasan went out and founded his own media outlet using Substack, and now has 50,00 paid subscribers (and 450,000 total subscribers). Instead of protest politics, Hasan is contributing directly to public discourse.
Speaking personally, most of the Unitarian Universalists I know (i.e., people who are mostly White, mostly progressive, mostly post-Christian) seem to place highest value on protest politics. If you want to get maximum kudos in Unitarian Universalist circles, tell people that you’re going to go to a protest rally. But if you say that you’re running for the local school board, or helping to run the local food pantry, or doing progressive journalism, it doesn’t seem to impress other religious progressives as an expression of your progressive religious values.
White religious progressives seem to place the most value on protest, and on what they call “resistance.” I just wish they placed more value on constructive ways to change the world.
C/ What religious progressives don’t seem to pay much attention to
The religious progressives I know don’t seem to pay much attention to several trends that I would have thought interesting to all religious progressives.
Childist theology
Over the past decade or so, there has been an academic movement among progressive Christians to discover children in the Christian scriptures and the Hebrew Bible. While I’m not especially interested in the resulting field of “childist biblical studies,” I am interested in the notion of putting children at the center of things when we look at religion. To me, this is a logical outgrowth of the feminist movement in the latter half of the twentieth century, which put women at the center of religion, and asked: How have women been covered up by patriarchal religion? How can we better see the women who have always been part of religious communities? And how will all this affect the ways we practice our religion in the here-and-now?
When I think about applying a childist perspective to my own religious group, I think about how a host of little incidents that make me feel as though the presence of children tends to be obscured within Unitarian Universalism — the UU ministers who have confessed to me how they simply didn’t like children; the unwillingness to confront a past history of teenaged children being molested in UU congregations, conferences, and summer camps; the elimination of paid positions to support children and teens; etc. I also think about the way many Unitarian Universalists talk about “faith development” as the way that adults develop religiosity in children — while I can’t help hearing an analogy to the way real estate developers turn undeveloped land to their own uses without considering what might be best for the land.
Multiculturalism and liberal/progressive religion
We live in an increasingly multicultural society. In the last century, many Unitarian Universalists were inspired by Huston Smith, the renowned twentieth century scholar of religion, who wrote: “It is possible to climb life’s mountain from any side, but when the top is reached the trails converge.” Many Unitarian Universalists believe this: we think that while we follow our own religious trail, eventually all trails end up on the same mountaintop.
However, scholars of religion like Stephen Prothero have argued convincingly that this is not true. We do not live in a straightforward religious landscape with a single mountain and a single trail up that mountain. A better analogy for a multicultural society might be a religious landscape with than one mountain, to say nothing of valleys and plains and a host of different trails that may lead somewhere or nowhere or everywhere. And if we took this analogy seriously, it would change the way we talk about religion. As Prothero says:
“[I don’t] assume, as many Protestants do, that religions are about faith and belief. Religions cannot be reduced to ‘belief systems’ and more than they can be reduced to ‘ritual systems.’ Belief is a part of most religions, but only a part, and in most cases no the most important part. … So while I do refer to Protestants as ‘believers’ and to their religion as a ‘faith,’ I do not refer to religious people in general as ‘believers’ or to their traditions as ‘faith-based.’” [from God Is Not One by Stephen Prothero (HarperOne, 2010)]
If this is so, where does that leave Unitarian Universalists? Some among us don’t consider themselves Christians, which means we can’t assume belief or faith pertains to all Unitarian Universalists — yet it would apply to Unitarian Universalist Christians. That might mean that different Unitarian Universalists are not only following different spiritual trails, but actually climbing different mountains. What then holds our religious community together? The usual answer is that covenant holds our communities together, but by now we might begin to doubt that covenant works for all religious trails. Maybe all that’s holding us together is the fact that we’re somehow holding together.
If we take multiculturalism seriously, it might cause us to reconsider a great many of our assumptions. That sounds exciting to me, but I can also see how some religious liberals would prefer to stick with the old thoughts — that we’re all going to wind up at the top of the same mountain, that belief and faith are fundamental, that covenant is central.
New management techniques
I’m aware of two management techniques that I think would interest religious liberals/progressives.
First, there’s network religion. In their book The Rise of Network Christianity (Oxford, 2017), Brad Christerson and Richard Flory show how some evangelical Christians are doing organized religion in new ways, taking advantage of the digital revolution and globalization to expand their reach. Network Christianity uses new forms of governance, getting away from older congregational and denominational structures to create new structures that allow for faster innovation, new ways of financing, innovative marketing, etc.
By contrast, most religious liberals and progressives stay with the older governance structures, which tends to limit their ability to innovate. Yet the market for organized religion is significantly smaller than it was a decade ago, and we’re seeing increased competition within that shrinking market. My sense is that religious liberals and progressives are losing market share, and the only way out of that is going to be innovation. Sounds like the classic vicious cycle.
There are one or two bright spots. One group that may be starting to use the power of network religion is Black Lives of Unitarian Universalism (BLUU). When I read their website, I’m impressed by what they say they’re doing: online worship, pastoral care, local community groups, and some non-standard fundraising strategies (including, e.g., Patreon). If BLUU can manage to expand beyond Black people who are already part of Unitarian Universalism, reaching out to welcome other Black people into their network, this will be an exciting development.
Also of interest is CLF’s Prison Ministry, which is introducing quite a few new people to liberal/progressive religion. There are 2 million people in prisons in the U.S., so this initiative has the potential to reach quite a few people. On the other hand, the methods used to reach prison populations do not translate well to the 341 million people who are not in prison.
Second, there’s the idea of sharing management resources to increase efficiency. If you know about Baumol’s cost disease, you understand that increases in labor productivity in some areas of the economy will drive up labor costs in other areas of the economy where there has been no increase in labor productivity. Organized religion is a sector of the economy where we haven’t seen much increase in labor productivity. Mega-churches (with over 2,000 average weekly attendance) offer some economy of scale, and therefore some savings in labor costs, which may help explain why mega-churches tend to do better than smaller congregation.
But mega-churches are actually not doing very well right now. What seems to be doing better is the scheme of organizing satellite churches, where administrative staff functions are based in a central church, so the satellite churches require less staffing.
Religious liberals and progressives should be looking at how to use variations of this model to share staffing, increases organizational efficiency, and cut costs. Three Unitarian Universalist congregations in Wisconsin are already using a version of this organizational model to combine resources. But really every small congregation (where “small” is defined as average weekly attendance less than 250 people) should be looking at ways to share resources (and thus save money) with nearby congregations. This does not mean that small congregations need to merge with one another — over and over again, experience has shown that mergers result in an overall decline in membership and attendance. Instead, keep existing congregations, with their unique cultures and traditions, and let them share resources to cut costs.