Fewer than half of Americans in 2021 told Gallup they belong to a house of worship, the lowest percentage since the 1930s. Twenty-nine percent of Americans identify as “Nones” — claiming no religious identity — while only a quarter say they go to church weekly, and less than a third (31%) say they go to services monthly.
Major denominations — United Methodist, Lutheran, Southern Baptist, Presbyterian — have lost millions of members in recent decades.
What have those groups done in the face of that decline? They have turned inward, fighting amongst themselves over sex, race and doctrine while their churches fall apart.
Baseball has seen similar declines.
In 2019, more than 65 million people went to a major league game. In 2021, that number had dropped to 45 million, according to Front Office Sports. Some of the decline in attendance was due to COVID — as the 2021 season started with pandemic restrictions — but attendance at games had already been dropping ever since reaching an all-time high of about 80 million people in 2007, The New York Times reported.
Large sections of empty seats are shown during the sixth inning of a baseball game between the Seattle Mariners and the Texas Rangers at Safeco Field, on Sept. 8, 2015, in Seattle. The announced attendance of 13,389 was the smallest home crowd of the 2015 season for the Mariners. Many MLB teams struggle with low attendance. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)
Those declines are driven in part by changes in the game that have made it boring and joyless. Games start late, run long and are filled with tedious at-bats that most often end in strikeouts and walks. When a player hits the ball hard, it’s usually right into a shift, where the defending player is in perfect position to catch the ball, thanks to advanced analytics.
The only saving grace is that once in a while there is a homer, often followed by a manager’s visit to the mound and a change in pitchers, causing more delays.
Rather than work to improve the game and connect with fans, baseball owners locked out the players, and the two sides are now stalemated over how to split billions in revenue. Baseball’s owners and players might want to pay attention to what is happening on the religious landscape before letting their feud go on too long.
Because baseball is more than a business. It is a religion of sorts — a vast social movement that shapes people’s lives, that touches on family, identity, regional loyalty and the joy of being together. It gives us something to talk about and can bring us together when life gets messy.
But more and more people are increasingly content to live without religion in the same way Americans are increasingly disinterested in baseball.
It’s not just the churches and the clubs that are to blame — both baseball and religion are also victims of changes in American culture, said Bart Barber, pastor of First Baptist Church in Farmersville, Texas, and a longtime baseball fan.
“Baseball as a pastime assumes an America in which people have free time where they can sit down and enjoy a baseball game during the work week,” he said. “The church also assumes that people set aside time — Sunday morning — and when I was growing up, all day Sunday — for church.”
