Vibrant Faith Communities Still In Wyoming Despite Christianity Decline

Justin Flanigan is a Casper-based entrepreneur who grew up in a devout Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints household, regularly attending church and doing daily prayers and scripture study. 

But immediately upon his return from a two-year foreign mission for his church, he dispensed with religious habit and “completely went off the rails,” he told the Cowboy State Daily.

“I basically went off and did everything that I taught people not to,” he said, referring to things like excess alcohol consumption.

He attributes the lapse to mental health challenges, including a bipolar diagnosis, that created a wedge between himself and his LDS faith.

On the face of it, Flanigan appeared ready to join the growing demographic of religiously unaffiliated Americans, the so-called “nones,” who’ve risen from a miniscule statistic to a sizable share of the U.S. population over the course of the last two generations.

Instead, Flanigan says he never totally lost his Christian faith, and after exploring myriad spiritual outlets and traditions, he circled back to his LDS roots.

“After experiencing my own journey and trying to find what made me happy, in short, I found out I am the happiest — spiritually, physically, emotionally — when I am living in accordance with … the gospels I was first taught in the church,” he said.

Christian Decline Pushes Pause

Flanigan’s experience dovetails with the findings of a major new religious study released in late February by the Pew Research Center that shows Christian identity is more resilient than expected.

In the 1990s, more than 90% of adults were self-declared Christians. That number fell to 78% by 2007 and is down to 62% now, according to data collected during the study.

But after three decades of steady contraction, the trend of a Christian decline in the U.S. has leveled off. 

“The most striking thing in the survey is the recent stability, both overall and within each generational cohort,” Gregory Smith, senior associate director of research at Pew Research Center, told Cowboy State Daily. “After a long period of decline, there are no generational cohorts who experienced an observable downturn in their religiousness over the last four or five years.”

Similarly, the share of Americans who identify as religiously unaffiliated has also held steady at around 29%.

Smith emphasized that the leveling may not last, and wider patterns in generational behavior suggest declines could resume. 

For now, experts are speculating on what led to the stabilization, and what it might tell us about the broader religious identity of Americans. 

Does Wyoming Fit The Mold?

Although the share of adults in Wyoming who identify as Christian is in line with the nation as a whole at 62%, some religious communities in the state have bucked broader trends. 

One congregation that’s been swimming against the current is Cheyenne Hills Church in Cheyenne.

This non-denominational community began meeting in a classroom at the Laramie County Community College in the early 1990s, right as Christian affiliation began its broad decline.

But as other churches were losing members, Cheyenne Hills was gaining them, Associate Pastor Jon Simpson told Cowboy State Daily. 

In the 2000s, the church left the college and expanded to its current location, where it now has multiple facilities, including a worship center that hosts around 1,300 people between its two Sunday services. 

Simpson attributes this growth to what’s known in non-denominational circles as the “seeker sensitive approach.” 

“We're trying to present and encourage [church participation] in a way that people can relate to, that's culturally relevant,” Simpson said. “We have some tradition here, but we're not as tied to tradition.”

He added that new members are those who have no religious upbringing as well as former Christians or other religious switchers. 

“Some of our growth is people looking for something different, who are maybe from a church that's more traditional but that has lost meaning for them, or significance,” he said.

Sunday service here is reminiscent of a rock concert. A full electric band performs upbeat Christian hymns to a choreographed light show on an elevated stage. Massive screens project live angles and lyrics for the audience to sing along.

The church even has a multimedia team that produces live-action videos. 

Its current in-house production is called “The Unshakables,” a faith-promoting riff on Pixar’s franchise “The Incredibles.” The Unshakables plays on the big screens during Sunday service.

“We try to make it fun,” Simpson said. “We want faith to be meaningful … but we also want to connect it to the world we’re in in a way they can relate to.” 

Wyoming’s Youth Match The Trend, But Will It Last?

One of the factors behind religion's unexpected stability is the country's youngest demographic of adults ages 18-24.

This group is less religious than the population at large, but is now exhibiting the same level of religiosity as the cohort directly above them, according to the religious landscape study.

“That limits the amount of the downward tug they can exert on the overall downward line,” said Smith. 

Cody Wagner is a youth minister at non-denominational City Park Church in Casper, and he believes youth religious engagement is not merely stable, but on the rise. 

He speculates that a digitally interconnected world is playing a role.

“I think growing up with social media and seeing what's happening globally, Gen Z sees that they can make a large impact with their life, larger than themselves and larger than their small sphere of influence,” said Wagner, who’s also seen growing levels of spiritual curiosity among unaffiliated children.

“Even though there’s been fewer families raising their children in the church, there's also this strange uptick of young people who find the idea of religion, or a spiritual journey, to be more important,” he said.

This sort of spiritual curiosity is also measured in the landscape study. 

Pew reports that 86% of Americans believe they have a soul or spirit in addition to a physical body, 83% believe in a universal spirit or God and 79% believe there is something spiritual beyond the natural world.  

At Cheyenne Hills Church, Simpson said that in addition to higher turnout, he’s witnessed younger people more interested in religious doctrine, graduating from what he refers to as “congregational” Christians to “convictional” Christians.

“What I see happening is that the 20-something generation are really looking for more authenticity. They like the aspects of the events, but they want to hear more about the actual Bible and Jesus,” he said.

The excitement at Cheyenne Hills and City Park churches notwithstanding, researchers emphasize there are still generational differences, and without major change Christian decline will resume.

“There's no cohort who's become more religious over the last 17 years or so since we've been doing these religious landscape studies,” Smith said. “The oldest Americans, who are on average far more religious than young adults, are going to pass away. 

“So, if nothing changes and today's young people retain their current levels of religiousness, then over time the population's religiousness will continue to decline.”

Wagner thinks the odds favor Christian religions.

“When I'm working with young people who were not raised in a church, there isn't this preconceived notion of religion,” he said. “We get to kind of start from square one.”

COVID

One emerging theory for the leveling off is the global COVID-19 pandemic, which reinvigorated religious yearnings, according to Pandemic-era surveys conducted by Pew. 

“Since the COVID outbreak, the share of Americans who participate in religious services, either in person or virtually, has been rock solid, even as so much of everyday life was disrupted,” Smith said.

In one survey, Pew asked Americans whether the COVID outbreak had strengthened their faith, weakened it or made no difference.

While most respondents said the events had not impacted their faith one way or the other, there were significantly more Americans who said their faith had been strengthened rather than weakened as a result.

About a quarter of Americans’ faith was bolstered in response, but less than 5% said it had diminished their faith.

These findings make sense for Flanigan, whose personal hardships mirrored the collective struggle experienced during the pandemic.

“You don’t think you need God when things are great and easy and prosperous,” he said. “But when things get hard and maybe you hit rock bottom, then you reach out spiritually for help or answers. And in my case, it brought me back to the spiritual beliefs I grew up with.”

Are Politics Making Americans Less, Or More, Religious?

The Pew study finds that political and religious identities are strongly intertwined, particularly in the high correlation between political conservatives and Christians. 

Around 82% of people who say they’re conservatives identify as Christian, down from 89% in 2007, according to the study.

In Wyoming, however, those numbers don’t precisely track.

By many metrics, Wyoming is the most politically conservative state in the union, but its share of adults who identify as Christian is only average, according to the poll. And its share of religiously unaffiliated adults, at 34%, is five percentage points above the national average. 

Long-term religious decline is closely connected to politics too, Smith said. 

“As being religious came to be associated in the popular imagination with conservative politics or right-wing politics, over time people who didn't share those politics came to disavow religion as well,” according to the study.

The share of self-described political liberals who identify as Christians has fallen 25 percentage points since 2007, from 62% to 37%, Pew reports.

Liberal Christian decline mirrors an increase in faith-centric politicians in Wyoming, according former baptist pastor turned Campbell County Commissioner Scott Clem, who’s religious beliefs were among the factors that motivated him to enter politics. 

“I’ve seen the Christian community getting more involved in political things, political endeavors,” Clem told Cowboy State Daily. “And I think my views on faith certainly do play a role as far as the self governance of our society. But there's a balance there too.”

Clem said politicians like him are often accused of promoting theocratic governance. He rejects those claims, and said religious values can inform politics without running afoul the constitutional separation of church and state. 

Clem laments political division within religious communities, and believes Christian factions could do a better job of learning from one another. 

“I think in those liberal branches of the church, with the practice of looking out for the poor and the widowed and some of those social programs, those really made the liberal church great,” he said. “It's one of the things that perhaps the conservative part of faith could learn from.”

He doesn’t agree, however, that politics is the reason for the religious departure of liberals. 

“What it comes down to is if you don't have an underlying faith in the validity of the Bible then it's easy to walk away,” he said.

Catholic Dynamic

At Our Lady of the Mountains Catholic Church in Jackson, which hosts one of the largest single congregations in Wyoming, Associate Pastor Fr. Philip Vanderlin told Cowboy State Daily that he’s witnessed politics negatively impacting Catholic communities.

“What has caused people to leave is the politicization of religion,” said Smith. “I’ve seen many people begin to reject the authority of the church because of how politics have entered into it.”

There’s also the impact of the controversial Pope Francis, who has struggled to strike a balance between progressive and conservative factions within the global Catholic Church.

Our Lady of the Mountain also highlights the diversity of Wyoming’s Christian population. Vanderlin said that the unique cultural aspects of his congregation, who are a majority Latino, defy survey results.

“We have around 5,000 Latinos who are Christians, Catholics, but their participation in church services doesn't reflect that,” he said, citing as an example the church’s Mexican-American parishioners. “To understand their religiosity, you have to understand their history.” 

For many Hispanics, Catholic identity is intertwined with a broader national ethnic identity. These origins date to 1531, when an apparitional Mary Magdalene is said to have compelled a native leader to build a church in her honor, catalyzing a fusion an indigenous-Catholic identity, Vanderlin explained.

“When they come to church, the first place the Latinos go is to the stained-glass window of the Blessed Mother,” he said. “It’s what I call a cultural-devotional religiosity which is dedicated fundamentally to this specific person and that specific event much more than to what we call the church practices nowadays.”

The Catholic faith in Wyoming also calls attention to larger demographic changes, including that the church in the U.S. loses members at a higher rate than other religions. For every one convert to Catholicism, it loses eight members to religious switching.

Still, its share of the U.S. population has remained relatively stable, which Smith attributes to America’s growing Hispanic demographic. 

Vanderlin estimates that more than half the Catholic community in Jackson is Latino. Whereas Anglos make up north of a quarter. Of adults who identify as Christian in the U.S. today, 19% are Catholic. In Wyoming that number is 12%.