Massive shift in religious affiliation in past 16 years?

Where did you find it?

 

Is there a Pew 2022 or PRRI 2006 on the subject? Not that important. I think the trend is real as I have seen similar data before.

Why do you think this is why we've become so divisive?

 

people have turned away from religion in droves because of how massively hypocritical and hateful it is

 

Yeah, the big change is obviously in White Christian Democrats moving to unaffiliated. As Christianity becomes more and more defined as Republican and Evangelical, it's no surprise. College me from the early 1980s could have predicted this as the Moral Majority was getting started during the golden age of TV preachers and campus campaigns against Humanism (later morphing into political correctness and now anti-wokeism) were everywhere. The older non-crazy mainline Christians of my parents generation died out and their progeny are confronted with the abomination that American Christianity has become. It used to be said about religion that you always go home eventually, but for many of us, there is no home anymore--particularly if you don't live in a large metro area. My local Methodist Church had a good and caring pastor until my kids were hitting their tweens. He got replaced by a younger Pastor who trended towards the Republican Evangelical side and some of his sermons were downright political. The Church lost massive numbers and they never came back. Now, the Methodists Church is splitting between traditional Methodism and a more evangelical bent. Where do those traditional Methodists go? They go unaffiliated if they don't have access to something resembling what they have known for their entire lives. And that's just a quick anecdote about one denomination.

 

The Western world is secularizing and has been since the enlightenment.

The U.S. lags behind western Europe in disaffiliation by about 20-30 years.

But take a look at England or other rich western European countries and that’s where we are headed. Christianity is almost only maintained by old to very old people and a tiny minority of youth.

Sociologists dedicate their professional careers to understanding this phenomenon.

Its multifaceted and complex. Briefly, it involves rising levels of affluence, exposure to more information, religious integration of communities, lessening stigma regarding non-affiliation etc etc.