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America’s Real Foreign Policy

Paul Craig Roberts

It is amazing how difficult it is for the Western foreign policy community and media to recognize and acknowledge facts.  Generally speaking, analysts who tell you the difference between the truth and the narrative are brushed aside. All sorts of dismissive names are applied to us few, and false narratives serving agendas prevail. Policymakers themselves end up believing the false narratives, and this raises the risks of dangerous miscalculations.

For example, one of the most dangerous of the false narratives is that the slowness of Russia’s military advance against Ukraine is the consequence of Russian military weakness, high Russian battlefield casualties, the vulnerability of the Russian economy to US sanctions, and Putin’s unrealistic expectation to be regarded by Ukrainians as a liberator.  

The truth is entirely different.  Every time Putin endorses negotiations, he emphasizes that they must address the “root cause” of the conflict.  The root cause is the absence of a Great Power Agreement.  Putin is using a long drawn out war that the West tires of to initiate “peace negotiations” that Putin hopes to turn into a Great Power Agreement like the one he and his foreign minister failed to achieve in the winter of 2021-2022.

Washington policymakers have concluded that Russia’s weakness allows the US to withdraw from Ukraine and turn the war over to Europeans, while Washington gears up to deal with the more dangerous enemy–China.  Failed Ukraine peace negotiations are the intended excuse for Trump washing his hands and walking away.  What it signifies is Washington’s refocusing on China as the most dangerous adversary. 

It is my opinion that China is not an adversary any more than Russia and Iran are, but the narrative demands that they are adversaries. The American military/security complex cannot exist without adversaries.  That is the reason America has adversaries. Without adversaries what would the CIA, NSA, Defense Intelligence Agency, think tanks such as the Center for Strategic and International Studies, organizations such as the Council on Foreign Relations, university international studies departments, and publications such as Foreign Affairs do?  The United States has massive vested interests in having adversaries, the more dangerous the better.  

The question has arisen:  How does the US deal with so many adversaries. Formerly, we were assured that we could defeat all adversaries simultaneously.  Today it is recognized that we cannot.  Wess Mitchell in a recent article in Foreign Affairs says it is the policy of the Trump administration to sequence its conflicts. As Washington regards Russia as the weaker of its two main “adversaries,” Washington is turning the Ukraine conflict over to its European puppets while Washington takes on China.

Wess Mitchell, a former Trump  senior defense department official, wipes out the narratives and tells us the policy. And no one other than John Helper and myself have commented on it.  

Here is Secretary of State Marco Rubio telling the US Senate yesterday what I have told you, what John Helmer has told you, and what Wess Mitchell has told you:  The purpose of the Ukraine “peace negotiations” is for the US to exit the conflict and focus on China.  Here are Rubio’s words:

The war against China, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told a Senate committee hearing on Tuesday (May 20) – is now the strategic priority for the US. Implementing it requires sequencing Washington’s wars. “Every minute we spend, every dollar we spend on this conflict in Europe [Ukraine] is distracting both our focus and our resources away from a potential for a much more serious and much more cataclysmic confrontation in the Indo-Pacific…they are related but they’re related both ways — they’re related on the one hand by the precedent that it could set, but they’re also related by the fact that every minute that we spend on this [Ukraine] conflict that cannot be won by military means,  every resource that’s expended into it [Ukraine] is money and time that’s not being spent on preventing a much more serious confrontation from a global perspective in the Indo-Pacific.”  Rubio clearly states that the prime target is China.

You can watch and hear Rubio speak here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiRGVc2J73s   at the 53 minute 51 second mark.

In my judgment based on the knowledge I have at the present time, Putin and the Russian foreign policy commentators do not understand what is afoot.  Putin is lost in hopes that peace negotiations can be turned into a Great Power Agreement, a new Yalta. That would be a greater achievement than merely winning a military conflict with Ukraine and, therefore, is worth the sacrifices of Russian troops in a conflict in which Putin prevents a victory, as a victory would prevent the negotiations that Putin imagines could become a Great Power Agreement. 

If Putin had immediately smashed Ukraine, Russia would be regarded as a Great Power and would have obtained its Great Power Agreement.  Instead, Putin created the image of a weak Russia that can be sidelined to Europe while Washington takes on China.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73eXRlduSa0 

https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2025/05/21/how-america-is-being-made-great-again/ 

https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2025/05/01/is-the-purpose-of-the-peace-negotiations-to-sequence-the-wests-wars-with-russia-and-china/ 

https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2025/05/18/is-trump-bringing-netanyahu-to-heel-and-substituting-an-american-colonial-empire-in-place-of-greater-israel/ 

Here is John Helmer’s report:  https://johnhelmer.net/the-politics-of-the-slow-russian-army-movement-westward/ 

All Compromises Will Have to be Made by Washington

PCR and Nima have a reality talk, the real reality.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73eXRlduSa0   

Author’s note: this article is a significant obiter dictum to the main series of articles linked above. The point it attempts to make is so important, based on the conclusions of part II, that it seems best to publish as a separate article. Part III will follow shortly. If you haven’t already, please read Part II before continuing to this section. No. First of all, a Catholic can save…

Source

When building a strong and diversified portfolio, most investors focus heavily on stocks. But bonds play an equally important role—especially when it comes to managing risk and providing consistent income. Incorporating bonds into your investment portfolio can lead to more stable investment strategies and long-term financial resilience.

Whether you’re just beginning to invest or looking to rebalance your asset allocation, understanding how bonds work and how to use them effectively is key to building a well-rounded portfolio.

Why Bonds Matter in Your Investment Portfolio

Bonds are debt securities issued by governments, municipalities, or corporations to raise capital. When you purchase a bond, you’re essentially lending money to the issuer in exchange for regular interest payments (called coupons) and the return of your principal at maturity.

Unlike stocks, which represent ownership and can be highly volatile, bonds provide more predictable returns. This stability can help cushion your portfolio during market downturns and reduce overall risk—making bonds an essential component of stable investment strategies.

Key benefits of bonds include:

• Capital preservation: Especially useful for investors nearing or in retirement.
• Income generation: Bonds pay fixed or variable interest, often semi-annually.
• Diversification: Bonds typically behave differently from stocks, helping to reduce portfolio volatility.

Types of Bonds: Government, Municipal, and Corporate

Not all bonds are created equal. Different types offer varying levels of risk, return, and tax implications.

Government Bonds

Issued by the U.S. Treasury, these include Treasury bills (T-bills), notes (T-notes), and bonds (T-bonds). They're considered the safest type of bond because they're backed by the U.S. government.

• Pros: Very low risk, exempt from state and local taxes.
• Cons: Lower returns compared to other types of bonds.

Municipal Bonds

Issued by states, cities, and other local government entities, these bonds help fund public projects like schools, roads, and infrastructure.

• Pros: Interest is often exempt from federal and possibly state/local income taxes.
• Cons: Slightly more risk than Treasury bonds depending on the issuing municipality’s credit rating.

Corporate Bonds

Issued by companies to raise capital. These offer higher yields but come with increased risk depending on the company’s creditworthiness.

• Pros: Higher potential returns.
• Cons: Greater default risk, may be affected by changes in business conditions or credit ratings.

How to Choose the Right Mix of Bonds

Choosing the right bond mix depends on your risk tolerance, time horizon, and income needs. A conservative investor may favor government bonds and municipal bonds for their safety and tax advantages, while someone with a higher risk appetite might include corporate bonds for greater yield.

Tips for selecting bonds:

• Evaluate the issuer’s credit rating.
• Consider duration—shorter-term bonds are less sensitive to interest rate changes.
• Look at the bond's yield compared to current inflation rates.

Understanding Bond Laddering

Bond laddering is a strategy where you purchase bonds with staggered maturity dates. As each bond matures, the proceeds can be reinvested into new bonds, creating a consistent stream of income and reducing interest rate risk.

Benefits of bond laddering:

• Helps manage reinvestment risk.
• Provides liquidity at regular intervals.
• Smooths out income and interest rate volatility over time.

How Interest Rates Affect Bond Investments

Interest rates and bond prices have an inverse relationship. When interest rates rise, existing bond prices fall (and vice versa). That’s because new bonds offer higher yields, making older bonds with lower rates less attractive.

This relationship is especially important when considering the timing of bond purchases and overall duration of your bond holdings. A financial advisor can help you manage interest rate exposure and align your bond strategy with your broader financial goals.

Let RIA Advisors Help You Build a Balanced Strategy

Bonds are more than just a conservative choice—they are a foundational part of any well-balanced portfolio. By understanding the types of bonds available, how they fit within your investment goals, and the strategies to manage them effectively, you can create a portfolio designed for growth, income, and stability.

Contact RIA Advisors today to schedule a consultation and explore how bonds can strengthen your investment strategy.

FAQs

What percentage of my portfolio should be in bonds?

This depends on your age, risk tolerance, and financial goals. A common rule of thumb is to subtract your age from 100 to determine your equity allocation, with the remainder in bonds.

Are bonds safe investments?

While no investment is without risk, government and high-quality municipal bonds are generally considered low-risk, especially compared to stocks.

What is the best time to invest in bonds?

Bonds can be a good investment in any market, especially during periods of stock market volatility or economic uncertainty. Timing may also depend on interest rate trends.

Can I lose money on bonds?

Yes. Bond prices can fall if interest rates rise or if the issuer defaults. However, holding bonds to maturity typically ensures you’ll get back your original investment (unless the issuer defaults).

What is a bond ladder?

A bond ladder is a strategy of buying bonds with staggered maturity dates to provide consistent income and reduce reinvestment and interest rate risk.

The post The Role of Bonds in a Well-Balanced Investment Portfolio appeared first on RIA.

Fiscal worries, the dollar’s imminent demise, and soaring tariff-related inflation expectations are among the concerns driving bond yields higher. At the same time, inflation, the historical determinant of US Treasury yields, continues normalizing. As a bond investor, it is difficult to reconcile facts that argue for lower yields and narratives pointing in the opposite direction.

In all markets, narratives win the day. In other words, market narratives dictate short-term price behavior, whether correct or not. Sometimes, narratives persist for months or longer. Understanding the differences between the narratives and the fundamentals is critical for those trading and investing in bonds. That is a meaty topic. Accordingly, we will expand on it in our blog article next Wednesday.

In the meantime, the two graphs below provide a road map for the current bond situation.

What To Watch Today

Earnings

Economy

Market Trading Update

Yesterday, we discussed the market's technical overbought condition and trading an "unstoppable bull market" in stocks. (We will discuss that topic further in this weekend's #BullBearReport.) An important consideration concerning the recent market rally is Bob Farrell's Rule #9: "When all experts agree, something else tends to happen."

Notably, the same applies to every asset class, such as the bond market. As Michael Lebowitz noted above, bond market traders have all latched onto a theme of runaway deficits as the reason for the recent rise in rates. No matter where you look, every tick higher in rates as of late is associated with concerns over the debt and the deficit. However, as shown, the deficit is about 1/2 of the level it was in 2021. Nonetheless, the increase in the deficit, while it has been going on for 40-years, has become the latest topic to spark traders positioning against bonds.

In other words, as Michael notes, the "narrative" drives bond traders to make increasingly large short bets against bonds, pushing higher yields. As long as traders can control the narrative, they can control the price.

However, in the longer term, fundamentals will drive the price of yields. More importantly, the deficit narrative will collapse if economic growth strengthens due to deregulation, tax cuts, or other growth-inducing policies being implemented. Of course, we also can not rule out Central Bank intervention to lower yields to support the economy's health and the financial banking system. In other words, there is a high degree of probability that the narratives of today will fail to come to reality.

The technical backdrop also tells us that. In the longer term, like stocks, interest rates can only move so far before something happens, leading to a recessionary or event-driven outcome (lower yields as shown above). But technically, using a monthly chart for long-term analysis, bonds are at overbought levels that have only occurred four times previously. Each of those previous periods corresponded to the onset of an "event" and lower yields. Furthermore, the massive MACD sell signal also suggests lower yields will come, and given the tightening price channel on yields, a break below 4% currently will likely spark a good deal of short-covering in bonds, driving yields toward 3% or lower.

One important note is that this is a MONTHLY chart, so the analysis is VERY slow to move. Therefore, in the short term, days and weeks, yields will continue to be driven by the narrative. However, eventually, as is always the case, that "bearish narrative" will fail. When fundamentals regain control, there will be many traders caught with their "shorts down."

Inflation Narrative

Need we say any more about why yields are rising than sharing the graph below? Consumers expect that inflation will top the levels seen in 2022. While the graph below is certainly scary, there is little statistical evidence that consumers can accurately forecast inflation. To wit, expected inflation during 2021 and 2022 lagged actual inflation.

More importantly, inflation during 2021 and 2022 was the result of excessive stimulus, including checks sent directly to consumers and a crippled supply chain. We have neither of those circumstances today. Instead, fears of tariff-related inflation are the concern. While it's too early to gauge the impact tariffs will have on prices, thus far, we have seen CPI and PPI come in below expectations. We suspect that when inflation expectations start to turn back down, bond yields will follow.

Lastly, the second graph shows that inflation expectations have a significant political bias, further blurring how much we should read into consumer expectations.

Death Of The Dollar: An Eternal Tale

The following paragraph, courtesy of Amazon, reviews the book Death of the Dollar by William Rickenbacker.

Death of the Dollar by William F. Rickenbacker is a critical examination of the economic policies and monetary mismanagement that the author argues are eroding the value of the U.S. dollar and threatening financial stability. Rickenbacker contends that the actions of money managers, including excessive government spending, inflationary policies, and the detachment of the dollar from the gold standard, are systematically devaluing the currency. The book warns of an impending monetary disaster, highlighting how these policies disproportionately harm everyday citizens who rely on the dollar’s stability for savings and investments. Through a blend of economic analysis and historical context, Rickenbacker underscores the dangers of unchecked financial intervention and the potential for a collapse of the dollar’s purchasing power.

Plenty of books, articles, and social media posts herald the same grim forecast as Rickenbacker. For the most part, they rely on similar reasoning. Essentially, lax monetary policy and gross fiscal spending, both deemed to be inflationary, will result in dollar devaluation and ultimately the death of the dollar.

The difference between Rickenbacker’s book and other dollar demise forecasts is that  Death of the Dollar was written in 1968!

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The post Bond Yields Are Surging: Narratives Vs. Fundamentals appeared first on RIA.

American Protestantism is in a bad way. At least, depending on how you define the term “Protestant.”

For many of us, it means “not Catholic.” If we’ve done our church history homework, or pay attention to online theological debates, maybe we mentally add “or Orthodox.” But baked into the name is a protest and that nominal fist is raised squarely at Rome.

There was a time when the umbrella term did some work. Protestants included the heirs of Martin Luther, of John Calvin, of Thomas Cranmer, even of Menno Simons. Later there were break-offs and dissenters—including pietists (Lutherans who cared about the heart), Puritans (Anglicans who cared about the heart), Baptists (one-time Puritans who cared about the heart), and Methodists (are you sensing a pattern?)—but the family, however extended, was still recognizable.

Aside from a small number of exceptions, you could generally count on Protestants to claim the full heritage of the Reformation as their own. They did so by confessing the creed, ascribing supreme authority to the Bible, ordaining their pastors to the ministry of word and sacrament, and (most of the time) baptizing their babies. Fractiousness was less about the program and more about fidelity of execution. If the Protestant revolution was above all a revolution of the heart, then any time the emphasis shifted to the head, to codified doctrines and calcified institutions, it was only a matter of time before new reformers would arise to lay claim to the original vision and start the whole process over again.

This pattern is common to all revolutions and proved reliably cyclical for successive generations of Protestant believers.

What about a more radical vision, though, one that went down to the roots? Europe already contained seeds of such a thoroughgoing transformation, but it wasn’t until the American frontier that they bore lasting fruit. This fruit is, you might say, a third species in the genus of Western Christianity. Neither Catholic nor Protestant, it has taken more than two centuries to come into clear view. It goes by many names, but the best is also the most hotly contested: evangelical.

As I use it, “evangelical” names non-Catholic Christians who are “low church.” By this I mean that evangelicals are:

1) biblicist, meaning the Bible isn’t just chief among many authorities, including church tradition, but the one and only authority;

2) autonomous, meaning their organizational leadership structures are either local or, if trans-local, then voluntary and quite loose;

3) egalitarian, meaning they either do not ordain pastors or, if they do, then the qualifications for and prerogatives of the ministry are modest;

4) entrepreneurial, meaning churches are often analogous to start-up business ventures, founded and led by charismatic individuals who cast a vision for the community;

5) evangelistic, meaning proselytization is high on the agenda, using money, grassroots training, and parachurch ministries to support foreign missions and local efforts at gaining new converts;

6) affective, meaning their piety is focused on the heart, which is more likely to find expression in music, song, and spontaneous spiritual gifts than in robes, rituals, and sacraments.

Note well that these six features all center the individual will, which in turn helps to explain why evangelicals do not baptize their babies. Faith cannot be imposed; it can only be chosen. The same rule applies to local congregations. Evangelicals inhabit a competitive marketplace in which believers vote with their feet. If your church can’t supply decisive reasons why they should stay with you, then rest assured they will be out the door and church shopping in a matter of months.

It’s not hard to grasp what respectable Protestants in the early nineteenth century thought of evangelicals when they first started making noise: at best, ignorant déclassé upstarts; at worst, heretics, nincompoops, and frauds. Despoilers of doctrine, corrupters of tradition, arrogant racketeers of religion pulling the wool over simpletons’ eyes. Would it be better or worse if they actually believed in what they were hawking? No creed, no clergy, no church, just you and the Lord and the Bible and maybe a preacher to bring the three together at a revival.

Fast forward to the present. The reputable Protestants never knew what hit them. Today American Protestantism is all but dead, whereas evangelicalism is alive and, if not exactly well, then certainly kicking. What happened?

Earlier this spring I published an essay for First Things called “Goldilocks Protestantism.” It makes the case that Protestantism as we know it, both nationally and globally, is on life support. The Christian world has become either “high,” meaning catholic, or “low,” meaning evangelical. The one includes bishops and priests, liturgy and tradition, creeds and councils, icons and saints, relics and mystics, Mary and monks, whereas the other includes none of the above. The excluded middle is the Protestantism of the Reformation, a “Goldilocks” Gospel that strives to be neither too high nor too low, but just right. By my reckoning, this style of faith makes up no more than 10 percent of global Christianity. In truth it may be as low as 5 percent, and its numbers continue to decline.

That’s the global story. Now I’d like to focus on the national story. As Hemingway once described the onset of bankruptcy, American Protestantism collapsed slowly, then all at once. Precisely while it was building to an extraordinary, dominating height in the 1960s, its competitors and eventual replacements were growing as well, biding their time. They only had to wait. Termites had long since found their way to the foundation. Once it was destroyed from within, there was no way to reverse the damage. The house was doomed to fall.

Let’s date the pinnacle to the late 1950s. By one estimate, in 1958, more than half of all Americans belonged to a “mainline” Protestant denomination. Think Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Episcopalian. It’s a mistake to wonder how many of these were “actual” as opposed to “nominal” Christians. The social prestige was the point. A prestigious institution is powerful just to the extent that it attracts members regardless of their beliefs. The “mainline” was what you belonged to if you aspired to join—or sought the respect of, or wanted to remain in—the class that ran the country. Presidents, politicians, and businessmen placed formal membership in a known and vetted Protestant denomination. They were neither irreligious nor part of the riffraff (fundamentalists, Pentecostals, Mormons). Like Roman philosophers, their private skepticism and unchristian habits were beside the point: civil religion binds society together. Pay your tithes, say your prayers, make the sacrifices; otherwise the center might not hold.

The center did not hold anyway. Today perhaps fewer than one in ten Americans is a mainline Protestant, and most of them don’t go to church. Demographers predict that in the next dozen years this percentage will trend downward until it settles around one to three percent. So what happened? At this point the story is well told. The best popular books on the subject are Ross Douthat’s Bad Religion, Joseph Bottum’s An Anxious Age, and Tara Isabella Burton’s Strange Rites, all of which build on the work of scholars like Nathan Hatch, George Marsden, Mark Noll, Christian Smith, and David Chappell. Lately we’ve also been well served by sociologists and demographers like Ryan Burge, Stephen Bullivant, and Phil Zuckerman. This only scratches the surface of the research published on the subject.

I’m a theologian and make no claim to originality. In what follows I’d simply like to lift up four themes from these and other works that I find illuminating for understanding the story of American Protestantism, past, present, and future.

Before beginning, though, a caveat is in order. The black church is one of the central institutions of American life and its numbers, although finally showing decline in younger generations, resemble far more the embattled resilience of white evangelicals than the deflated balloon of the white mainline. At the same time, African American Christians are not nearly so easy to categorize as the language of “the black church” would suggest. Black believers fill the pews of Protestant churches, charismatic and Pentecostal churches, evangelical and Baptist churches, and both majority-black and majority-white churches. A small but sturdy percentage is Roman Catholic. In other words, they are well distributed. So while I will not be focusing on race, I here acknowledge that it—not just race but racism—hovers above and within and around the story, sometimes at the edges, more often at the heart of it. 

Protestantism and the Sexual Revolution

The transition from Eisenhower to Kennedy symbolizes, for the American mainline, both a summit and a cliff. The reason is that the 1960s kicked off two epochal trends that continue into the present. The first was the sexual revolution.

It could be argued that, in the last seventy-five years, every major public debate in the American church, including every occasion for schism or division, has been about sex. Divorce and remarriage, artificial contraception, births out of wedlock, working mothers, single parenting, the Pill, abortion, the ordination of women, sex outside marriage, same-sex marriage, gender identity and biological sex—these, and not arguments about Jesus or justification by faith, have dominated Christian discourse. (Race, again, is the only other contender, whether in the 1970s or the 2020s. This, too, is a social and not a doctrinal issue.)

With respect to sex, the mainline bet on the wrong horse. It allied itself to the liberalism of the political, educational, and cultural elites and this, it turned out, was not what most American Christians were looking for—even when they agreed on the politics. Mainline Protestantism had always been respectable, and since political and sexual liberalism was supposed to be not just the spirit of the present age but the vanguard of the future, then liberalism as such needed to be embraced and proclaimed from within the Church, from her pulpits and prayers and pamphlets. This liberalism was all-encompassing: it was moral, it was political, it was activist, and ultimately it was theological, too. It called into question the trustworthiness of Scripture, the classical metaphysics of the creeds, the traditional morality of the catechisms, and much more besides.

Defection and loss weren’t instantaneous, but once the ball got rolling it only sped up as the years went by. Two phenomena are worth noting. On one hand, ordinary people in the pews needed a reason to come to church. But if the mainline was merely the DNC at prayer while crossing its fingers even during prayer, then why go? Why not sleep in, drift away, or maybe join that young, vibrant, energetic start-up around the corner? Sure, they might be a little conservative, but they’re on to something. There’s life there. And there’s no doubt that they believe—evangelicals aren’t known for crossing fingers.

On the other hand, mainline leaders living in the postwar boom failed to realize how much they depended on the social and religious capital built up from prior centuries. They fervently believed in the separation of church and state, but they operated as the clerisy of an unofficially established church. They cared about helping the poor, but their education and values (not to mention the source of their prestige and a good portion of their rolls) were substantially upper-class. They hated war and segregation, but their WASP credentials alienated them from the working class, both white and black, and their fence-sitting on Vietnam marked them as insufficiently radical for the left and insufficiently patriotic for the right. While their younger members protested, their older members began to trickle out the door.

In a word, mainline leadership took for granted that the world they’d always known and led would somehow remain in place even as they helped to birth a new world to replace it. But in midwifing a novus ordo seclorum into being, they rendered themselves redundant. Once you’ve placed a question mark next to traditional beliefs, traditional morals, and traditional texts, what else is left? Absent these, there is no reason to join a religious tradition except for community and social capital. But those are byproducts of membership; as the sole motivation for observance or attendance, they are far too weak to sustain belonging, especially when peer pressure has relaxed.

It is a tautology to say that religion becomes optional when it is no longer compulsory. Compulsoriness, however, is said many ways. For many people church was felt to be compulsory, even if, strictly speaking, it was not. And once the feeling was gone for mainline Protestants, they started heading for the exits.

Losing Our Religion

This trend, namely, Americans leaving religion altogether, leads to another I want to highlight: secularization. Like “evangelical,” this is a charged term with dozens of possible meanings. For my purposes I will rely on a sociological definition offered by Phil Zuckerman, Isabella Kasselstrand, and Ryan T. Cragun. In their book Beyond Doubt: The Secularization of Society, they argue that secularization includes:

1) the process of religion losing its overarching, hegemonic significance as a result of its being increasingly differentiated and sequestered from other institutional sectors of society and 2) the concomitant processes whereby religiosity weakens, lessens, diminishes, or fades in society. At the micro level, secularization is best understood, articulated, and measured in relation to the three Bs. That is, secularization entails a social process in which fewer people, over time, believe in supernatural claims, fewer people engage in religious behaviors, and fewer people belong to or identify with a religion.

The authors go on to argue that, as societies develop economically and/or adopt liberal political structures, they always secularize. This, they say, is demonstrably true and brooks no significant exceptions. The end result “is not widespread irreligion,” meaning mass atheism or opposition to religion, “but rather widespread religious indifference.” Such indifference is not mutually exclusive with plenty of people believing, behaving, and belonging in religious ways and in religious communities. But the civic bonds of social obligation have seriously deteriorated; the ambient culture no longer makes faith a given of common life.

The process of secularization came earlier for Europe, and for a time it seemed America would hold out. It proved only to be a delay. Members of every generation since the Boomers are less likely to be regular attenders of religious services of any kind, less likely to be regular attenders of a Christian church, and less likely to claim to be Christians. Three terms have been proposed to describe these Americans: “None,” “Nothing in Particular,” and “Nonvert.” The first takes its name from those who check none of the above on a survey of religious options, but for this reason it includes atheists and agnostics. The second group picks out those Nones who are neither atheist/agnostic nor a member of a determinate religious body. The third, coined by Stephen Bullivant, refers to members of either the first or the second group who were raised in a religiously observant household but, at some point in teen years or adulthood, left the faith and did not join another.

Regarding this last group, a book published in 2023 called The Great Dechurching offers some important insight. With the help of research done by Ryan Burge and Paul Djupe, pastors Jim Davis and Michael Graham found that forty million living American adults no longer attend church, though they once did, and that “most of this dechurching has happened in the past twenty-five years.” That’s 15 percent of the population. If true, it amounts to a kind of negative Third Great Awakening, and quite possibly the greatest single-generation religious shift in American history.

Whether we call these people Nones, Nonverts, or Dechurched, they are a growing, if curious, bunch. Most of them still believe in the divine and many still pray or occasionally attend religious services. If you count them as one American religious group among others, comparing them not to Christianity in general but to Hindus and Muslims, Catholics and Baptists, they are likely to be the largest such group in the next decade. In his new book The American Religious Landscape, Burge even argues that, among all Americans, “it’s probable that nothing in particulars will be the plurality choice . . . in the next fifteen or twenty years.”

This, in brief, is the secular future and present for American society: at once religious and irreligious, Christian and post-Christian, spiritual but not institutional, culturally Protestant but syncretistic, entrepreneurial, and individualistic in practice. Nathan Hatch calls this “the democratization of American Christianity.” Ross Douthat’s term is “bad religion.” Americans don’t give up on prayer or the supernatural, they just opt for heresies old and new, riffing on received religion with peculiarly American twists. Tara Burton calls it “remixed religion,” a do-it-yourself approach that fuses crystals and seances with sacraments and rosaries. It’s odd only if you assume the truth is found nowhere except in one of the major global institutional expressions of faith. And that’s just begging the question. 

Who Will Replace the Mainline?

I said I’d lift up four themes, and so far I’ve mentioned two: the sexual revolution and secularization. The other two are simply other Christian traditions: evangelicalism and Catholicism. These, in a sort of pincer movement, quietly advanced on the mainline’s position and, when the opportune moment arrived, attacked it from both sides. It didn’t happen all at once; rather, it resulted from decades of quiet incremental expansion.

We have already seen what has long attracted so many Americans to evangelicalism: the frontier spirit, the can-do attitude, the charismatic vision, the muscular ambition, the cultural adaptability, the missionary zeal, the affective dimension, the leveling spirit. Youth, vitality, growth, expansion—these have always marked American evangelicalism even and especially when besieged by challenges, whether from without or from within. You can see this today in the only growing Christian group in America: so-called “nondenominational” churches. It is unclear whether this growth comes from converts to the faith or “transfers” from other Christian traditions. At any rate it is one more example of the old frontier flexibility applied to a newly competitive marketplace, innovating to attract newcomers inside the doors.

This is the essence of evangelicalism, because evangelicalism is the American genius applied to Christian religion. Evangelicals’ every virtue and every vice have their roots in the American character. The two are intertwined. Evangelicals believe in the Gospel, but they also believe in America. Even the most jaded among them retain some hope in the latter; the despair of some evangelicals in the last decade is best explained by a loss of faith, not in God, but in the country.

To be clear, secularization comes for all, and just as it made inroads on the mainline in the 1960s and ’70s, so it did the same with evangelicals in the last three decades. Perhaps they failed to learn the lesson of Protestant liberals and wedded themselves to a narrow politics, only this time on the right instead of the left. Perhaps their moral and other failures exhausted the patience of parishioners. Perhaps evangelicals, too, were drawing down on capital they’d not created themselves, capital they furthermore lacked the institutional strength to replenish. In any case, evangelicals we will always have with us, but in the coming years they will endure in diminished numbers.

That leaves Catholics. With around sixty-two million Americans on the rolls, Catholicism is by far the largest religious tradition in the country. No other Protestant group comes close. The primary reasons are immigration and, until recently, large families. The truth, however, is that American Catholicism cannot keep its children in the faith, and both Nones and evangelicals are the beneficiaries. Even today its numbers appear superficially steady by comparison to others’ decline solely because of the steady stream of Catholic immigrants across the border. There is a distinct possibility, then, that Catholic support of strict immigration and deportation policies could end up weakening Catholics’ dominant presence in America.

For a moment it seemed that Catholics might seize the leadership vacuum left open by the collapse—the detonation, the evacuation, the suicide—of mainline Protestantism. Just as neoconservatives were anti-Communist liberals who moved right during the Cold War, so erstwhile liberal Protestants found themselves politically homeless, even betrayed, in the 1970s. For a Lutheran like Robert Jenson, who marched on Washington in 1963 and protested the war in Vietnam, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Roe v. Wade changed everything. From Jenson’s perspective, the moral and political through-line from racial segregation through bombing villages to abortion on demand was self-evident. He learned quickly that the connections were not nearly so clear to those he marched with. For this reason his fellow Lutheran, Richard John Neuhaus, left Protestantism and was received into the Catholic Church.

Neuhaus, Jenson, and their many friends and fellow travelers hoped the mainline could be replaced, if not by Catholics per se then by an ecumenical alliance led by conservative Catholic clergy and intellectuals. It was not to be. They had success in elite spheres like academia and Washington, D.C. They advised presidents, launched think tanks and magazines, filled seats on courts at every level. But even if America wasn’t so culturally Protestant as to recoil at a new Catholic mainline—and I think it was and ever will be—the one-two punch of the sex abuse crisis and the George W. Bush presidency put that notion to rest for good. The American bishops are still recovering from their loss of moral leadership. And with reason.

Not that Catholics are going anywhere. Their sheer numbers, plus the continuation of immigration in some form from countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America with large Catholic populations, plus their disproportionate presence in elite cultural, legal, and political institutions ensure a Catholic future even in secular America.

In a way, you might reduce the complexity of that religious future (which, I risk repeating, is the present) by reference to four groups: Catholics, evangelicals, cultural Protestants, and other. “Other” would encompass actual mainline Protestants, Eastern Orthodox Christians, and all non-Christian religious traditions as well as vehemently anti-Christian groups. “Cultural Protestants” would describe Christian-friendly atheists and agnostics, adherents of American civil religion, citizens who don’t go to church but pray in the name of Jesus, and ex-Christians of various stripes—i.e., all people who wear the mantle of high-Protestant civilization and its mores, which is to say, the worldview minus the metaphysics.

And this returns us to where we began: namely, with the vast middle of American Christianity utterly hollowed out. Mainline believers who remained in the faith were either hoovered “up” into catholic traditions or pulled “down” into evangelical fellowships. To be sure, there remain some true-believing via media Protestants who are morally and theologically conservative and continue to attempt to strike the balance between high and low. These are members, for example, of the Presbyterian Church of America (PCA), the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod (LCMS), the newly formed Global Methodist Church (GMC), and offshoots of Episcopalianism like the Reformed Episcopal Church (REC), Anglican Church of North America (ACNA), and Anglican Mission in the Americas (AMiA). Outside of the Methodists, whose departure from the larger, more liberal United Methodist Church (UMC)—over, yes, sexual ethics—is still ongoing, each of these groups is a fraction of a fraction of the American population. Whatever their future, they will not be resuming their place at the commanding heights of the culture.

More to the point, even these traditions contain more than a little evangelical DNA. What “converts” they make are often already Christians who are looking for a more liturgically reverent, more intellectually sophisticated, more historically rooted Protestantism. These believers, sometimes ex-Catholics but usually ex-vangelicals, bring the American religious genius with them through the doors. In many cases it’s only a matter of time before the leveling impulse wends its way through the parish. Soon it will be evangelical in all but name. This is fitting, since the churches in America have for some time been Protestant in name only.

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