Casey Chalk is the author of The Obscurity of Scripture: Disputing Sola Scriptura and the Protestant Notion of Biblical Perspicuity (Emmaus Road Publishing), and The Persecuted: True Stories of Courageous Christians Living Their Faith in Muslim Lands (Sophia Institute Press). He has an M.A. in Theology from Christendom College and a Masters in Teaching from the University of Virginia.
Fifty years ago, the percentage of religiously unaffiliated Americans was about five percent of the population, meaning that in just two generations that cohort has increased 500 percent, and most of that has been just in the last twenty-five years.
The religiously unaffiliated—also known as “nones”—today account for about one quarter of American adults, or about 59 million people. The majority of those are what sociologist Stephen Bullivant calls, in his new book, “nonverts”: those who go from identifying with a religion to identifying as a “none.” And sixteen million of those nonverts were raised Catholic.
Do you have any serious proposal for bringing those millions of nonvert Catholics back to the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church? I sure don’t. …