Review: ‘Christianity at a Crossroads’
Christianity Today
October 12, 2026
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Photo by Martin Doblmeier
Any number of recent surveys indicate an upheaval in American Christianity. Political scientist Ryan Burge’s work, which has set the pace for several years now, alongside studies by the Pew Research Center and the Public Religion Research Institute, provides a sober assessment of what our congregations, whether historic mainline denominations or nondenominational megachurches, will look like in the years ahead.
Despite cries of revival, there is little evidence, as far as these surveys can tell, of a great resurgence in Christian belief among younger generations. Most likely, a decades-long decline has simply leveled out. Available evidence seems to point toward a less religious future than at present, with fewer female adherents than male—a reversal of the church’s past gender composition.
The surveys conflict on many other predictions—how the racial makeup of churches will change, for instance, and whether livestreamed services will become more common. But taken together, the data suggests we should expect discontinuity more than continuity when it comes to American religious life.
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Data analysis can tell us a lot, and in my Christian network, these analyses often align with personal experience. Many people who’ve attended church in the last decade have experienced tensions over politics or public health or race, faced financial worries as membership ages or shrinks, or grappled with how technology impacts worship. It can all feel exhausting. These numbers-backed concerns seem to be uniquely ours, a product of our time and place.
But what statistics don’t always reveal is that we aren’t the first to worry. Nearly every generation before has wrung its hands wondering how the church (and local churches) will have a future.
The new PBS documentary Christianity at a Crossroads attempts to lend perspective. By focusing on particular congregations, Crossroads offers a wide lens on contemporary church turmoil and, in the process, offers some measure of comfort about the future. It does so by depicting not only the hard realities of decline but also the ways in which congregations are meeting the moment with creative solutions.
Since 1983, director Martin Doblmeier and Journey Films have been making movies designed to familiarize an increasingly secular public with religious ideas and figures. Most recently, their projects have tended biographical, introducing general audiences to Howard Thurman, Dorothy Day, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Abraham Joshua Heschel.
But this film takes as its subject a trend, not a person: the accelerating closure of American churches. Of the 350,000–400,000 churches operating now, nearly 100,000 are projected to shut their doors in the next decade. Why?
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Perhaps, Crossroads posits, we can blame the church’s entanglement with American political causes for its plight. Episode 2 features Adam Hamilton, a Democratic Senate nominee and the pastor of Resurrection Church in Kansas City, the largest mainline congregation in the United States. Episode 2 also features Robert Jeffress, pastor of First Baptist Church of Dallas, and representatives from the American Renewal Project, a conservative political movement designed to get Christians into office.
Though very different theologically, the fact that both Resurrection and First Baptist deal with political divides by not shying away from politics is itself interesting. Not every church in the documentary navigates the partisan landscape so boldly. In a Democrat-leaning congregation in Maryland, liberals must figure out how to get along with the conservatives sitting next to them in the pews. In Minnesota, rural Lutherans discuss how Scripture conflicts with their positions around farming and government help.
As Ryan Burge himself states in Crossroads, politics has indeed become a determining factor in why particular people join particular congregations. That’s what the data shows.
But it’s also worth asking whether Republican-Democrat divides should be the primary way to understand American Christianity today. Plenty of US churches espouse a theology that codes both conservative and progressive—wedding traditional sexual ethics to robust social-justice efforts, for instance, or supporting more liberal views on immigration that rest on literalist readings of Scripture. I doubt that most churches (and individual Christians) care about this contradiction. I still believe most pastors preach to advance the gospel, not a party platform.
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Crossroads may overemphasize the role politics plays in American Christianity. But the film does a fine job explaining other influences on the changing church, including immigration and young people’s distrust of organized religion. It visits first- and second-generation Korean churches in Virginia and a weekly nonreligious gathering in San Diego, designed for those who want Sunday community without any doctrinal baggage.
It also complicates any doom-and-gloom oversimplification. Crossroads’ first episode introduces a church in Belding, Michigan, that’s grappling with a dwindling membership of less than 25. Its final episode films the deconsecration of the sanctuary as it closes its doors.
But the documentary also showcases formerly sputtering churches—in Wisconsin, in West Virginia—now overflowing. One church, following the pandemic, sees its online ministry explode, while another pastor goes all in on virtual reality. Crossroads visits house churches, large nondenominational music gatherings, and a resurgent Catholic parish in Greenwich Village. Throughout, it tries to let these bodies speak for themselves: The filmmakers’ approach is sensitive, charitable, and hopeful when hope is warranted.
Ultimately, Crossroads gets at the both-and realities that data can sometimes oversimplify. American Christianity is changing, yes, but not every community follows the trend lines to a T. Rules, even data-backed ones, always have exceptions, often within a given sanctuary. Worrying about the survival of churches is nothing new, whether in America or abroad. Perhaps it’s our country’s relatively recent history of full pews and civic religion which makes us feel this particular crossroad more acutely.
Crossroads also doesn’t offer a silver bullet for survival. Some churches flourish in spite of their circumstances, and some churches die despite doing everything right. But what comes through clearly is something like hope: The future is not like the past, but there is a future. And from what we see, it is a future in which the gospel is proclaimed, in which people are changed by God’s grace, in which the church survives.
Myles Werntz is the author of books including Contesting the Body of Christ: Ecclesiology’s Revolutionary Century. He writes at Taking Off and Landing and teaches at Abilene Christian University.
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