God may be alive in the hearts of most Americans, but the church is not doing so well.

The fact is, fewer Americans are going to church or affiliating with an organized religion — especially the mainline Protestant and Catholic traditions that dominate the Midwest. It’s a decades-long trend that has church leaders searching for ways to remain relevant and connect with people.

People like Ezra Kazee believe in God, read their Bibles and pray — but don’t go to church.

“I have my own conversations with God,” he said. “I have my own relationship.”

He may be praying by himself, but he’s not alone. Kazee is part of the fastest growing religious trend in America, the “nones” — those who don’t claim affiliation with any church or tradition.

Often called the “un-churched,” this group accounts for about 16 percent of the U.S. population, more than twice what it was just two decades ago, according to a 2010 survey by the National Opinion Research Center. While still a relatively small fraction of the population, the rise of the “nones” has happened as the share of those who identify as Protestant has fallen from more than 60 percent to less than 48 percent.

“What has changed is people’s willingness to say they have no religious affiliation,” said Roger Finke, a Penn State sociologist and director of the Association of Religion Data Archives, which maintains statistics on religious traditions around the world.

It’s a distinctly American phenomenon, Finke said. In other parts of the world — such as Africa and China — modern religions are growing like never before.

So who are these “nones”?

According to survey data, they tend to be younger than church-goers — 60 percent are younger than 45, compared to 49 percent of Catholics and just 38 percent of Protestants.

They’re more common in the West and South, though they live throughout the country. They are politically more liberal and moderate, more likely to accept homosexuality and to favor environmental protection. They tend to be slightly wealthier than evangelicals but not noticeably better educated.

The majority of them, 60 percent, also believe in God, according to a 2007 survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

And 65 percent say they pray at least once a week.

“They’re not atheists,” said Laurie Cooper Stoll, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse and author of a 2008 paper on church attendance. “They’re often people who say spirituality is important to them.”

Since 2000, the number of Americans who belong to or regularly attend church has been slowly eroding. The so-called adherence rate fell about 5 percent nationwide, according to data gathered by the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies. In Minnesota and Wisconsin the change was even more pronounced — a roughly 15 percent drop-off during the last decade.

There is some debate about how much of that decrease is a result of changes in the method of counting, but what’s clear is that local rates remain above the national average and that the number of church adherents is not keeping pace with population growth.

The reasons are varied and harder to discern.

Stoll said many aren’t rejecting the beliefs of the church, but rather the structure and bureaucracy.

For Kazee, the problem had less to do with the church than its followers.

Raised in the Methodist church, the 35-year-old Onalaska man said he left the church as a teenager but returned in his 20s, only to be repulsed by people he found to be hypocritical and judgmental.

“It almost seemed like church was a quick fix (for them),” he said. “They could act any way they wanted through the week and then go to church.”

However, one group of Christian churches appear to be bucking the trend of shrinking church allegiance and attendance. Evangelical Protestant churches claim a relatively small but growing share of churchgoers.

Stoll said the beliefs held by members of evangelical churches don’t differ substantially from other fundamentalist traditions, but the churches have found more appealing ways to reach out to the un-churched.

“Evangelicals have tended to embrace technology. The theology is not really different,” Stoll said. “They’ve repackaged that. They’re selling it with Christian rock, wearing jeans on Sunday.”

Abandoning traditional religious affiliations has an impact on the culture that goes beyond individual belief and spirituality.

Stoll said there’s societal value in a shared familiarity with religious traditions.

Chris Hubbuch reports for the Winona Daily News.

“There’s a cultural capital that goes with knowing these stories,” Stoll said. “As a society, we are illiterate when it comes to religion.”