There's the church and steeple: Where are all the people?

Peggy McAllister of Springville loves the idea of church and having fellowship with others in a the intimate setting a church service provides, but it's been a little more than two years since she's attended a service and, she said, she's not sure she'll go back.

'I really miss church and I miss the fellowship, but it got so political,' McAllister said. 'It seemed more of a political rally than talking about God, and I just couldn't listen.'

McAllister, 56, of Springville, is one of a growing number of adults who have left the institutional church behind while maintaining their faith. For some, like McAllister, leaving the church was a matter of social conflict, of not wanting to merge their religious and political lives.

For others, like Charles Raianerastha Black, 56, of Cedar Rapids, the church didn't meet all of their spiritual needs. Black left the church more than a decade ago as he was becoming more in touch with his Native American heritage.

'I found the church couldn't adequately deal with questions and issues concerning my traditional Mohawk beliefs, so I felt I had to leave,' Black said.

'The institutional church makes the mistake that there is a 'biblical culture' that it embraces that is based on the Bible and free of other cultural influences, and that in order to be a Christian you have to adapt to that culture,' he said. 'What the institutional church doesn't realize is that the culture they claim to be 'biblical' isn't really — it's American culture, it's western European culture.'

McAllister and Black are among the nearly 33 million Americans who say they have no particular religious affiliation, according to the Pew Center for Research's 2012 Religion and Public Life Project. Those numbers include adults who say they have some level of religion but either aren't active churchgoers or who have stopped attending services altogether.

The largest group of Americans with no religious affiliation is that which includes those ages 18-49, according to the Pew study, with 32 percent of those 18 to 29 declaring no affiliation and 21 percent of those ages 30 to 49. Just 15 percent of those ages 50 to 64 — the age group both McAllister and Black fall in — consider themselves unaffiliated, and only 9 percent of those age 65 and older.

The numbers don't surprise Rodney Bluml, spiritual director at Prairiewoods Spirituality Center in Hiawatha.

'I've done some conversations around this topic, the phenomena that young adults are experiencing and why some of them are drifting away from the church,' Bluml said. 'Some of the influences, and not just with the young adults, are the fruits of what I would call a really radical individualistic society, with some modernism and postmodernism mixed in, which really rejects institutions.

'The other part of it is the hyper-mobility of our society,' Bluml said. 'Unless there's a church community that is really over-the-top hospitable, I think the Internet has become peoples' church — they don't really feel like they need to show up.'

It's not necessarily that the church has changed, Bluml said. On the contrary — mainline churches haven't changed a whole lot in the last 50 years in the way they approach community life and the teachings of the Bible, he said.

'I do think people's response to those teachings has changed considerably,' he said.

Older adults, those 40 to 55, are leaving the church more because 'they're tired of feeling like they always have to be right,' Bluml said.

'The traditional religions far too often are pushing a right-ness, or something that pushes toward perfection,' he said. 'There's a sense of feeling judged. While these adults long to be part of a community, the organized institutions are just too judgmental.'

That's certainly true for McAllister. She's been affiliated with a half-dozen denominations through the years, as well as a non-denominational Christian church — all of which, she said, met some of her religious needs but injected too much politics into their teachings.

'There just seemed to be a lot of double standards,' she said. 'There are a lot of prideful churches very interested in the money. We're all humans and we all make up the church.'

Now, she said, she takes care of her spiritual needs at home.

'I say my prayers, I watch things like Joel Osteen — he was talking one day about how we need to love on people, not judge people, and that's what I connected with. That's what I needed. The world doesn't need more hate, it needs more love.'

For Black, leaving the church was something he believes he was led to do.

'One of the things I had long recognized … was that when you're faithfully pursuing God as best you can, he is going to place you someplace where you can do that with the least disruption to your life,' he said.

'Some people like being in a comfortable mainstream church, that's where they have their best relationship with God,' Black said. 'I'm not saying those relationships are wrong. But that same structure that can nurture faith for some people, can be very stifling and even abusive for people who are not meant to be there. And I realized that I was not meant to be there.'