The Decline of Religion
According to her article in Axios Finish Line, Organized Religion Decline (10/6/23), Erica Pandey says that, “According to a new AP-NORC poll, There's a global, fast-growing population of people without a religion.” Religion has long been a powerful force in society, touching politics, art and daily life. The rise of nonbelievers and people with no religious affiliation is diminishing its influence. Three in ten U.S. adults said they had no religious affiliation and about half of them identify as atheist or agnostic, and the other half say their religion is "nothing in particular."
The shift away from religion is even starker among younger adults, with 43% of 18- to 29-year-old Americans responding "none," when asked which religion they follow as opposed 20% of U.S. adults over 60 reporting as "nones." Young people, have also seen the largest decline in socializing. Boys and girls ages 15 to 19 have reduced their hangouts by more than three hours a week, according to the American Time Use Survey. There is no statistical record of any period in U.S. history where young people were less likely to attend religious services, and no period when young people have spent more time on their own. (Thompson 2024)
The trend is gaining momentum across the world according to AP who reported from several countries including: Japan, where 70% of people say they have nonreligious feelings. Italy, where nearly 80% say they're Catholic. But most view it as a tradition, with fewer than 20% attending services weekly. Israel, where a country with about 7 million Jews, is remarkably nonreligious as just 33% said they practiced "traditional" religious worship. Conflict between secular and ultra-religious Israelis has grown in recent years. However, public rejection of religion is harder for nonbelievers in many other countries. India, which has a long history of nonreligious movements, where most atheists keep quiet about religion. Nigeria, where it can be risky and even dangerous to be publicly atheist or agnostic. Organized religion remains a key source of community for many Americans, with 66% of U.S. adults identifying as Christian, according to Pew Research Center. As recently as the 1990s, that share was 90%.
https://www.axios.com/2023/10/06/organized-religion-decline-agnostic-atheist-nonreligious
Poll: Most Americans cool to Christian nationalism as its influence grows 2/28/23.
Russell Contreras, Axios Latino U.S.
Overall about two-thirds of Americans reject or are skeptical about Christian nationalism despite its rising influence that's shaping education, immigration and health care policies, a new survey finds. Why it matters: Some Republicans are openly expressing Christian nationalist views, which have ranged from calls for more religion in public schools to book bans and even suggestions that democracy should die. This once-fringe ideology has become prevalent in some deeply red states at a time when the nation overall is increasingly diverse and less religious. The big picture: The new data from the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute's American Values Atlas come days after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos should receive legal protections as "unborn life" — and cited Christianity in its reasoning.
7 out of 10 Americans said they were rejecters (30%) or skeptics (37%) of Christian nationalism, the PRRI survey said. In California, New York and Virginia, more than 75% of respondents said they were rejecters or skeptics. But: In five deeply red states, at least 45% of respondents said they were adherents or sympathizers of Christian nationalism: North Dakota (50%), Mississippi (50%), Alabama (47%), West Virginia (47%) and Louisiana (46%). States with the highest levels of support for Christian nationalism form a horseshoe shape, starting in the upper Midwest, dipping down into the deep South, and then through the Appalachian Mountains. Republicans (55%) are more than twice as likely as independents (25%) and three times more likely than Democrats (16%) to hold Christian nationalist views, the survey found.
Majorities of two religious groups hold Christian nationalist beliefs: White Evangelicals (66%) and Hispanic Evangelicals (55%). Both groups are strong supporters of former President Trump, other polls have indicated. Between the lines: Christian nationalism is a set of beliefs centered around white American Christianity's dominance in most aspects of life in the United States. Many Christian nationalists believe the federal government should declare the U.S. a Christian nation. Many also believe U.S. laws should be based on Christian values and that God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society. What they're saying: "It's really a claim for an ethno-religious state, and so there's nothing democratic about that worldview," Robert P. Jones, president and founder of PRRI, tells Axios. Jones said some Christian nationalists view political foes as evil or demonic rather than as fellow citizens with different opinions, and see them as needing to be conquered.
Tom Parker, chief justice of Alabama's Supreme Court, quoted the Book of Genesis, the Ten Commandments and Christian theologians in the court's recent opinion that said embryos fertilized through in vitro fertilization should be considered children.The ruling led IVF clinics in Alabama to shut down and set off a scramble among lawmakers nationwide. Conservatives who support IVF are trying to reckon with the fallout from the ruling, which was rooted in a court decision they favored: the U.S. Supreme Court's rejection of abortion rights under Roe v. Wade. On a podcast after the Alabama ruling, Parker repeated the tenants of the "Seven Mountains Mandate," a belief system rooted in Christian nationalism, and said U.S. law should be rooted in the Bible. The Seven Mountains Mandate urges Christians to take control of seven areas of society: family, religion, government, education, arts and entertainment, commerce and media.
Methodology: The Public Religion Research Institute's American Values Atlas survey was conducted March 9-Dec. 7, 2023 by PRRI. The poll is based on a representative sample of 20,799 adults (age 18 and older) living in all 50 states and the District of Columbia who are part of Ipsos' Knowledge Panel®.The margin of sampling error is ±0.82 percentage points at the 95% confidence level, for results based on the entire sample.
Losing My Religion
New research published in the Journal of Religion and Health has found faith in God and trust in a higher power declined across the course of the pandemic. The German survey found the longer the pandemic went on, the more people seemed to lose their faith in God. It is generally thought that belief in God and reliance on religious institutions increase during times of trauma and crisis. Prior studies have indicated faith-based beliefs can help people make sense of traumatic events that can initially seem meaningless or random.
“… trauma challenges so many assumptions about who we are, what our purpose is and how to make sense of a traumatic event,” wrote theologian Danielle Tumminio Hansen, in a piece for The Conversation last year. “Faith-based beliefs and practices offer meaningful resources to help navigate those questions. This is why spiritual beliefs and practices across various religions can often lead to faith strengthening rather than weakening, following a trauma.”
A Pew Research poll conducted in the summer of 2020 found, in the United States at least, the pandemic was strengthening many people’s religious faith. “Nearly three-in-ten Americans (28 percent) report stronger personal faith because of the pandemic, and the same share think the religious faith of Americans overall has strengthened, according to the survey of 14 economically developed countries,” the Pew poll found after the first few months of the pandemic.
This new study focused more on temporal changes to religious belief over 18 months, beginning June 2020 and running up until November 2021. Nearly 5,000 people in Germany were surveyed at various points over the 18-month period, and the researchers found the longer the pandemic went on, the more people were losing their faith in God or a higher power.
“Analyses revealed that with the 2nd wave of the infection and its 2nd lockdown, trust in a Higher Source, along with praying and meditation decreased,” the researchers wrote in the new study. “Also, the sharp increase in corona-related stressors was associated with a decline of wellbeing and a continuing loss of faith. These developments were observed in both Catholics and Protestants, and in both younger and older persons.”
In June 2020, at the beginning of the study, only three percent of survey respondents indicated they had lost faith in a higher power due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Across six more surveys over the next 18 months this percentage consistently increased until the final survey conducted between August and November 2021 found 21.5 percent of people reporting a loss of faith due to the pandemic.
Loss of faith responses were consistent across not only Catholics and Protestants but also those more agnostic respondents classified as religiously non-affiliated. But the researchers hypothesize this general loss of faith trend during the pandemic is most likely due to a severing of the social bonds many religious communities rely upon.
“It seems that, due to the long course of social distancing and related restrictions, more or less vital social and religious bonds between people and local religious communities were affected and even disrupted,” the researchers hypothesized. “… when sacred spaces (i.e., the churches) are not easily accessible, people may lose access to the center of their public religious life, and thus they may either develop new forms of spiritual practices in privacy or simply get used to the loss.
”A recent survey from the Pew Research Center suggests this pandemic-related decline in religious belief may not translate to the United States. Although Pew has found a consistent decline in general religious affiliation over the past 15 years, it has not detected any unusual drop over the past 24 months.
While the pandemic has unsurprisingly led to decreases in US church attendance over the past 18 months, it is believed this should pick up as the coronavirus subsides. And many religious organizations are indicating a need to modernize their accessibility to make better contact with younger demographics. (Haridy – 2022)
Pew found that there were 36 million mainline Protestants in 2014, a drop of 5 million from seven years earlier, and both Pew and PRRI say fewer than 15 percent of Americans are mainline Protestants, a tradition that includes the United Methodist Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Presbyterian Church USA, and the Episcopal Church. (Allen – 2021)
Why So Many Americans Have Stopped Going to Church
In an article for The Atlantic (8/3/23) (https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2023/08/why-church-religion-attendance-decline/674916/) Isabel Fattal talks about the fact that the decline is not just about religious institutions; it's about society itself.
Church attendance in America has been on the decline in recent decades. Are Americans losing their ability to incorporate religion—or any kind of intentional community—into their lives? “Take a drive down Main Street of just about any major city in the country, and—with the housing market ground to a halt—you might pass more churches for sale than homes,” two sociologists wrote in The Atlantic in January. And the facts bear out that visual: As Jake Meador, the editor in chief of the quarterly magazine Mere Orthodoxy, notes in a recent essay, about 40 million Americans have stopped going to church in the past 25 years. “That’s something like 12 percent of the population, and it represents the largest concentrated change in church attendance in American history,” he writes.
The Great Dechurching, a forthcoming book analyzing surveys of more than 7,000 Americans conducted by two political scientists, attempts to figure out why so many Americans have left churches in recent years. The authors find that religious abuse and corruption do play roles in pushing attendees away, but that a much larger share of the people surveyed indicated that they left the church “for more banal reasons,” as Meador puts I, the book suggests that the defining problem driving out most people who leave is … just how American life works in the 21st century. Contemporary America simply isn’t set up to promote mutuality, care, or common life.
Rather, it is designed to maximize individual accomplishment as defined by professional and financial success. Such a system leaves precious little time or energy for forms of community that don’t contribute to one’s own professional life or, as one ages, the professional prospects of one’s children.
As Meador notes, part of the problem is the unusual role that religion has come to play in some Americans’ lives. The Atlantic writer Derek Thompson coined the term workism in 2019—and diagnosed himself as a worker under its thrall. “The economists of the early 20th century did not foresee that work might evolve from a means of material production to a means of identity production,” Thompson wrote then. “They failed to anticipate that, for the poor and middle class, work would remain a necessity; but for the college-educated elite, it would morph into a kind of religion, promising identity, transcendence, and community.”
Workism doesn’t deliver on these promises, Thompson noted: “Our jobs were never meant to shoulder the burdens of a faith, and they are buckling under the weight. A staggering 87 percent of employees are not engaged at their job, according to Gallup. That number is rising by the year.” Even so, for those who have come to view work as the guiding principle of life, other priorities can quickly fall by the wayside. “The underlying challenge for many is that their lives are stretched like a rubber band about to snap—and church attendance ends up feeling like an item on a checklist that’s already too long,” Meador writes.
At its core, the issue is not just church attendance, Meador argues, but rather what American society has become:The problem in front of us is not that we have a healthy, sustainable society that doesn’t have room for church. The problem is that many Americans have adopted a way of life that has left us lonely, anxious, and uncertain of how to live in community with other people.
Meador’s point here reminded me of one of my favorite episodes of our podcast How to Talk to People, in which the hosts discuss the role of public spaces in building community. Places such as coffee shops, churches, and libraries can serve as truly shared spaces, where people mingle and make new friends.
But even in those places, host Julie Beck notes, “I’ve observed … a hustle and bustle.” People are “on a mission.” What she and producer Rebecca Rashid call “American efficiency culture” makes it so that we’re just not incentivized to take it slow, sit down, and meet someone new. Beck is getting at the same point as Meador:
Many Americans seem to have forgotten how to create truly deliberate communities with one another. That said Christian Nationalism is on the rise (https://santarosapressdemocrat-ca.newsmemory.com?publink=12b2d852e_1348496)
Robert Jones, CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, said those Jan. 6 displays were no surprise. According to a recent survey by the institute, white evangelical Christians were among the strongest supporters of the assertion that God intended America as a “promised land” for European Christians. Those who backed that idea were far more likely to agree that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence ... to save our country.” “To my mind, white Christian nationalism is really the threat,” Jones said. Conservative Christian themes are also playing a role in local elections, including in blue states, although many proponents say they view it not as nationalism but as supporting their religious freedom and values.
Pastor Tim Thompson of 412 Church in Murrieta, California, who hosts a YouTube channel with more than 9,600 subscribers and envisions a conservative future for the state, recently started a political action committee aiming to “take back our school boards.”. “We don’t want teachers or any other adults talking to our kids about sex,” Thompson said. “We do not want teachers categorizing our kids into oppressed or oppressor. These are not political issues. They are moral and biblical issues.”
The True Cost of the Churchgoing Bust
In an article for The Atlantic (4/3/24) The True Cost of the Churchgoing Bust, (https://www.theatlantic.com/ ideas/archive/2024/04/america-religion-decline-non-affiliated/677951/) Derk Thompson, begins: “As an agnostic, I have spent most of my life thinking about the decline of faith in America in mostly positive terms.” Organized religion seemed, to me, beset by scandal and entangled in noxious politics. So, I thought, what is there really to mourn? Only in the past few years have I come around to a different view. Maybe religion, for all its faults, works a bit like a retaining wall to hold back the destabilizing pressure of American hyper-individualism, which threatens to swell and spill over in its absence.
More than one-quarter of Americans now identify as atheists, agnostics, or religiously “unaffiliated,” according to a new survey of 5,600 U.S. adults by the Public Religion Research Institute. This is the highest level of non-religiosity in the poll’s history. Two-thirds of nonbelievers were brought up in at least nominally religious households, like me. (I grew up in a Reform Jewish home that I would describe as haphazardly religious. In kindergarten, my parents encouraged my sister and me to enthusiastically celebrate Hanukkah—and, just as fervently, to believe in Santa Claus.) But more Americans today have “converted” out of religion than have converted to all forms of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam combined. No faith’s evangelism (zealous advocacy of a cause) has been as successful in this century as religious skepticism.
Secularization is Old News
The scientific revolution that pitted the Church against stargazers like Galileo comes from the 1600s, and Nietzsche famously declared “God is dead” in the 1880s. But even as secularism surged throughout the developed world in the 20th century, America’s religiosity remained exceptional. Seven in 10 Americans told Gallup that they belonged to a church in 1937, and even by the 1980s, roughly 70 percent said they still belonged to a church, synagogue, or mosque.
Suddenly, in the 1990s, the ranks of nonbelievers surged. An estimated 40 million people—one in eight Americans—stopped going to church in the past 25 years, making it the “largest concentrated change in church attendance in American history,” according to the religion writer Jake Meador. In 2021, membership in houses of worship fell below a majority for the first time on record.
The sudden decline of religion likely relates to changes in both politics and family life
In the 1970s and ’80s, the religious right became a formidable fundraising machine for the Republican Party. As the GOP consolidated its advantage among conservative Christians, religion seemed less appealing to liberal young people, especially if they or their parents already had a tenuous relationship with the Church. In the late 1980s, only one in 10 liberals said they didn’t belong to any religion; 30 years later, that figure was about four in 10. Meanwhile, the decline of marriage, especially among low-income Americans, accompanied their move away from the Church.
That relationship with organized religion provided many things at once: not only a connection to the divine, but also a historical narrative of identity, a set of rituals to organize the week and year, and a community of families. PRRI found that the most important feature of religion for the dwindling number of Americans who still attend services a few times a year included “experiencing religion in a community” and “instilling values in their children. ”When I read the PRRI survey, this emphasis on community is what caught my eye. As I recently reported, the United States is in the midst of a historically unprecedented decline in face-to-face socializing. The social collapse is steepest for some of the groups with the largest declines in religiosity.
For example, young people, who are fleeing religion faster than older Americans, have also seen the largest decline in socializing. Boys and girls ages 15 to 19 have reduced their hangouts by more than three hours a week, according to the American Time Use Survey. There is no statistical record of any period in U.S. history where young people were less likely to attend religious services, and no period when young people have spent more time on their own. (Thompson 2024)
A similar story holds for working-class Americans. In 2019, a team of researchers published a survey based on long interviews conducted from 2000 to 2013 with older, low-income men without a college degree in working-class neighborhoods around the country. They found that, since the 1970s, church attendance among white men without a college degree had fallen even more than among white college graduates. For many of these men, the loss of religion went hand in hand with the retreat from marriage. “As marriage declined,” the authors wrote, “men’s church attendance might have fallen in tandem.” Today, low-income and unmarried men have more alone time than almost any other group, according to time-use data.
Did the decline of religion cut some people off from a crucial gateway to civic engagement, or is religion just one part of a broader retreat from associations and memberships in America? “It’s hard to know what the causal story is here,” Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist at NYU, told me. But what is undeniable is that nonreligious Americans are also less civically engaged. This year, the Pew Research Center reported that religiously unaffiliated Americans are less likely to volunteer, less likely to feel satisfied with their community and social life, and more likely to say they feel lonely. “Clearly more Americans are spending Sunday mornings on their couches, and it’s affected the quality of our collective life,” he said.
Klinenberg does not blame individual Americans for these changes. He sees our civic retreat as a story about place. In his book “Palaces for the People”, Klinenberg reported that Americans today have fewer shared spaces where connections are formed. “People today say they just have fewer places to go for collective life,” he said. “Places that used to anchor community life, like libraries and school gyms and union halls, have become less accessible or shuttered altogether.” Many people, having lost the scaffolding of organized religion, seem to have found no alternative method to build a sense of community.
Imagine, by analogy, a parallel universe where Americans suddenly gave up on sit-down restaurants. In surveys, they named many reasonable motivations for their abstinence: the expense, the overuse of salt and sugar and butter, the temptation to drink alcohol. As restaurants disappeared by the hundreds, some mourned their closure, while others said it simply didn’t matter. After all, there were still plenty of ways for people to feed themselves. Over time, however, Americans as a group never found another social activity to replace their dining-out time. They saw less of one another with each passing decade. Sociologists noted that the demise of restaurants had correlated with a rise in aloneness, just as the CDC noticed an increase in anxiety and depression.
I’ve come to believe that something like this story is happening, except with organized religion playing the role of restaurants. On an individual basis, people can give any number of valid-sounding reasons for not frequenting a house of worship. But a behavioral shift that is fully understandable on the individual level has coincided with, and even partly exacerbated, a great rewiring of our social relations.
And America did not simply lose its religion without finding a communal replacement. Just as America’s churches were depopulated, Americans developed a new relationship with a technology that, in many ways, is the diabolical opposite of a religious ritual: the smartphone. As the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt writes in his new book, The Anxious Generation, to stare into a piece of glass in our hands is to be removed from our bodies, to float placelessly in a content cosmos, to skim our attention from one piece of ephemera to the next. The internet is timeless in the best and worst of ways—an everything store with no opening or closing times. “In the virtual world, there is no daily, weekly, or annual calendar that structures when people can and cannot do things,” Haidt writes. In other words, digital life is disembodied, asynchronous, shallow, and solitary.
Religious rituals are the opposite in almost every respect. They put us in our body, Haidt writes, many of them requiring “some kind of movement that marks the activity as devotional.” Christians kneel, Muslims prostrate, and Jews daven. Religious ritual also fixes us in time, forcing us to set aside an hour or day for prayer, reflection, or separation from daily habit. (It’s no surprise that people describe a scheduled break from their digital devices as a “Sabbath.”) Finally, religious ritual often requires that we contact the sacred in the presence of other people, whether in a church, mosque, synagogue, or over a dinner-table prayer. In other words, the religious ritual is typically embodied, synchronous, deep, and collective.
I’m not advocating that every atheist and agnostic in America immediately choose a world religion and commit themselves to weekly church (or synagogue, or mosque) attendance. But I wonder if, in forgoing organized religion, an isolated country has discarded an old and proven source of ritual at a time when we most need it. Making friends as an adult can be hard; it’s especially hard without a scheduled weekly reunion of congregants. Finding meaning in the world is hard too; it’s especially difficult if the oldest systems of meaning-making hold less and less appeal. It took decades for Americans to lose religion. It might take decades to understand the entirety of what we lost.
Derek Thompson is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of the Work in Progress newsletter.
The Misunderstood Reason Millions of Americans Stopped Going to Church
The defining problem driving people out is ... just how American life works in the 21st century.
By Jake Meador
JULY 29, 2023
Nearly everyone I grew up with in my childhood church in Lincoln, Nebraska, is no longer Christian. That’s not unusual. Forty million Americans have stopped attending church in the past 25 years. That’s something like 12 percent of the population, and it represents the largest concentrated change in church attendance in American history. As a Christian, I feel this shift acutely. My wife and I wonder whether the institutions and communities that have helped preserve us in our own faith will still exist for our four children, let alone whatever grandkids we might one day have.
This change is also bad news for America as a whole: Participation in a religious community generally correlates with better health outcomes and longer life, higher financial generosity, and more stable families—all of which are desperately needed in a nation with rising rates of loneliness, mental illness, and alcohol and drug dependency.
Timothy Keller: American Christianity is due for a revival
A new book, written by Jim Davis, a pastor at an evangelical church in Orlando, and Michael Graham, a writer with the Gospel Coalition, draws on surveys of more than 7,000 Americans by the political scientists Ryan Burge and Paul Djupe, attempting to explain why people have left churches—or “dechurched,” in the book’s lingo—and what, if anything, can be done to get some people to come back. The book raises an intriguing possibility: What if the problem isn’t that churches are asking too much of their members, but that they aren’t asking nearly enough?
The Great Dechurching finds that religious abuse and more general moral corruption in churches have driven people away. This is, of course, an indictment of the failures of many leaders who did not address abuse in their church. But Davis and Graham also find that a much larger share of those who have left church have done so for more banal reasons. The book suggests that the defining problem driving out most people who leave is … just how American life works in the 21st century. Contemporary America simply isn’t set up to promote mutuality, care, or common life. Rather, it is designed to maximize individual accomplishment as defined by professional and financial success. Such a system leaves precious little time or energy for forms of community that don’t contribute to one’s own professional life or, as one ages, the professional prospects of one’s children. Workism reigns in America, and because of it, community in America, religious community included, is a math problem that doesn’t add up.
Numerous victims of abuse in church environments can identify a moment when they lost the ability to believe, when they almost felt their faith draining out of them. The book shows, though, that for most Americans who were once a part of churches but have since left, the process of leaving was gradual, and in many cases they didn’t realize it was even happening until it already had. It’s less like jumping off a cliff and more like driving down a slope, eventually realizing that you can no longer see the place you started from.
Consider one of the composite characters that Graham and Davis use in the book to describe a typical evangelical dechurcher: a 30-something woman who grew up in a suburban megachurch, was heavily invested in a campus ministry while in college, then after graduating moved into a full-time job and began attending a young-adults group in a local church. In her 20s, she meets a guy who is less religiously engaged, they get married, and, at some point early in their marriage, after their first or second child is born, they stop going to church. Maybe the baby isn’t sleeping well and when Sunday morning comes around, it is simply easier to stay home and catch whatever sleep is available as the baby (finally) falls asleep.
In other cases, a person might be entering mid-career, working a high-stress job requiring a 60- or 70-hour workweek. Add to that 15 hours of commute time, and suddenly something like two-thirds of their waking hours in the week are already accounted for. And so when a friend invites them to a Sunday-morning brunch, they probably want to go to church, but they also want to see that friend, because they haven’t been able to see them for months. The friend wins out.
After a few weeks of either scenario, the thought of going to church on Sunday carries a certain mental burden with it—you might want to go, but you also dread the inevitable questions about where you have been. “I skipped church to go to brunch with a friend” or “I was just too tired to come” don’t sound like convincing excuses as you rehearse the conversation in your mind. Soon it actually sounds like it’d be harder to attend than to skip, even if some part of you still wants to go. The underlying challenge for many is that their lives are stretched like a rubber band about to snap—and church attendance ends up feeling like an item on a checklist that’s already too long.
What can churches do in such a context? In theory, the Christian Church could be an antidote to all that. What is more needed in our time than a community marked by sincere love, sharing what they have from each according to their ability and to each according to their need, eating together regularly, generously serving neighbors, and living lives of quiet virtue and prayer? A healthy church can be a safety net in the harsh American economy by offering its members material assistance in times of need: meals after a baby is born, money for rent after a layoff. Perhaps more important, it reminds people that their identity is not in their job or how much money they make; they are children of God, loved and protected and infinitely valuable.
But a vibrant, life-giving church requires more, not less, time and energy from its members. It asks people to prioritize one another over our career, to prioritize prayer and time reading scripture over accomplishment. This may seem like a tough sell in an era of dechurching. If people are already leaving—especially if they are leaving because they feel too busy and burned out to attend church regularly—why would they want to be part of a church that asks so much of them?
Read: American religion is not dead yet
Although understandable, that isn’t quite the right question. The problem in front of us is not that we have a healthy, sustainable society that doesn’t have room for church. The problem is that many Americans have adopted a way of life that has left us lonely, anxious, and uncertain of how to live in community with other people.
The tragedy of American churches is that they have been so caught up in this same world that we now find they have nothing to offer these suffering people that can’t be more easily found somewhere else. American churches have too often been content to function as a kind of vaguely spiritual NGO, an organization of detached individuals who meet together for religious services that inspire them, provide practical life advice, or offer positive emotional experiences. Too often it has not been a community that through its preaching and living bears witness to another way to live.
The theologian Stanley Hauerwas captured the problem well when he said that “pastoral care has become obsessed with the personal wounds of people in advanced industrial societies who have discovered that their lives lack meaning.” The difficulty is that many of the wounds and aches provoked by our current order aren’t of a sort that can be managed or life-hacked away. They are resolved only by changing one’s life, by becoming a radically different sort of person belonging to a radically different sort of community.
Last fall, I spent several days in New York City, during which time I visited a home owned by a group of pacifist Christians that lives from a common purse—meaning the members do not have privately held property but share their property and money. Their simple life and shared finances allow their schedules to be more flexible, making for a thicker immediate community and greater generosity to neighbors, as well as a richer life of prayer and private devotion to God, all supported by a deep commitment to their church.
This is, admittedly, an extreme example. But this community was thriving not because it found ways to scale down what it asked of its members but because it found a way to scale up what they provided to one another. Their way of living frees them from the treadmill of workism. Work, in this community, is judged not by the money it generates but by the people it serves. In a workist culture that believes dignity is grounded in accomplishment, simply reclaiming this alternative form of dignity becomes a radical act. In the Gospels, Jesus tells his first disciples to leave their old way of life behind, going so far as abandoning their plow or fishing nets where they are and, if necessary, even leaving behind their parents. A church that doesn’t expect at least this much from one another isn’t really a church in the way Jesus spoke about it. If Graham and Davis are right, it also is likely a church that won’t survive the challenges facing us today.
The great dechurching could be the beginning of a new moment for churches, a moment marked less by aspiration to respectability and success, with less focus on individuals aligning themselves with American values and assumptions. We could be a witness to another way of life outside conventionally American measures of success. Churches could model better, truer sorts of communities, ones in which the hungry are fed, the weak are lifted up, and the proud are cast down. Such communities might not have the money, success, and influence that many American churches have so often pursued in recent years. But if such communities look less like those churches, they might also look more like the sorts of communities Jesus expected his followers to create.
Jake Meador is the editor in chief of Mere Orthodoxy. He is the author of What Are Christians For?: Life Together at the End of the World.