Much has and will be made of a report issued recently by the Pew Forum, finding a significant increase in the percentage of Americans who identify themselves as religiously unaffiliated. Commentators have seized on one fact–less than half of Americans now identify themselves as Protestant, a testimony, above all, to the continuing collapse of mainline Protestantism, but perhaps also a harbinger of a decline in Evangelicalism, which has also lost adherents over the past five years.
I’ll note a few things now, and have more later, after I’ve had time for further reflection.
First, the vast majority of the unaffiliated do not describe themselves as atheists or agnostics, but simply as not affiliated. Eighty-eight percent of the non-affiliated say they aren’t looking for a religion. Many say they believe in God, but are cynical about organized religion. I wonder what the basis of their cynicism is. Do they actually have experience of a church or religious community that justifies their cynicism, or is this just the easy, pseudo-worldly wise stance of the young?
Second, the young indeed comprise a substantial proportion of this unaffiliated group. That gives me some hope. Perhaps they’re still open to the kinds of experiences (birth and death chief among them) that can bring us to our knees in prayer and send us to church or back to church. Of course, the problem here is that while all of us will face death, an increasingly diminishing proportion of us will face birth, so to speak.
Third, it’s pretty clear that part of the problem is the failure of catechesis:
Michael S. Horton, professor of systematic theology and apologetics at Westminster Seminary in California, said Christians appear to be creating future “nones” by failing to adequately pass the faith on to successive generations.
“We are about a generation away from a worshiping community that is rather small in terms of those who know what they believe, why they believe, and practice their faith with some real conviction,” he said.
As I said, more later, after more reflection.
October 10th, 2012 | 2:14 pm
>>>Second, the young indeed comprise a substantial proportion of this unaffiliated group. That gives me some hope.<<<
Not only does it give me hope, it makes perfect sense. How many times do you hear a parent say something to the effect, "I want my child to decide how they feel about God. I don't want to force it on them." Given that prevailing sentiment among many parents, it makes sense that their children are adrift.
I have hope because we are all called to Christ. As St. Augustine said, "you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you". The will find their way to Christ, they just need our help.
October 10th, 2012 | 2:23 pm
I’ll second the “failure of catachesis” point, on the basis of ongoing interactions with my college students. My classroom is a pretty non-threatening environment, for religiously-minded students, and rarely if ever do I get anyone who will rationally argue a point based originally in a religious conviction. My impression is not that students aren’t religious at all, but that they are vaguely and mostly emotionally religious, and so the notion of defending a religious point of view rationally is either new, frightening, or both.
October 10th, 2012 | 2:58 pm
Well, moralism is shallow. That’s true whether it’s of the purity-and-obedience kind or the Social Gospel kind. And, as has been noted in literature for centuries, there is an abiding temptation to reduce Christianity to moralism. Discipleship is more than mere moralism; it’s a call to theosis, a call to become ikons of Christ in the world. (It’s not so much What Jesus Would Do? as What/How Jesus Would Be in Us?) Moralism gets the screen hits and sound bites precisely because it’s the safer plane. A lot is done in the name of Christ that makes a rather poor ikon of Christ. And I suspect young people have caught on to that.
October 10th, 2012 | 4:22 pm
I think the US will reach a tipping point, at which religion will simply collapse, as in Western Europe. Most people are only nominally religious, and religious observance rests largely on social coercion. When there are enough non-believers to make it difficult to impossible to shun people into going to church, the floodgates will open.
October 10th, 2012 | 4:36 pm
Yes, Maximilian, and how’s that working out for Western Europe? Between the debt crisis and demographic collapse, it looks to me that a collapse in religious observance is a harbinger of general civilizational collapse.
And yet our Western secularized elites take no notice as they go off the cliff, “laughing themselves to death.”
October 10th, 2012 | 4:39 pm
“Many say they believe in God, but are cynical about organized religion. I wonder what the basis of their cynicism is.”
I wonder if 9-11 (and other) attacks made in the name of Islam helped solidify this cynicism. Scandals in organized Christian churches—not just the abuse scandal in the Catholic church, but also exposure of various televangelists, etc.—no doubt started the aversion, but I really noticed the criticism of “organized religion” after 9-11.
October 10th, 2012 | 5:27 pm
Heraclitus: Between the debt crisis
Do you really think that the debt crisis has something to do with religiosity (or lack thereof)? If so, then the more secular countries should have more of a problem, not less of one. Greece is rather heavily religious, while Germany, Denmark, Holland and Finland (the solid countries) are fairly irreligious.
Also, let me remind you that the US has a tiny bit of a debt problem. Is that to blame on irreligiosity, too – in the most religious country in the industrialized world?
Heraclitus: and demographic collapse
Again, demographic collapse has little to do with religiosity. Italy and Greece (two of the most religious states) have some of the lowest birth rates in all of Europe.
Heraclitus: it looks to me that a collapse in religious observance is a harbinger of general civilizational collapse.
Why would that be? Is there a third cause, that causes religious collapse in the short term, and civilizational collapse in the long term? Or does religious collapse cause civilizational collapse? If so, how?
October 10th, 2012 | 5:37 pm
The young and unaffiliated who I know have had trouble finding a good church with solid and interesting teaching. After a while they give up, though some go looking again after they have children.
October 10th, 2012 | 5:51 pm
“When there are enough non-believers to make it difficult to impossible to shun people into going to church, the floodgates will open.”
Wow, that’s an odd argument. I live in the buckle of the Bible Belt in church attendance on an average weekend is well less than half of the population (more like 20-25%). So apparently all that shunning isn’t effective. The social pressure to attend church isn’t particularly intense in general society. Identifying yourself with a particular group in a social survey isn’t much of an indicator of anything.
This isn’t exactly 17th century New England or Calvin’s Geneva.
October 10th, 2012 | 8:35 pm
I may be wrong (and hope I am), but I don’t think voluntary organizations in general are doing very well these days.
October 11th, 2012 | 8:54 am
Wow, people are being shunned into going to church in 2012. I did not realize we were living in 17th century Massachusetts….
October 11th, 2012 | 9:10 am
Steve: Wow, that’s an odd argument. I live in the buckle of the Bible Belt in church attendance on an average weekend is well less than half of the population (more like 20-25%).
Clumsy phrasing on my part. Shunning works to largely keep people in churches, and to force them to have a nominal commitment to the dominant religion. Perhaps this is starting to be less effective – if it is, you should not be happy about it. But H.L. Mencken pointed out that basically anyone in rural Tennessee needs to at least acquiesce to fundamentalist ideology, or get out. It’s still incredibly effective in the Mormon church.
The issue in America is that it is socially acceptable to be a religious person. Which is why in the Bible Belt, way more than 25% would say that they attend church weekly. Elsewhere in the industrialized world, people would be more embarrassed about it.
Steve: This isn’t exactly 17th century New England or Calvin’s Geneva.
They did not rely on shunning. You’d be banished if you were not to the taste of Winthrop and Calvin respectively.
October 11th, 2012 | 9:56 am
I think the bigger take-away is that Americans generally believe crazy things without really thinking about it. Between one-fifth and one-third of respondents, regardless of religious affiliation, believe in spiritual energy in crystals, reincarnation, and that they have seen or been in the presence of ghosts. I.e., one quarter of unaffiliateds believe that they have seen evidence of an afterlife with their own eyes, and don’t think it’s worth doing anything about it, and one quarter of Christians purport to believe in both Christ’s death and resurrection and in reincarnation. The main take-away from the Pew results is that the poll respondents are dumb.
October 12th, 2012 | 9:45 am
I think that all areas of organized society have become suspect in the minds of most people. Government is growing and failing. Schools are failing students. Large corporations are going bankrupt. The housing market has died. Medical cost have risen and the medicines that are pushed out have so many complications that their worth is suspect. Court systems are more political than constitutional. Is it any wonder that people are lost and confused about who and what to trust.
October 12th, 2012 | 4:01 pm
“Yes, Maximilian, and how’s that working out for Western Europe? Between the debt crisis and demographic collapse, it looks to me that a collapse in religious observance is a harbinger of general civilizational collapse.”
Thank goodness good old America isn´t in pretty bad economic shape, nor has a big internal debt. The supposed demographical collapse is nothing more than racist hysteria, since it is the collapse of white demographical patterns (in contrast with muslim inmigrant rates), of an already overpopulated continent. And lets not even talk about civilization: At least europeans have abandoned their fancy imperialist and colonialist adventures, which is a true sign of civilization. Americans, on the other side, seems not to have learned much from the disasters it engered in their european cousins, and continue with their barbaric “preeventive wars”, “drone attacks” and militaristic spenditures and ocupation of most of the globe.
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