https://news.gallup.com/poll/341963/church-membership-falls-below-majority-first-time.aspx
Good data in that article and it fits very much with our conversations over the years. In the meantime many of the religious people I know seem to be rejecting science as if it were there just to break their faith.
The turbulent ride of post-church America
https://theweek.com/articles/974716/turbulent-ride-postchurch-america
What do you think of the arguments in that last article?
>arguments
I'm in general agreement.
I think this is more succinct, though;
"I'm inclined to think that industrial development inherently undermines tradition and cultivates individualism, qualities that render it an adversary of faith-based, communitarian institutions. It also seems to me that late capitalism has robbed the church of its monopoly on a wide range of social functions"
Worth a read (skip the GOP part):
The GOP (Rightly) Fears America's Churchless Majority
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/04/gallup-poll-church-gop-christian-right-2024-democracy.html
<+>
>robbed the church of its monopoly on a wide range of social functions
IMO, there is no better example than Denmark. As women have been given a relatively strong social net, the result has been to move away from the church.
I wonder to what extent that is because institutions were set up to address prior conditions. It may well be that we will see this as a low ebb in church membership rather than the midpoint of a trend.
Let's see... would you say that it's fair to say that religiosity declines as one's sense of control and understanding of the world increases (whether that sense is right or wrong)? So, for example, because I understand that lightning is caused by physical phenomena related to the violent movement of air masses, rather than, say, Zeus being angry or demons cavorting, I'm less likely to make a burnt offering to Zeus or pray to the Virgin Mary and light a candle blessed on Candlemas (Feast of the Purification of the Virgin and candles blessed at Candlemas mass were widely believed to protect against lightning and most prudent householders in the late medieval and early-modern periods tried to keep a few around for protection during storms and delivery of babies).
But what if we are entering an age where people feel less control and more anxiety?
Also, my mother always contended that in the disarray of Vatican II, the Catholic Church which was the center of communal life in her childhood became nothing more than a place to go for Mass in my childhood. So she understood my disinterest in the Church as a reflection of the Church's fundamental disinterest in me (she would not have used those exact words, but that's the essence of it). What if churches figure out, in an age of fractured communities, to once again become the pole of a community?
In other words, I could see many of the trends we see explaining the decline in church attendance being used to explain the increase in church attendance if the trend were to reverse.
Similarly, the article blames late-stage capitalism for the decline in religion, while David Brooks in his take on it blames the decline in religion for late-stage capitalism. In his view, the churches provided a break on boundless greed which has become more manifest as the influence of religion wanes.
Personally, I feel that Brooks and the article cited above are missing something major, but I just don't know what it is! I guess I am skeptical of any attempt to look at two trends as broad and vague as these and say one causes the other.
The first article on the other hand... demographics are powerful and that suggests a trend that will be hard to reverse. But it doesn't really explain why, in a way that convinces me, there is such a sudden decline in religiosity across generations.
BTW, I come to this as someone who was born into a very religious family, never once believed in any of it myself, and somehow ended up with a PhD and 20 years of research focused on who resisted the Reformation and how people adapted to and adopted the Reformed religion. So it's not a topic where I expect to find an answer that I find satisfying between now and the time I die.
>missing something major, but I just don't know what it is!
Same. I keep churning this over & over. Some thought fragments;
The Catholic sex abuse cases.
Rising feminism and/or rejection of the male dominant role in many religions.
Science.
Membership is falling for many social organizations, not just churches; Elks, Rotary, Moose, VFW ---there is a wholesale dropout movement.
>male dominant
"as Trump rose to the presidency, Moore found herself aghast at the church's embrace of him and its stances on women."
Beth Moore Says She Is 'No Longer A Southern Baptist' : NPR
https://www.npr.org/2021/03/11/976124629/prominent-evangelical-beth-moore-announces-split-from-southern-baptists
>churning
Big one: BIRTH CONTROL & abortion
Religious rejection of homosexuality, same-sex marriage, LGBT
>> Religious rejection of homosexuality, same-sex marriage, LGBT
That isn't true across the board. Some denominations including my own (Anglican, in Canada) have moved / are moving to bless same sex marriages. There was lots of controversy along the way but at least in some corners the church is becoming more accepting and supportive of LGBTQ2+.
Quote from: buckworks on April 02, 2021, 01:23:02 AM
>> Religious rejection of homosexuality, same-sex marriage, LGBT
That isn't true across the board.
No, it isn't, but there has been a lot of reporting on this being an increasing rift between the young and old in white evangelical circles.
One annoying thing is that in the media and even more often in casual conversation with very secular people, I find that they often equate "Christian" not just with "evangelical" but with "conservative evangelical" or even, though they don't know it, with "Southern Baptist." Meanwhile, many of the people I know are "liberal" or centrist politically and "conservative" or very conservative theologically and a mix of those who do and do not identify as "evangelical".
That said, many of the concerns of the older generation among American evangelicals, and above all the anti-homosexual agenda, are off-putting to the younger generation. Meanwhile, many of the concerns that the younger generation considers important (climate for example) are either off the radar or actively opposed by the older generation.
So that's what made me say that we could be seeing the inexorable decline of church affiliation, or we could be seeing the groundwork for a revival. You're probably tired of me saying it, but the thing that makes the future so hard to predict is that it hasn't happened yet.
>>Beth Moore
Yeah, I saw that too. I found it interesting and that again is floating around in my head when I made the comments above. Maybe 30 years from now we see 2021 as the moment when Mooreism definitively broke the Southern Baptist stranglehold on American conversation about religion and kicked off the religious revival.
Vatican Rejects Blessing Same-Sex Marriage, Saying We "Can't Bless Sin" --March 2021
https://nowthisnews.com/news/vatican-rejects-blessing-same-sex-marriage-pope-francis-approves
Hm, this is really old stuff and may not pertain or might be a very small factor amongst the many theories you have brought up.
This is something I remember from a theology class at Uni back 40+ years ago. Back during the turbulent 1960's and '70's attendance to mainstream churches went down. Somebody did a study afterward, that found that those denominations that got involved in preaching about secular political events from the pulpit suffered the biggest decline. While those denominations that ignored the turmoil of secular society and stuck with purely a message of salvation of one's soul, suffered the least decline.
What the researchers found out was, back then, church goers, wanted church services to be a refuge from the scariness of the turmoil of the secular world that seemed, in the 1960's to be falling apart, and they wanted comfort from their fears and direction about salvation, eternal life after death -- the Big Questions.
Bringing that home today: those churches that got deeply involved in politics may be suffering a backlash.
I think all of RC's points and ergo's are in play but two generational shifts are factors IMHO:
1. Role of women and the women's equality movement. Boots on the ground, it's the women that are the backbone of any congregation and have been for generations. This is a double edge sword: A. women are not allowed in the hierarchy of many churches which alienates them, but also: B. women may have been the backbone of the congregation precisely because they were marginalized in society and careers. Now, women are advancing on those fronts plus raising children and don't have time for the church role their mother's had.
2. The whole same sex, LBGTQ acceptance thing. Even in conservative churches many younger members are much more accepting of this than their elders and the hierarchy.
And this is just my own theory, but the rise of evangelical movements, and everyone wearing their religion on their shoulder like a chip to be knocked off, has not helped. The neighborhood I grew up in had Roman Catholics and Heintz 57 variety Protestants all mixed together and you wouldn't ever know who was what because nobody talked about religion and their chosen denomination was just something for them and their family and we all just got along. Even though many had very deep faith they kept that to themselves.
Montana passes 'sweeping and dangerous' religious freedom bill that could block life-saving healthcare for queer people
https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2021/04/02/montana-house-greg-gianforte-lgbt-discrimination-religious-freedom/
--------
In Michigan, women hold power. Not everyone seems comfortable with that.
https://19thnews.org/2021/04/michigan-women-whitmer/
Alabama's Yoga Ban Is Part of the Christian Right's War on Pluralism
https://religiondispatches.org/alabamas-yoga-ban-is-part-of-the-christian-rights-war-on-pluralism/
Man, yoga is getting hit from both the Right and Left. This from 2015:
A university yoga class was cancelled because it was 'cultural appropriation' of a non-western practice
https://www.businessinsider.com/yoga-class-cancelled-because-its-cultural-appropriation-of-a-non-western-practice-2015-11?op=1
>cultural appropriation
I really dislike the concept of limiting ones activity to what people find acceptable for one's ethnicity.
Quote from: littleman on April 03, 2021, 06:33:41 PM
>cultural appropriation
I really dislike the concept of limiting ones activity to what people find acceptable for one's ethnicity.
Agreed. "Cultural Appropriation" is a phony sin invented to allow somebody to feel righteously offended and to put somebody else at a seeming disadvantage.
1. Nobody can own a culture.
2. No two cultures encounter each other and come away unchanged.
3. Cultures have been selectively stealing from each other since before recorded history. It's part of progress.
>>cultural appropriation
It is a funny one. My other half (a native American) found it a bit weird that someone in my daughter's Primary school class dressed up as a Native American. Reminded her I saw a photo of one of her cousins at Halloween in a "see you jimmy" hat and some tartan, holding a beer of course.
I try to take the view that we should celebrate our differences rather than more dangerously try to homogenise everyone into indifference. Respect the fact people are different, talk different, look different, believe different, all that.
I'm 100% agnostic but totally get why people have faith.
If it's weaponised against you, different story.
Remember when that American high school girl wore a Chinese dress to her prom? People piled on that poor girl like crazy. I read through a massive Twitter thread about it at the time. I followed that thread across all the US time zones and people were piling on that young lady saying the most terrible things about her and her cultural appropriation. Nasty stuff but I kept following that thread until it hit China. The Chinese were very polite but they made the following points:
A. They pointed out that nobody owns a culture.
B. They pointed out that there is no monolithic "Chinese" culture as American's seem to think, but that there are 8 Chinas (I don't remember the number TBH).
C. When the girl wearing the dress hit the media it was much discussed on Chinese social networks and the overwhelming consensus was that the Chinese were flattered that a young American woman chose to wear a Chinese dress to her special party.
D. They said they don't understand the concept of cultural appropriation and wondered if it was being pushed by first generation immigrants who were feeling the loss of their parent's heritage.
E. Many ventured that it looked to them like it was an excuse to bully a young woman.
That pretty much stopped the Twitter pile-on for that thread in it's tracks. I got quite a chuckle out of that.
>It is a funny one. My other half (a native American) found it a bit weird that someone in my daughter's Primary school class dressed up as a Native American.
>Remember when that American high school girl wore a Chinese dress to her prom? People piled on that poor girl like crazy.
To me these are very different things. Wearing a costume to mimic an ethnic group for entertainment isn't the same thing as wearing a specific type of outfit because one finds it beautiful.
BTW, my wife has no issue with anybody wearing a Qipao/Cheongsam.
"Some of the decline is attributable to changing generations, with about 66% of people born before 1946 are still members of a church, compared to just 36% of millennials."
"Many Americans – especially young people – see religion as bound up with political conservatism, and the Republican party specifically,"
"Just 47% of the US population are members of a church, mosque or synagogue" I'm guessing including the others makes the decline even steeper amongst the church demographic?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/05/americans-religion-rightwing-politics-decline
Quote from: littleman on April 04, 2021, 01:33:44 AM
BTW, my wife has no issue with anybody wearing a Qipao/Cheongsam.
Same here. Her reaction is just "pretty dress" (which they are). However, as a child she and her siblings were really perturbed that the only Chinese-American person they could get to play a Chinese -American monk was David Caradine... who is not in the least Chinese.
Ideally, I'd like to see a world where there was less focus on whether people "look" the part, but right now it is asymmetrical. David Caradine is 0% Chinese, but gets to play a Chinese person. But I think Jackie Chan, for example, could make an excellent Reagan in terms of delivering both the serious and humorous lines Reagan is known for, but that is completely off the table.
>> 36% of millennials
Which basically brings the US into line with where other countries were a couple decades ago. In France, going back to the 1980s, church membership was primarily invoked for weddings, baptisms and funerals. The common line was "croyant, mais non-pratiquant" (believing by not practicing). Though the famous historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie once told a friend that he was "pratiquant mais non-croyant."
QuoteJust 14 percent of Britons identified themselves as Church of England, down from 31 percent 15 years ago, the British Social Attitudes survey found. The number saying they had no religion rose from 41 to 52 percent.
Church of Scotland numbers also fell from 31 percent in 2002 to 18 percent.
The sharpest decline in those saying they were Church of England was among 45 to 54-year-olds while 70 percent of those aged between 18 and 24 said they had no religion, according to the survey, based on 3,988 interviews.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-religion/church-of-england-numbers-in-britain-are-at-record-low-survey-idUSKCN1LM3D1
QuoteAn Ipsos/MORI poll in 2011 showed that 45% of French people claim to be Christians - most of them Catholics - while 35% claimed to have no religion, and just 3% proclaimed themselves as Muslims.
Church attendance in France is among the lowest in the world, with surveys showing that only about 5% of the total population, i.e. less than 10% of those who are nominally Catholics, now attend weekly mass.
https://about-france.com/religion.htm
I would guess the only places where participation is rising is where it was formerly repressed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Poland
>David Caradine
I think that's a bit of a sore spot for Jen too and it is closer to BoL's example.
Going back in this very interesting thread a bit:
QuoteIn his view, the churches provided a break on boundless greed which has become more manifest as the influence of religion wanes.
There is a school of thought that the protestant work ethic is the cause of much of the current greed. "The West" (by which I mean civilisations started in the colder climates, with long dark winters) had to save food to survive to the next harvest and beyond.
>>protestant work ethic
There has been a lot of pushback on the Weber thesis. Some have argued that what he saw as the "protestant ethic" was actually a refugee community ethic, for example, given that when Weber said "protestant" what he really meant for the most part was Calvinist.
The protestant ethic results in accumulation of wealth precisely because the wealth was an accidental consequence of calling and service - those societies valorized work and criticized spending, so people tended to accumulate wealth. And most of those societies also had sumptuary laws that prevented conspicuous consumption.
The David Brooks argument is that what happened is that the accumulation of wealth has become divorced from any traditional break on the use and abuse of that wealth and has resulted in breaking the social contract that previously existed, because those religious beliefs in charity and even the nobility of the poor have diminished while the accumulation of wealth has accelerated.
Personally, I have a number of issues with Brooks' thesis, but just throw it out there as food for thought.
Ok, this is new to me. :)
When was the contract broken? Or was it general timing.
Was it before Gadsby? Published 1925. I confess to not reading it, but vaguely know the story, from family discussion.
worth a read
"The nones aren't just young, highly educated, liberal white people.
Compared to the U.S. population overall, nonreligious Americans are younger and more Democratic-leaning. But the number of Americans who aren't religious has surged in part because people in lots of demographic groups are disengaging from religion — many nones don't fit that young, liberal stereotype. The average age of a none is 43 (so plenty are older than that). About one-third of nones (32 percent) are people of color. More than a quarter of nones voted for Trump in 2020. And about 70 percent don't have a four-year college degree.
The decline over the last decade in the share of Black (-11 percentage points) and Hispanic adults (-10 points) who are Christians is very similar to the decline among white adults (-12 points), according to Pew. The number of college graduates leaving the faith (-13 points) is similar to those without degrees (-11 points). The decline in organized religion is indeed much bigger among Democrats (-17 points) than Republicans (-7 points) and among Millennials (-16 points) compared to Baby Boomers (-6 points), but the trend is very broad.
The growing diversity of nones explains a lot of dynamics we see in America today. For example...."
It's Not Just Young White Liberals Who Are Leaving Religion | FiveThirtyEight
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/its-not-just-young-white-liberals-who-are-leaving-religion/
So this is David Brooks argument. I've always been skeptical of both the Weber thesis (The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism) which is mostly disregarded in scholarly circles, and David Brooks' thesis about religion having, until recently, provided a break (one among several) on unadulterated greed.
But here goes...
>>Was it before Gadsby? Published 1925.
Mmm... that's not a great starting point for discussion. Remember, Jay Gatsby was a bootlegger and somewhat of mobster who didn't care about money at all. He simply wanted to throw lavish parties to seduce the woman who lived across the way and everything he did from the bootlegging, the big house, the fancy car, the lavish parties were all to get the girl. So that doesn't speak to the question of income inequality very well. Better would be Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class from the 1890s, but we don't need to go back that far.
>>When was the contract broken? Or was it general timing.
Brooks is referring primarily to the post-war contract. One of the key events in the breaking of the contract was a shift that people see in the 1960s and 1970s in the language of corporate earnings reports and prospectuses and so forth. Prior to that, there was a fairly common refrain that a corporation has a responsibility to its employees and customers. The cynic might say that was just talk, but there is a noticeable shift as people start adopting the Milton Friedman framework and saying that a corporation's only responsibility is to the shareholders.
If you look at trends after that you see a sharp inflection point. Up until 1970 in the US, wages tracked with productivity. Rising tides raised many boats. Also, the share of wealth of the bottom was staying steady or increasing. After 1970, you see those trends change sharply. Productivity increases become decoupled from wages and working class wealth falls dramatically as a share of total wealth.
That's the breaking of the contract. I don't think there's much argument there. It's not a particularly liberal argument anymore. Even people like Marco Rubio (Republican legislator who jumped on the "election has been stolen" train) has lately been writing op-eds about this. And, of course, so has David Brooks.
The thornier question is whether the breaking of the contract has anything to do with the decline of religiosity. That's a much harder argument. Kick it off with a quote from a Brooks op-ed:
QuoteThe frequency of the word "I" in American books, according to Putnam and Garrett, doubled between 1965 and 2008. The authors are careful not to put it into moralistic terms, but I'd say that, starting in the late 1960s, there was left-wing self-centeredness in the social and lifestyle sphere and right-wing self-centeredness in the economic sphere, with a lack of support for common-good public policies. But it was socially celebrated self-centeredness all the way across. It was based on a fallacy: If we all do our own thing, everything will work out well for everybody.
https://www.palmbeachpost.com/story/opinion/columns/more-voices/2020/10/17/david-brooks-says-we-need-big-cultural-shift-america/3680525001/
Brooks isn't making a straight one-to-one argument: less religion equals less social contract. Rather, he's saying that it coincides with a shift into extreme individualism and, on the right, that means hardcore individualism in the economic sphere, which decouples any sense of social responsibility from one's personal economic activity. That is the breaking of the social contract.
Not everyone is a fan of Brooks' cultural-religious decline thesis for income inequality, of course. To wit, liberal economist Robert Reich:
QuoteOccasionally David Brooks, who personifies the oxymoron "conservative thinker" better than anyone I know, displays such profound ignorance that a rejoinder is necessary lest his illogic permanently pollute public debate.
https://robertreich.org/post/73764746576
Thanks for filling that in, I had to read it a couple of times, because I am a duck out of water in this area. Very Interesting
I was listing to a very engaging BBC podcast, I think it was the "Moral Maze" the other day, and the number of instances of "I" and "we" was mentioned in that, and the change over time. It might well have been a different podcast, not sure.
The reason I picked Gadsby, was because of his devil may care attitude. He came into money, and then used it. I wonder whether that available excess is a contributing factor to changing behaviour across society. That excess was available to more than just the politically powerful,
I understand the breaking of the contract a bit better now.
But still, as you can tell by my badly formed arguments and lack of depth, still a duck out of water (A coot probably, I watched one run down the road last week, now that was funny :))
I'll add increasing urbanization -actually the flip side, lack of contact with nature-- to the list of causes.
We're just a generation away from this.
UK church converted into a grocery store
https://old.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/n0t2s0/a_church_converted_into_a_grocery_store_anyone/
I raise you with a Pub.
https://www.pitcherandpiano.com/bars/nottingham
I raise again with a climbing wall. Its been there since 2007. Its in an area where there are more people from other faiths now I believe.
https://www.alter-rock.co.uk/
Closed due to Covid, but I raise you The Church of 8 wheels (http://www.churchof8wheels.com/).
https://youtu.be/JH4M12btrcU?t=22
"A landmark study of US Jews by the Pew Research Center has demonstrated that young American Jews are increasingly likely to say they do not identify with the Jewish religion, participate less in Jewish customs, and have less attachment to the Jewish people.
At the same time, intermarriage is rising rapidly, with Jews who got married in the last decade significantly more likely to be married to a non-Jew than a Jew and the rate of intermarriage increasing significantly over the previous decade."
Young US Jews increasingly detached from Jewish people - Pew report - The Jerusalem Post
https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/young-us-jews-increasingly-detached-from-jewish-people-pew-report-667868
Seems to be inline with what I've seen in the last couple of decades. My last boss was a Jewish atheist who married someone of Christian heritage.