I have been traveling the last few days — a national college media conference and a baptism involving family — and I failed let GetReligion readers take a look at some interesting Ryan Burge graphics linked to two of the dominant religion-news stories of our time.
One of the stories is, of course, the collapse of the safe, vague ground in the middle of the marketplace of American religion. It’s an equation that comes up at GetReligion all the time, with traditional forms of religion holding their own (signs of slow decline and slight growth in some sectors) while the rise of the religiously unaffiliated gets lots and logs of ink (with good reason).
In the middle of all that is story No. 2, which is the demographic death dive of the old world of mainline, liberal Protestantism.
So take a look the chart at the top of this post — especially that dramatic “X” created by the rise of the nones and the fall of the mainline middle.
So, some will say: This is just a projection, not a set of carved in stone facts. True, that. However, Burge is only attempting to project trends 10 years into the future. That’s not a giant leap, when you are using trend lines dating back four decades. (I’d like to see that chart enlarged to 1960 or so, which would give us the true peak of old Mainline power and cultural prestige.)
Now, keep that chart in mind while reading the following column by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat — “The Overstated Collapse of American Christianity.” Here’s a crucial piece of the intro:
… (The) new consensus is that secularization was actually just delayed, and with the swift 21st-century collapse of Christian affiliation, a more European destination for American religiosity has belatedly arrived. “In U.S., Decline of Christianity Continues at Rapid Pace” ran the headline on a new Pew Research Center survey of American religion this month, summing up a consensus shared by pessimistic religious conservatives, eager anticlericalists and the regretfully unbelieving sort of journalist who suspects that we may miss organized religion when it’s gone.
The trends that have inspired this perspective are real, but the swings in the consensus over a relatively short period should inspire caution in interpretation. One important qualifier … is that the decline of Christian institutions and the weakening of Christian affiliation may be clearing space for post-Christian spiritualities — pantheist, gnostic, syncretist, pagan — rather than a New Atheist sort of godlessness. (The fact that this newspaper, occasionally stereotyped as secular and liberal, is proclaiming “peak witch” while The New Yorker gives friendly treatment to millennial astrology, is suggestive of just how un-secular the American future might become.)
Douthat offers three big ideas about all of this, openly stating that he believes journalists need to slow down and dig a bit deeper when looking at all the numbers.
Trend No. 1 is the point made for many years here at GetReligion, that lukewarm, mushy, centrist religion is collapsing.
The Pew survey shows a definite decline in weekly churchgoing, alongside the growing disaffiliation of people who once would have been loosely attached to churches and denominations — cultural Catholics, Christmas-and-Easter Methodists, Jack Mormons and the like. But recent Gallup numbers indicate that reported weekly and almost-weekly church attendance has only “edged down” lately, falling to 38 percent in 2017 from 42 percent in 2008 — a smaller drop than the big decline in affiliation reported by Pew. And long-term Gallup data suggest that any recent dip in churchgoing is milder than the steep decline in the 1960s — and that today’s churchgoing rate isn’t that different from the rate in the 1930s and 1940s, before the postwar religious boom.
The relative stability of the Gallup data fits with analysis offered by the sociologists Landon Schnabel and Sean Bock in a 2017 paper, “The Persistent and Exceptional Intensity of American Religion.”
If traditional forms of faith hold firm (in part due to evangelism and birth rates), while a secular-nones coalition keeps growing, it’s easy to predict more political and legal conflict on moral, cultural and religious issues involving church and state.
That will affect Democrats, as well as Republicans.
Please remember this David “Frenchism” French quote at the end of my recent On Religion column about Democrats and the explosive issue of stripping the tax exemptions of doctrinally conservative colleges, ministries, think tanks and even churches.
"Right now, Democrats have to focus on all those white, secular, online progressives … who are extremely hostile to small-o orthodox religion," he said. …But party leaders also know they "have in their coalition the least religious and the most religious cohorts in American life. …
"There is that coalition of woke Democrats, but there are also millions of African-American churchgoers. … That's an issue Democrats will have to deal with sooner or later."
On to Douthat big idea No. 2, as in, “The waning of Christianity may be still as much a baby-boomer story as a millennial one.”
Ah, demographics and trends linked to aging.
Burge actually shows up in this discussion.
Measured by religious affiliation, yes, the millennial generation is the most secular in modern American history. Measured by religious attendance, they are the least churched of American adults. That much of the “secular young people” story is true.
But religious attendance ebbs and then flows across the life cycle, falling when you leave home and then increasing with child rearing and with the encroachment of mortality. And when the political scientist Ryan Burge recently compared weekly church attendance among today’s 20-somethings to weekly attendance among 20-somethings in the 1990s, he actually found a tiny increase: Church attendance has been falling among the middle-aged and early-elderly cohorts, but the typical millennial or Gen Z American is slightly more likely to be a weekly churchgoer than a Generation-Xer circa 1995.
What, pray tell, is Douthat’s point No. 3?
There’s a strong case that any crisis facing Christian institutions is a more Catholic crisis than a Protestant one. This is not how the story of American religion since the 1960s is often told, because in terms of raw numbers of adherents the biggest post-1960s collapse clearly belongs to Mainline Protestantism, with evangelical Christianity and Catholicism looking similarly stable.
But divide American Christianity along Catholic-Protestant lines, rather than into a Mainline-Evangelical-Catholic troika, and you can tell a different story — where evangelicalism gained at the Mainline churches’ expense, keeping the broader Protestant position constant, while Catholicism was saved from a Mainline-style decline only by Hispanic immigration.
The collapse of Catholic mass attendance after the Second Vatican Council — the subject of a fascinating new book, “Mass Exodus,” by the British theologian and sociologist Stephen Bullivant — was more dramatic than any general Protestant development. The subsequent Catholic ratio of deconversions to conversions, of ex-Catholics to new ones, is a grim indicator for the church — worse than the Mainline by far, visible among Hispanic Catholics as well as whites. And after a long period of immigrant-supported stabilization, in the current “aftershock” it’s mostly Catholic mass attendance that’s been falling, even as Protestant church attendance bobs up.
This is a must-read column, for sure.
Meanwhile, GetReligion will continue to pass along these fascinating Burge graphics on trends emerging in various mountains of statistics about American life and religion. Journalists need to follow Burge on Twitter and bookmark the Religion in Public weblog.