Comment has been considerable in the blog-o-nets regarding the new study just out that shows that the percentage of Christians in the USA has dropped to 76% (from 86% in 1990) while those affiliating with no religion has moved upward to 15%. The study also confirms that evangelicalism is the "default option" for American protestants.
"There is now this shift in the non-Catholic population -- and maybe among American Christians in general -- into a sort of generic, soft evangelicalism," said Mark Silk, who directs Trinity's Program on Public Values and helped supervise the survey.
This is nothing new, though this info may be a bit behind the curve. I would estimate that the number of "seculars"--those with no religious affiliation--is probably already higher than 15%. Among young people, it's around 25%. The over-all trend is clearly toward "secularization" and away from religion.
I attribute the decline of religion in America to three primary factors: (1) The attack on 9.11, which was a stunning display of the effects of religious fanaticism. True, it wasn't Christians who did it, but all religions are affected when any one religion promotes or condones violence; (2) The pedophilia scandal in the Roman Catholic Church, which was the last straw for thousands of Catholics, and (3) The rise of evangelicalism and its association with conservative politics. If this is the face of Christianity, most people--about two-thirds in most surveys--would rather skip it.
In my view, the "evangelical era" is drawing to a close. Internet monk is even more pessimistic about the evangelical future than I am and has plotted its coming demise here, arguing basically that, as Gertrude Stein once said of Oakland, California, "There's no there there." The theology is shoddy, and the worship vacuous. A theology of worship based in mere "uplift" is always going to call for more and even greater expressions of "uplift"--bigger screens, more laser lights, fog machines, cheerleaders, carnival barkers, and who knows what else. I call this "the banality of pyrotechnics." Lacking substance, it gets old quick.
Roman Catholicism is in dire straits as well. Immigration from Latin America is helping their numbers to stay stable, but this disguises a significant shift in the Catholic population. Roman Catholic influence continues its fall in New England, while rising in the southwest. Mainline protestantism, of course, continues to get smaller, a trend which has been going on for about 40 years.
How will Christianity respond? In Roman Catholicism, Pope Benedict is patching things up with revanchist elements in the church, such as the Society of Saint Pius X, and Anglicans who can't take women's ordination. It's pretty clear that Benedict intends to hunker down with his cohort of conservatives and hope Europe's "secularization" eventually blows over, a strategy which will prove a dismal failure.
Evangelicals don't know they're in trouble yet so it's uncertain how they will respond when they find out that they are. When an ideology begins to lose steam with the public, what often happens is that those who still hold to that ideology try to re-assert it with even greater vigor. This is most likely the tack that conservative evangelicals will take. (It's what they always do.)
Moderate evangelicals will do something similar, but since they don't have a particularly strong ideology, they will likely try to re-assert the market-driven methods which "worked" for them in the past. This won't work either.
Say what you want about mainline protestants, but they have handled their "decline" with relative grace and calm acceptance. They have neither withdrawn into social conservatism nor adopted the market-driven methods of the "cool kids." In fact, contrary to every precept of market psychology, mainline protestants have actually taken stands on behalf of those most other churches would rather pretend don't exist, such as homosexuals, immigrants, and Palestinians.
Mainline protestants have a rich heritage of theology and worship. There is some actual there there. In some strands of that tradition, there is also a significant theology of context, which means re-interpretation of the faith in light of the world in which we currently live--not wooden dogma, in other words, but a capacity for "thinking the faith fresh."
This does not mean that mainline protestants will rebound from their membership losses. They won't. All traditions of the church are going to get smaller in the USA of the future. What mainliners may do, however, is provide an option--already there but largely unknown to the general public--for an interpretation of the Christian faith that is not wedded to either the market or social conservatism.
What? 9/11, pedophilia, and conservative evangelicals are the reason for demise of religion in America? (Don't my friends all over the Orient read all about this and the church in China is growing 9% a year?) Christianity answers the questions, "Do I matter? Does God care? When will He act? Who is Jesus of Nazareth?" Christianity declines when people stop asking the questions, take on a false face and get too enamored of themselves, their material lives and their political solutions. Is this not most certainly true?
Posted by: David Zimmerman | March 14, 2009 at 01:32 PM
Yes. The problem with religion in America is that it is not about the way of Jesus.
Posted by: John Petty | March 14, 2009 at 02:05 PM