In Quitting Church, Americans Gave Up More Than They’d Bargained For
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(OPINION) I’ve long argued it’s difficult — really, next to impossible — to practice Christianity effectively without becoming (and staying) an active member of a local church congregation.
Not only Christianity but the other major faiths are, by intention and maybe by definition, communal pursuits rather than solitary ones.
Private spirituality is vital, of course, and underpins the communal life of any religious group. Hats off to the desert fathers, those legendary hermits of yore. And all of us should pray regularly in our secret prayer closets.
Still, faith is mainly a team sport. Until you’re part of a group, you have about as much chance of mastering divine mysteries as a guy who only plays football by himself in his back yard has of becoming a hall of fame quarterback.
Writing this never fails to stuff my inbox with irate replies from readers. But trust me on this. Like the proverbial stopped clock, I’m right occasionally — and this is one of those times.
The rate of churchgoing in the United States keeps dropping like a cannonball in pie filling. That’s bad for us all, even the nonreligious. The ill consequences of that decline will be felt by society for years to come.
On the latter point, I’m not alone. Derek Thompson, a staff writer at The Atlantic, basically argued the same in an article titled, “The True Cost of the Churchgoing Bust.”
Unlike me, Thompson is no apologist for religion.
“As an agnostic, I have spent most of my life thinking about the decline of faith in America in mostly positive terms,” he wrote. “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.”
He recognized that religion, “for all of 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.”
In the United States, about 40 million people have stopped going to church over the past 25 years. More people have quit religion than have converted to Christianity, Judaism and Islam combined. That’s the largest shift in church attendance in history.
“No faith’s evangelism has been as successful in this century as religious skepticism,” Thompson said.
Why should anyone other than pastors and deacons care?
Because people’s relationship with organized religion apparently has a vast ripple effect.
Religious observance can provide many things, Thompson said: “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.”
Currently our country is seeing an unprecedented decline in face-to-face socializing and, with that, a host of widespread ills.
“The social collapse is steepest for some of the groups with the largest declines in religiosity,” Thompson said.
Teens are fleeing religion faster than others. Teens also have seen the largest fall in in-person socializing — and, as has been widely noted, skyrocketing rates of anxiety and depression.
“There is no statistical record of any period in U.S. history where young people were less likely to attend religious services, and also no period when young people have spent more time on their own,” Thompson said.
A similar story holds for working-class Americans, and especially for low-income and unmarried men, who now spend more time alone than almost any other group.
It’s not clear from the research whether the decline of religious participation has in itself cut people off from some crucial path to social engagement, Thompson said. Declines in religion could be part of a larger retreat from associations and memberships generally. Smartphones have played a role in keeping people apart from face-to-face meetings, too.
But, whatever the cause-and-effect, as people have disaffiliated from organized religion it appears they’ve also become less likely to affiliate elsewhere, with nettlesome results.
“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,” Thompson said.
Thompson wasn’t suggesting atheists and agnostics rush out and join churches.
“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,” he added. “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.”
As I said, Thompson comes at this issue from a different angle than mine. But what he says resonates with my arguments for attending services regularly.
That is, church (or synagogue, or mosque) participation can be troublesome and boring. Sometimes your minister is a birdbrain or the choir is perennially off-key or the nursery is understaffed. Occasionally it’s worse: Your leaders are retrograde, emotionally manipulative or hypocritical.
But you also can reap a windfall of positive — if often hidden — benefits for yourself and others that you just won’t get when you’re out there trying to navigate a spiritual life alone.
Paul Prather has been a rural Pentecostal pastor in Kentucky for more than 40 years. Also a journalist, he was The Lexington Herald-Leader’s staff religion writer in the 1990s, before leaving to devote his full time to the ministry. He now writes a regular column about faith and religion for the Herald-Leader, where this column first appeared. Prather’s written four books. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.