When I was a kid, you were expected to be in church.
All of my friends went to church (not necessarily the one I attended). All of my parents' friends went to church; as did their kids. Sunday School was an obligation no one backed out on, even when we were young adolescents with big mouths and gave the teacher lip because we could get away with it. Church was very much a social thing (covered dish suppers, Christmas Eve services, Maundy Thursday services, even Sunday evening prayer services for awhile), and a service thing (collecting clothes for the poor, delivering Christmas gifts to "needy" families, etc.).
By the time my daughter came along and I was no longer pastoring a church, the church we attended then (Episcopalian) barely had any people my daughter’s age in Sunday school (one; maybe two; seldom that many) and nobody felt the pressure to bring their kids to school. Du muss gehen!, was the German phrase I learned from my German congregants in my small UCC churches (one member remembered going to school to learn English, because German was spoken exclusively at home). The pastor was Herr Pastor and du muss gehen!, i.e., you must go...to church.
Honestly, that was already fading when I was going to church.
On the other hand, church was the place where I could be an "adult" long before I could vote. I was 16 when the 26th Amendment was ratified. I'd been voting in my church on matters of governance and who would be the deacons and elders (very Presbyterian!) for 2 years by then. Not that the "youth vote" swamped the votes of my parent's generation. But there was reason to believe we'd be the "leaders" of the church, or at least respected voices, by the time we were of college graduate age.
My first church as a pastor came to me when I was 42. I was considered "young" by the majority of the members (one told me so directly, although as he put it, he wondered what someone "so young" could teach him (he was nearly twice my age at the time), and was pleasantly surprised to learn I could be his pastor. His was a minority opinion.). Very few people in that church were my age, or near to it.
This was a dramatic shift from the UCC church I'd joined in Austin, where much of the membership was closer to my age, or the older members were well disposed toward letting the "younger" ones (in our '30's) take responsibility for the church. In the two churches I pastored after leaving Austin for seminary, the elderly (70+, to be clear) made it clear who was in charge and who was listened to.
Which, I soon realized, was a primary reason there were so few "young people" in the church. Du muss gehen was long gone, and being told, effectively, that no one was interested in your opinion, drove them away, pretty much in the 15-29 cohort. Why stay where you're not really wanted?
I should point out both of those churches were small (75 on a Sunday would have been a crowd), and both are gone now. Defunct. Collapsed under their own aging demographics. One, so far as I can tell, simply shuttered the place. The other still functions, but as a "gay" church. It leased out its building to that church, then quietly joined forces a few years later as it became clear they literally weren't getting any younger.
Which is where I point out the largest church in the UCC, at one time anyway, was pastored by Jeremiah Wright, which is what drew Barack Obama there back in the day. And one of the largest now is a "gay" church in Dallas, which grew precisely because it offered "open and affirming" (the denomination's term, which I prefer, too) fellowship in a time several years before Obergefell.
I mention all of this because of this:
Some, building on the work of the late sociologist Rodney Stark, have argued it’s caused by denominations growing more liberal. According to this argument, if a church emphasizes all the same issues and concerns as left-leaning political activists, then there’s no reason to do the extra work of belonging to a church. They point to shrinking mainline churches. The United Church of Christ, the first mainline denomination to embrace same-sex marriage, lost more than 40 percent of its members in the 17 years after that decision, for example.
Christianity Today has a bit of a dog in this fight, because it's a very conservative religious publication, not to be confused with Christian Century, which was once "mainstream" but is now more "liberal." As was the UCC, actually. And I can tell you from personal experience that there isn't even a correlation between the UCC embracing same-sex marriage and losing 40% of its members over 17 years after that. Most church members I knew had no idea that was the church's position on the matter. Communication between congregation and national was that bad. This was a matter of polity: the UCC blended a very Lutheran denomination with a Congregational one. Think Puritans joining hands with Episcopalians (because I don't want to spend much time explaining the structures of the Lutheran church. Close enough is good enough.). The German (Lutheran) side was used to doing things in a denominational way; the congregational side was used to being very, very loosely affiliated with other congregations (the SBC is congregational in polity, but probably still more top-down than the UCC is). There was a lot the national church emphasized that the local churches blithely ignored. Politics didn't cause the decline in the UCC; demographics and societal shifts did.
For reasons I can't explain without a great deal of sociological data, more conservative churches tended to be more demanding that their children go to church, and the culture of those churches held families in church together more tightly than the more "liberal" denominations. That, I think, is the better explanation for the decline in "mainline" denominations (decline in membership, I mean), than anything cooked up by Rodney Stark or Max Weber (who is responsible for the laughable notion that industrialized societies, being better educated too, soon turn their back on "childish" things like religious belief). It’s simple demographics and a changing society where church attendance is no longer seen as a social requirement; or necessarily even a social good.
When I was in public school, Sundays were sacrosanct. We had a Jewish synagogue in town, but it never occurred to anyone that observant Jews might want to observe the Sabbath (our Saturday) and so shop on Sunday. Too bad, because everything was closed on Sunday. Blue laws made sure of that because, did I mention, non-Christians didn’t count. I remember the minor rumbling when a new grocery store moved to town and opened on Sunday. Sunday was the day for church, football games in the afternoon, or naps by adults. My wife and I both remember the long, dull Sunday afternoons when there was nothing to do until primetime TeeVee in the evening, at which point her mother would take them back to church (she was raising four children after her husband's untimely death; she needed all the help she could get). Sundays were set aside for church and almost nothing else. We weren't quite observant Jews honoring the Sabbath, but we almost could have been.
When my daughter was in school, extracurricular activities were regularly scheduled as early as 8 in the morning on Sundays, and ran all day. Soccer games and baseball games and field hockey games and what-have-you, were conducted all weekend long, and no day was set aside for anything more important than that. Weekends were for all the organized sports that couldn’t fit after school in the week.
Which is yet another reason young people left church early. They never really attended. Stores, of course, are open 7 days a week; odd is the store that isn't. Church is just one more thing to schedule in an over-scheduled life. I remember, as a young married adult who hadn't yet gone back to church, luxuriating on Sunday morning because I could buy a copy of the Sunday NYTimes (printed in Austin via satellite! It was exciting then.) and spend the day reading through it and the Magazine and just generally not getting dressed until...whenever. I wore a tie back then, 5 days a week. Sunday, I didn't have to (and never did again once I bought a clerical shirt with a plastic insert for the "dog collar.").
What happened to church? Society changed, and left it behind. Once a pillar of society, an institution as important as school and business, it faded into almost insignificance. Were the '80's a "revival" of Christianity? Or just the blush on the cheek of a dying age? I think it's more clearly the latter than the former.
Society left it to the old people, who ran it the way they wanted to because too much of the rest of the world had left them behind. I remember in my last church hearing grumblings from those old people if the service ran 3 minutes over the hour they alloted to it (my parents were the same way. A friend's mother died, and we all attended the funeral. I barely got to speak to my friend afterwards before my parents were demanding I take them home.). Why, I wondered. Where do they have to go? They didn't have busy social lives, business lives, children to cart to soccer games, events to attend. They were just going to go home.
And they didn't want their routine disrupted. Not by a service that didn't end "on time," and not by new members who might impose new social, or other, burdens on them. And certainly not by "young people" (i.e., me, already by that time in my mid-40's) bringing in any "new" ideas.
Old age; changing social standards; the decline of the church as an authority in society.
None of that excludes the "conservative" denominations. It's catching up with them, now. Christmas is on Sunday again this year. How many "conservative" Protestant churches will be open for worship to observe the "holy day"? Next to none, I'm guessing. Christmas is about family, not Christ. Put the "Christ" back in Xmas ("Xmas" is a term created by Christians; or Xians, if you prefer. They saw it as the "chi" from the Greek, first letter in the Greek "Christos," not the "X" from our alphabet. So it goes.), but put him back on Christmas Eve. Leave Christmas morning to Santa Claus.
And some young people are loudly leaving because of the destructive politics which went so far as to "anoint" Donald Trump the new David (David was a sinner, but at least he worshipped God. Trump? Trump only worships Trump.) The pastor of the largest Baptist church here in Houston got himself into some mildly warm water just two weeks ago by preaching about how his congregants should vote out all the Democrats because...well, because he doesn't like them, essentially. This led to the NextDoor discussion I've written about before, because someone posted a link to his next sermon, on the evils of CRT, and several critics of the erstwhile pastor jumped on him with hobnail boots for his previous sermon, as well as the foolishness of this one. I'd say the critics were stronger and more vocal than the supporters, but what does that matter? I'll also point out that pastor is an old guy (older than me); and there are rumors his "mega-church," like all of them do, is beginning to leak members faster than it can replace them. That may well be the reason why he's gone "political." He's trying, I suspect, to stay "relevant." But in a very blue Texas county, I doubt his outreach efforts are going to bear very much fruit.
Certainly all the attention hasn't been positive. His first sermon got him some negative local press, which is where I first heard about it.
The times, they are still a-changin'.
Does this all mean my experiences trump (sorry!) a Pew report? No. But it's interesting Christianity Today is disturbed by this report.
As the researchers charted the possible paths for the future, they tried to keep in mind what they didn’t know and the data they didn’t have. Extrapolating from trends doesn’t account for the kind of dramatic events that shape generations.
“It is possible,” the report says, “that events outside the model—such as war, economic depression, climate crisis, changing immigration patterns or religious innovation—could reverse the reverse current religious switching trends.”
Revival could happen. There’s just nothing in the current data that indicates it will
I have to note that "revival" is a very overworked term in American ecclesiological circles. All our memories are set by the "Great Revival," which really wasn't all that great, or that much of a revival. It coincided with the rise of the respectability of emotion over reason brought on by the Romantic movement, but it didn’t necessarily herald a moving of the Spirit over the waters of American believers; especially since church membership was down to only 41% of the population by 1906. Church attendance increased sharply after World War II (most of us Boomers came along then, and took church going for granted. It hadn't been before that; not society wide). It peaked in the '80's, and has been in decline ever since. "Revival" is not the salvation of the institution of the church; it's more like the drug some think we need to just keep going. Even in my UCC seminary with professors so staid and Midwestern they were almost caricatures, some asked us earnestly if we thought a "revival" was coming. They could read the sociological studies (and did), and the future was grim. "Revival" was their only hope.
Don't bet your retirement on it, is all I'm sayin'.
Hearkening back to that discussion about CRT around the sermon by the Second Baptist (Houston) preacher, I note this:
Black Protestant churches were more likely than any other tradition to preach on racism. Both in sermons addressing race and addressing the election, they were also more likely to address voting rights.
Sermons from Black Protestants in the Pew analysis were twice as likely to encouraging voting when talking about the election (43% vs. 20% overall), while evangelicals were more likely than other traditions to speak on issues, candidates, or parties (48%).
“I just see it as a Christian responsibility for us to engage the needs of our communities. It’s always been about the community as a whole. Churches exist to proclaim the name of Jesus to those who are lost and at the same time to leave his imprint in whatever community they end up in,” said Parks. “The Black church has been a beacon of that. If that meant we’re going to rally people to a voting booth, we’re going to do that.”
A lot of people on that NextDoor discussion didn't like the idea of churches getting involved in politics, in large measure because they didn't like that pastor's politics. I think if I'd dropped these paragraphs into the discussion it would have gone over, as we used to say, like a flash flood in a Fizzies factory (yes, you have to be this old to get that reference. Google is your friend. And no, they weren't good; they tasted like shit. But we were young, what did we know?). Let's just say, as the Rev. Dr. King observed, that 11 am on Sunday morning is still the most segregated hour in America:
Protestants at historically Black churches were seven times more likely to hear a sermon reference voter suppression, early voting, and registering to vote, according to Pew.
Evangelical churches, by contrast, spoke more regularly of prayer for the election and for the president. The Pew report noted, “evangelical pastors tended to employ language related to evil and punishment at a greater rate, using words and phrases such as ‘Satan’ or ‘hell’ at least twice as often as other clergy did.”
When addressing racism, evangelical pastors were more likely to refer to “racial tension” or mention the role of the police, while Bland mainline Christians spoke more often of “white supremacy.”
Are these things right? Or wrong?
That's the analysis from CT, which tends to favor "evangelical" denominations, and notes in its analysis that many Black protestant denominations are "evangelical." So there's no good data there about Catholic or "mainline" Protestants. But it's interesting information, all the same.
Pastors preach to their audience. Quelle surprise. And evangelicals have a tighter grip on their congregations because they preach hell and damnation. And yet even that’s not enough anymore.
Huh.
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