Americans’ belief in God hit an all-time low about 6 months ago — here's why https://t.co/mpm4sWBhvc
— Raw Story (@RawStory) March 3, 2023
Up close, the trend looks even more dramatic. Only about half of Americans believe in “God as described in the Bible,” while about a quarter believe in a “higher power or spiritual force,” according to a Pew poll. Just one-third of Generation Z say they believe in God without a doubt.
Congregational membership, too, is at an all-time low. In 2021 Gallup found that, for the first time ever, fewer than half of Americans – 47% – were members of a church, synagogue or mosque.
Call me when it gets down to 41%. That's where the country was in 1906, with a much smaller, much less urbanized and industrialized, population. I live in the 4th largest country in the country, in an area that was farm country in 1906. I knew people close to my age who remember when Houston was a wagon's ride away from here. She was mocked for dating someone (now her husband) so far away from the neighborhood, i.e., in Houston. I can drive to downtown Houston in 20 minutes, traffic permitting. It took half a day to get there in the 1950's.
The times, they are a'changin'.
Yes, it's dropping back down to 1906 levels. But it took 115 years for that to happen. I suspect people in 1906 thought we had "secularized" back then, too. Lincoln, if you look closely, was no frontier evangelical. He used the same words Jefferson did ("God," "creator," etc.), many of the words the Deists used 100 year before him. He was hardly an "evangelical Christian" as we would define that term today. Probably our Presidents since Carter were more religious (not Reagan, really. Or HWBush, who was just a card-carrying Episcopalian, by most measures. W. claimed to "born again," but it didn't keep him from being a weasel. Carter's adherence to his understanding of Christianity was more held against him than in his favor. What, you think Trump exposed to hypocrisy of the "religious right"? It just finally reached it's generational limit with him. Coincidence is not causation.) But are we plunging irrevocably into secularization?
As Chou En-Lai (ask yer grandpa! Punks!) said of the French Revolution: it's too soon to tell. Membership in churches was down to 41% of the population in 1906. It peaked at 70% in 1998.
At the end of the century, eight of every ten Americans were Christian, one adhered to another religion, and one had no religious preference. The non- Christians included Jews, Buddhists, and a rapidly growing number of Muslims.
Those numbers have obviously declined since then. They've declined before. They may rise again. Or they may not.
I've been down this road once or twice before. There are numerous studies on declining church attendance, none of which hinge on rising secularization as the only possible cause. There's the 'Bowling Alone' hypothesis, for example, pointing out the rather peculiarly American propensity for joining (in the 19th century, which Tocqueville thought noteworthy) and then not joining (in the 20th century) organizations of like-minded people: clubs like the Optimists and the Elks (my father was an Optimist until everybody seemingly decided it wasn't worth the effort anymore), I've seen several congregations dissolve for much the same reasons. Part of the assumption behind "rising secularization" is that all church members are fervent believers and practically "religious" (in the Roman Catholic use of that category), when they never were. Churches were social organizations, and they have served their purpose. I can assure you most of the people I knew in churches were, by and large, fine people (nastier to the pastor than ever I imagined, but I learned that lesson, too). But they weren't really, in any sense, religious. As Auden said in one of his earliest poems, when the dissolution came, it came "parting easily two who were never really joined." It wasn't, in other words, as painful as a divorce or cataclysmic as a death.
Who misses bowling leagues anymore? Or men's business/charity clubs? I know the Shriners are still around because they run endless TV ads promoting their children's hospital. It's a laudable thing, but is that their raison d'etre now?
Churches once ran hospitals; and orphanages, and mental health wards; and even charities for sailors on the Mississippi. Eventually most of those services were taken over by the state or by for-profit entities (or private charities). So it goes. The church as an institution filled a huge number of needs in the world. Most of that is beyond their reach, now; or beyond their caring, too. So it goes. Does that mean we were secularizing from the moment the church stopped owning that hospital or orphanage?
Really?
Secularization is a poorly defined term in this article, but basically it seems to refer to matters arguably reserved to religion, such as the concept of the "sacred":
Secularization in industrializing societies had been anticipated by many European thinkers in the 19th century, including the likes of Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, two of the founders of sociology. Weber spoke of the “disenchantment” of the world: the idea that increasing scientific knowledge would replace supernatural explanations.
For decades afterward, social scientists who study religion took secularization in industrialized societies more or less for granted. Some assumed that religion’s disappearance from many societies was all but certain – such as C. Wright Mills, who proclaimed in 1959 that “the sacred shall disappear altogether except, possibly, in the private realm.”
My knowledge of Weber is not strong enough to drag him into this discussion, so I'm sticking with what the article provides. First, "supernatural explanations" went the way of the dodo sometime after 1906. It's decline led directly to the creation and rise of fundamentalism, which didn't get its hands on the reins until the 1980's. We can take from that Weber's argument, and discard it as too simply by half. For Weber secularization meant "rejecting religion outright," a fight that was fought across most of the 20th century, and lost by the early 21st century (finally). It's too narrow a view of religion by half; at least, for purposes of this post, that's my argument and I'm sticking to it. I reject Weber's presumptive definition of the term, which means it can't be coming to pass soon, because it doesn't reflect reality.
Mills is not much better, because "the sacred" is alive and well in the public realm. Just ask anyone who adheres fervently to an ideology, and idea, a precept, a claim. It may be unfair to say Donald Trump holds anything sacred, but his supporters certainly hold fast to the idea he is the only Presiden who can save the country, or make it great again, or whatever claim they adhere to (it seems to change with the angle of the sun in the day). Again, far too weak a concept to prove "secularization" is about to rule America.
And I limit myself to America because this is an issue in America. Yes, Europe is far more secular (i.e., less supportive of churches via attendance) than American has been for a century or more. Two world wars walked all over Europe and the churches, from Rome down to the Evangelical Church of Germany (and the Church of England, though they were on the "right" side) were useless to complicit (the would-be head of the Church of England was far more fascist friendly than his brother who took the throne upon his abdication. One can be almost grateful for the historical nightmare of Henry VIII continuing the idea that the monarch of England could never divorce, or marry a divorced woman.). Dragging Europe into this as a convenient analogy when it suits, is really a poor argument at all. America was very publicly religious in the 20th century as Europe shrank away from the historical burden of state Christianity (and so Christianity) in that same century. Apples and sausages, people.
I bring this up not to set up straw men and knock them over (I am admittedly skimming these topics, not adequately addressing them) to get (this is only a blog post, after all!) to this:
Still, we argue that the latest numbers regarding religious belief, behavior and belonging in the U.S. paint a clear portrait of secularization. Beyond the more universal factors, other developments that have been detrimental to religion include a strong reaction against the political power of the religious right, and anger at the Catholic Church’s child sex abuse scandal.
The consequences of religion’s weakening are unclear. But while its meaning for America remains an open question, whether secularization is happening is not.
All well and good, but the question remains: what does "secularization" mean? That statistics (i.e., polls) reveal fewer people pray now than said they did earlier? Considering what the public expectations of private prayer were (people are still squawking about public prayer in schools, including the current mayor of New York City), d'ya think that prior data is really sound? Yes, people attended churches in greater numbers in my childhood (when church attendance peaked in America, if not church membership), but how many of those pew-sitters were baptized heathens, present because it was the socially accepted thing to do? My own parents stopped attending church regularly for a number of reasons: they got old, their friends changed churches or died, they changed. Social pressure was keen on them in my childhood; it wasn't when they were old and retired. I met a number of people like that in my time in seminary and in pulpits. In my church (the one I'm ordained in) the tradition was from the Germans; "Du muss gehen!" You must go! Yeah, that came to an end decades ago.
Because of "secularization"? Or just because society shifted and the institution of the church, like the institution of the bowling league or the garden club or the men's business club, simply no longer served a purpose? Sunday was once legally and socially sacrosanct: stores in my hometown were closed by law, banned from selling many items (except groceries). The day was dead: no school planned events, no organized leagues played on Sunday morning, or afternoon, for that matter. Today organized sports in some social circles completely prelude Sunday worship, and nobody blinks. The calendar is full, the kids have to play, the church is just...not that important.
Because we are secularized? Or because we are no longer socialized to church attendance? Secularization assumes we were there, in the first place, out of profound belief. Well, that's the 20th century argument about Christianity: that we must believe, we must have "Jesus in our hearts." Or rather, that's the argument of fundamentalists and evangelicals, who emphasise it was a badge of membership. You're either "born again," and have "Jesus in your heart," or you're not. And if you're not, you're out. That was always and ever the point of that. A/k/a social pressure, again.
It never kept the Baptists I grew up with from drinking and dancing and screwing, like the rest of us. Were they secularized? Or were they baptized heathens?
So much depends on the definition, doesn't it?
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