In Houston, now, the largest Baptist church in town reportedly has a lock on funerals for police officers. I know that isn't quite true, but it's a stalwart rumor meant to reflect the political power (waning over the decades, actually) of that church. In almost any smaller town, there is one church it is wisest to be seen belonging to, if you want to be sure to "do everything 'right.'" I'm not saying that's right, per se; but it is the way it has been since Paul's house churches became Augustine's formal churches became cathedrals and, in the modern version, basketball arenas.
Their trend is just as unmistakable: those who are the most likely to attend services weekly are those with a graduate degree. The least likely to attend are those with a high school diploma or less. And these aren’t small differences, either. The last few years have seen nearly a ten-point gap in attendance from the bottom to the top of the education scale.
Less educated people work harder, longer hours, at more physical, if not flat manual, labor. Time was when everything except sports events were closed on Sundays, and church was somewhere to go in the morning because, what else were you gonna do? Read the Sunday Times? Not outside NYC, you weren't (I remember the thrill of being able to buy the Times in Austin, because it was sent electronically via satellite to the local newspaper to print and distribute. This was only 40 years ago.) So some of that "spread" is about economic justice as much as it is about educational attainment. But it doesn't disturb his basic point, just shifts its focus a bit. Especially in light of the opening of his argument, appealing to the Gospel of Luke and the fundamentally Christian idea (truly fundamental, although it's almost never stressed) that the first shall be last and the last first.
But it isn't education that's driving religious affiliation or worship attendance. Indeed, the data points out that those with graduate degrees are most likely to attend worship regularly. It's called "networking," something even my father recognized as an important part of church attendance (I remember him telling me about that fact of life when I was married and living in Austin and returning to church after decades away; that return led me to seminary, eventually). It's also called "leisure time," something people with graduate degrees, who are usually paid commensurate with the value of their diplomas (doctors, lawyers, etc.), tend to have more time off than high school graduates. If you're an auto mechanic at a car dealership, what do you need to network for?
I'm not being severe about this. My grandfather had, at best, a high school diploma (if that) and worked as a manual laborer or heavy equipment operator until he retired in his '60's (and died before he reached 70, as most people did at the time). He was a lay preacher and regularly attended a Primitive Baptist congregation. But times have changed, economically and socially. That's the trend that is truly unmistakeable.
"Networking" points to a fact about church attendance: it's about the people far more than it's about the "religiosity" of the attendants.
That gap persists all the way through the life course, too. Even among sixty-year-olds it’s still there. About 30% are married retired folks are in churches, it’s just 20% of those who are not married. Marriage leads to much higher levels of religiosity - at any age.
He's talking there about married couples attending worship, v. divorced or non-married couples. But his conclusion is that "Marriage leads to much higher levels of religiosity." Or it leads to greater seeking of a community of like minded people you enjoy spending time with. When I married the Lovely Wife we didn't seek out a church because neither of us were exactly comfortable looking for one. We finally did a few years before the Golden Child was born, or almost 15 years into our marriage. We made friends there, enjoyed the people there, threw ourselves into it. There was a couple our age pregnant with their first child about the same time we were, and their child was born around the same time ours was. It was a community. And it ended when we move to St. Louis and I entered seminary.
And after some perfectly miserable experiences in parish ministry, and equally rough times in churches we attended as lay members, we left church again. I have three graduate degrees, including my M.Div., but I haven't regularly attended church in almost 20 years. I suppose I'm an outlier. But mostly, I was teaching English and didn't need to "network," and the people I found in congregations were, to put it kindly, not people I really wanted to spend time with. I'll take the blame for that in Groucho's famous phrase that I wouldn't join any club that would have me as a member. Not anymore, anyway.
Does the data explain me as lacking "religiosity"? Or is the problem in applying that term, and using the data to flatten everyone out into one-size-fits-all explanations?
The clear outlier here is folks who are married with children. Among those who fit both criteria and are under the age of thirty, 37% are attending weekly. That does begin to decline as the age category moves up. I am guessing that’s because folks who have children later in life tend to be less religious, but that’s just a hunch.
Except when the Golden Child was born I was six weeks shy of being 37. And from seminary onward, we attended church weekly; well, until we stopped, and no one in the family disagreed with the cessation. I know, I know, a patch of ice doth not a winter make, nor a single swallow summer. But I'm no less religious than I was; I'm just no more interested in worshipping among people than I was. Me and Groucho, is my explanation.
These results are hard to ignore and should sound some major alarms for any person of faith who is concerned about the large state of American society. Increasingly religion has become the enclave for those who have lived a “proper” life. College degree, middle class income, married with children. If you check all those boxes, the likelihood of you regularly attending church is about double the rate of folks who don’t.
This is also troublesome for American democracy, as well. Religion, at it’s best, is a place where people from a variety of economic, social, racial, and political backgrounds can find common ground around a shared faith. It’s place to build bridges to folks who are different than you. Unfortunately, it looks like American religion is not at its best.
Yeah, bullshit. Working stiffs like my Grandfather were not likely attending that St. Louis UCC church in its heyday for late 19th and early 20th century glitterati. I never saw anyone with a college degree attend my grandparents Primitive Baptist church, though they'd have been more welcome there than my grandparents would have been at the "high churches" of many American cities.
Church attendance after WWII was all about the "proper" life. If you weren't dressed properly, you weren't welcome at all. The little country church I pastored in Southern Illinois, two of the happiest years of my ministry, was sometimes visited by the town crank. What to call her? In NYC she'd be a "bag lady," except she had a home of her own, and fierce Midwestern independence. I don't think she was mentally ill; she just lived according to her lights. She was her own woman, and once in a while she'd wander in to the church service. It was a tiny room, you couldn't miss a newcomer if you tried. But the town (of about 150, IIRC) all knew her and all accepted her, and so welcomed her if she showed up. That whole congregation was more "religious" in the way Mr. Burge seems to mean the term than any I've known outside my grandparents' church. And there was precious little concern with being "proper" in either congregation.
As for religion being a place where a variety of backgrounds come together: in what church? Dr. King, I think it was, called Sunday morning the most segregated hour in America. It still is. Most churches are white or black; or now gay, or not. I think some of the "gay" churches are also more multi-racial than I'm used to, and good on them. But I attended two black church services; one in seminary, one where I preached as the guest at a black UCC church in Lake Charles, Louisiana; and I can tell you in both churches I was more welcomed by the congregation than any one of their members would have been in the white churches I knew. Oh, there was no overt racism; but the segregation of the hour was still a profound cultural reality.
I suspect, despite the exceptions, that they still prove that rule.
No, church in America (and yes, we mean "Christian church, don't we? Not synagogue or mosque or anything else; just Christian) is not the democratic American melting pot, then or now. It's not, nor was it ever, egalitarian, class-blind, race-blind, or gender-blind. Besides, I don't meet Muslims, Jews, or Sikhs in my church, and Muslims don't meet me in their mosque nor Jews in their synagogue. The idea that church attendance is, or once was, reflective of America as a whole and so an instrument of democracy, is laughable.
Democracy as whole in America has led on the issues of inclusion and acceptance of genders, races, and religious beliefs, far more than church in America ever has. In fact, all this data tells me is that the beat goes on.
And that should be of concern for church and religion in America. But, as Fehrlengetti once wrote: "I am waiting for someone to really discover America. And wail." He meant that, or at least I think he did, in the '50's American jazz sense of sing with unalloyed joy for what had finally been found.
I'm with the poet. I'm still waiting.
