Happy Lutheran

I just finished a really interesting article that was published in The Atlantic on April 3, 2024. [You might be able to read it here: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/04/america-religion-decline-non-affiliated/677951/] We are reading it for our upcoming board meeting, and it is really thought-provoking.

The title is “The True Cost of the Churchgoing Bust.” The author, Derek Thompson, is a self-proclaimed agnostic, and he opens the article by saying, “I have spent most of my life thinking about the decline of faith in America in mostly positive terms. Organized religion seemed, to me, beset by scandal and entangled in noxious politics. So, I thought, what is there really to mourn?”

It is worth pausing for a minute with these brief sentences, because I imagine they resonate with many people who either were never a part of a faith community, or who have left the church after being wounded, disillusioned, or worse. Scandals? Check. Many different faith communities–including Christians–have struggled with abusive leaders, criminal mismanagement, and a wide range of other bad behaviors. Noxious politics that preach condemnation and exclusion to a wide swath of people whose behaviors/beliefs/identity don’t fit with a narrowly-understood norm? Check. Christians can cast stones from glass houses with the best of them. So, I can imagine for many people who have had a bad experience with the church, it must seem like the chickens are coming home to roost as churches, and not just mainline churches, are hemorrhaging members.

However, this is not the direction Thompson wants to take. Instead, in the following sentences, he he suggests that he has had a change of heart. He writes, “Maybe 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.”

It turns out that even a non-believer can see the value in religious institutions–not just in some vague “spirituality,” but in religion: religious organizations, practices, ceremonies and communities. The rest of the article lays out his observations, and his argument.

According to a recent poll, more than 1/4 of Americans now identify as religiously unaffiliated, the highest level ever recorded. It was in the 1990s that the number of people leaving religious communities spiked, with the result that in 2021, “membership in houses of worship fell below a majority for the first time on record.” The article makes brief mention of some possible reasons for this shift–changes in politics and family life, for example–but in some ways, the reasons for it are less important than the results of it.

Thompson notes that active participation in organized religion provides many things at once: “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.” Let’s say that a different way: being part of a religious congregation nurtures a relationship with God, fosters a positive sense of identity, creates structures for meaning-making across time, and facilitates life in community. For Thompson, it is this emphasis on community that is so important.

According to Thompson, “the United States is in a midst of historically unprecedented decline in face-to-face socializing,” and this is particularly true with young people and working class Americans; and it is especially true for men.  What I also found interesting is his observation that non-religious Americans are also less civically engaged. You would think that perhaps people who are not going to church are spending more time volunteering, but that is not the case. He cited current research that that observed how 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.

One of the things that I found particularly interesting in the article was the parallel he made using the example of restaurants. I cite the whole paragraph below.

Imagine, by analogy, a parallel universe where Americans suddenly gave up on sit-down restaurants. In surveys, they named many reasonable motivations for their abstinence: the expense, the overuse of salt and sugar and butter, the temptation to drink alcohol. As restaurants disappeared by the hundreds, some mourned their closure, while others said it simply didn’t matter.  After all, there were still plenty of ways for people to feed themselves. Over time, however, Americans as a group never found another social activity to replace their dining-out time. They saw less of one another with each passing decade. Sociologists noted that the demise of restaurants had correlated with the rise in aloneness, just as the CDC noticed an increase in anxiety and depression.

 His point is obvious: people can give all kinds of reasons for why they no longer go to church, but the negative effects are the same, both individually and on our larger communal lives, and some of these losses won’t be fully experienced for decades. 

The last thing in the article I want to highlight is the point made by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt in his book, The Anxious Generation. He talks about the rise of the smartphone, concurrent with the rise of “depopulated churches.” In Thompson’s interpretation of Haidt’s argument, digital life is “disembodied, asynchronous, shallow, and solitary.” By contrast, public, communal religion is the opposite in almost every respect. Religious practices–“the religious ritual”–are typically “embodied, synchronous, deep, and collective.” Ultimately, organized religion facilitates meaning-making and identity-creation, and Thompson concludes by saying, “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.”

Now, in some ways, this is a very humanistic/agnostic argument for religious practice–it didn’t surprise me that the author was raised in a Reform Jewish home: worshipping God is hardly mentioned. But, in other ways, it reflects the deeply-held Christian belief that a relational God created humans fundamentally for relationship, too–relationship with God, with each other and with the whole of creation. Life-in-relationship is our telos, our purpose, our truest identity–and without each other, we whither, cut off from the nourishing vine that sustains our lives as children of God in Jesus Christ. None of us can thrive on our own, and a society of “hyper-individuals” cannot thrive, either.

It turns out that we need God. We need each other. We need intentional religious communities. In other words, we need the church.