Shrinking Church, Thriving Church

The church is shrinking, but it’s getting stronger as well.

That is the paradox afoot on the American religious scene. The number of unchurched — “nones” and “dones” — are skyrocketing, while the remainers, the ones who stick it out, are becoming more devout — smaller but better.

It’s bad for the church — the visible, institutional church. And it’s good for the church — the hidden church, the body of Christ, the assembly of believers gathered by the gospel.

The first part is easily corroborated. Study after study shows that the exodus out the church doors is profound. By now everybody has heard the news, so we can recap.

The seven sisters of the mainline, as the seven traditional Protestant old-line denominations are called, have lost substantial membership in the past 20 years, some by over half. The Disciples of Christ are down 57.25 percent in membership from 2000 to 2020. In that same time period, the Presbyterian Church USA has dropped by 50.68 percent; the United Church of Christ, 43 percent; the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, 38.6 percent; the Episcopal Church, 32.42 percent; the United Methodist Church, 24.4 percent; and the American Baptist Church, 21.7 percent. (READ MORE from Tom Raabe: Biden, Trash-Talker in Chief)

But the decline has hit America’s largest Christian denomination as well — the Catholic Church. According to a recent study, following the COVID pandemic only 17 percent of Catholic adults go to Mass every week — down from over 24 percent before the virus. The number for millennials is 9 percent.

Many are the reasons proffered for the exodus. Some seem nonspiritual – parishioners move and don’t adopt another congregation in their new location; the services aren’t at convenient times so they stop attending; they simply get out of the habit; COVID put them on their couches for online worship and, post-virus, they never roused themselves from the cushions. Some see church as providing only community, and they can find that elsewhere — heck, every morning down at the local Cracker Barrel if community per se is all they’re after.

The factors associated with a rising secularism have also taken a toll. The attack on religion, the attempt to strip religious views from the public square, the rise of scientific explanations for life’s big questions that leave no room for God have all moved people out of the pews.

But there is also the redundancy factor. Catholicism is victim to the same social factors as mainline Protestantism. Many priests, as their Protestant peers, deliver sermons regaling social-justice warriors and damning conservatives as the reactionary spawn of the devil. It has been that way for decades now, and as the church becomes more progressive, more political, more social-justice-oriented, it becomes less theological. Doctrine becomes emasculated; beliefs become personal opinions, “my truths,” and no longer binding on the masses.

The church in this world seems more and more unnecessary. It serves as a redundancy system — a backup network of fellow travelers who meet once a week to reinforce political and social allegiance. Sure, there are a few comforting rituals … maybe some favorite songs to sing, the familiar liturgical rubrics, empty now of meaning but still producing the warm religious fuzzies. But eventually, the whole enterprise becomes tangential. It adds a religious skin to the political pudding the attender is in reality invested in. It doesn’t provide anything more, or other, or unique or different, than the political and social networks he already accesses. And the churchgoer becomes a “done.” He doesn’t need it anymore; it’s redundant. (READ MORE: The LGBTQ Conquest of America)

Unfortunately, it is just these churchgoers who have inculcated their offspring in the idea that religion is optional and requiring of no moral obligation. They passed the faith down to the next generation as not a vital and crucial — and certainly not eternally necessary — aspect of life.

The result is the meteoric rise of the “nones.” These are they who do not identify with any religion; they’re atheists, agnostics, or nothing in particular, and they constitute almost 30 percent of the population. And they’re young — 65 percent are under 50 years old — and comprise a lot of millennials and Gen Z (44 percent of millennials and 45 percent of Gen Z are nones).

It’s the second side of the paradox — that a stripped-down church is reclaiming a vibrant, electric faith — that is the new news.

An Associated Press article by Tim Sullivan dropped a few days ago extolling just this side of the paradox. Quoting from the article:

Across the U.S., the Catholic Church is undergoing an immense shift. Generations of Catholics who embraced the modernizing tide sparked in the 1960s by Vatican II are increasingly giving way to religious conservatives who believe the church has been twisted by change, with the promise of eternal salvation replaced by guitar Masses, parish food pantries and casual indifference to church doctrine.

The shift, molded by plummeting church attendance, increasingly traditional priests and growing numbers of young Catholics searching for more orthodoxy, has reshaped parishes across the country, leaving them sometimes at odds with Pope Francis and much of the Catholic world.

The article focuses on a resurgent conservative Catholic piety, driven by young believers enamored of what the writer calls “the old ways” — by which is meant a return to ancient, traditional music; priests donning traditional garb, like cassocks; more sermons concerned with sin and confession and church doctrine; and the Latin Mass, along with more incense and more Gregorian chants.

These young people are looking for something different, something unlike their workaday lives. Said Ben Rouleau, quoted in the AP article: “We want this ethereal experience that is different from everything else in our lives.”

This is one of the forgotten attractions of traditional, even liturgical, worship. It’s different.

The modern church, the institution that is now obsessed with informality, wants to push on its members the same quotidian attitudes and styles they imbibe all week long. The sermon resembles a TED talk; the music is Christian Top 40; the attire is business casual, or worse, weekend casual. What those returning to orthodoxy are saying is, of the 168 hours in a week, give us one, just one, where we can remember our spiritual heritage, where we can flee the lives of the other 167 and access worship in the ancient forms. Where we can connect in worship with the saints before us, who centuries before sang the same Sanctus, the same Agnus Dei, that we sing today. (READ MORE: Courting the Vote of the ‘Nones’)

Chanting the psalms responsively, to take one liturgical action, is so unlike anything we’ll encounter during the week as to be immensely attractive — and meaningful. Why do we have to sing pop ditties in church that sound like the ones streaming into our ear pods all week long?

While boomers and other left-oriented cohorts rush out the church doors, the ones that remain, especially the young people, are pushing the church rightward. With the flight of their elders, they find themselves wielding more influence in their churches, and their conservative views are gaining traction.

Their cause is bolstered by an influx of young conservative priests coming out of seminary, priests who, according to a report, are far more likely than their older peers to identify as conservative both theologically and politically. On theology, the report said: “More than half of the priests who were ordained since 2010 see themselves on the conservative side of the scale. No surveyed priests who were ordained after 2020 described themselves as ‘very progressive.’”

Although scattered around the country, and representing only a minority of Catholics, this resurgence of serious churchmanship is encouraging amid the general decline of Christianity in America.

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