More on Christianity in America (with bonus updates)

Last updated on: February 24, 2015 at 11:23 pm by Jane the Actuary

More on Christianity in America (with bonus updates) 2015-02-24T23:23:54-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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(originally written 1/4)

Funny how your mind wanders during church . . .

Our new assistant pastor is Indian. No, not “of Indian ancestry” and not “Indian-American” (which, you’ll recall, I think should only be applied to someone who does have dual nationalities rather than American nationals with Indian ancestry or national origin). No, he’s Indian-Indian, meaning that he’s here on something more like an expat assignment/sabbatical.

Anyway, one way in which he brings his culture along with him, apparently, is that he gives long homilies. Don’t get me wrong — they’re well-thought-out and well-delivered homilies, and I don’t object to the length, but the mind does tend to wander — in this case, to contemplating Christianity in India, and at other times and places, and my blog post from yesterday, asking why Christianity in the US has so far, been a lot more successful, though not wholly so, at staving off the decline that churches in Europe are facing.

Here are my thoughts:

The conventional wisdom says that this is all the inevitable result of the wealth of modern developed nations. Religion is a means for the poor to find comfort and consolation, and the hope that you’ll be better off in the next life than this one, so when you are no longer poor, you no longer need this.

But shouldn’t the whole hierarchy of needs say that the poor are too busy trying to make it from day to day to have any energy left for religion? And is it really true that the poor are more likely to be religious? Certainly, when Christianity was first becoming established, it wasn’t the poor but the upper classes that were drawn to this message. And St. Francis came from a wealthy family. Now, too, in China, the reported boom in conversions to Christianity are coming as a reaction to the new-found wealth, a sort of “is there all there is?” spiritual hunger. Besides which (sorry, no citation), it seems to me that I’ve read recently that in America it’s actually the poor that are “losing their religion.”

So here’s my Big Thought of The Day: what’s the difference between the US and Europe? We don’t have a State Church, or any history of a State Church. Instead, we have all manner of denominations competing for adherents.

Now, I’m not saying that those churches which have done their very best to cater to changing mores are succeeding in retaining their membership, nor that the best way for churches which are losing ground to recover is to change their doctrine and moral teachings. But nonetheless, the very fact that there are so many denominations means that even if some of them screw up royally, there are others who might not, and who do find the right “formula” to attract worshippers.

(The Catholic Church is in part a bit “stuck” in a past in which all its parishoners followed their parents and grandparents before them, and hasn’t really adapted to the American religious rough and tumble.)

Compare this to Europe:

In Germany, this past fall, there were multiple reports (see here, for instance, or just google Germany church tax) that a change in the Church Tax formula, now including capital gains, meant there was a significant uptick in official de-registrations.

And with respect to England, I read an unsettling blog post the other day that the Catholic bishops there, indifferent to their responsibilities to their flock, were so eager to transform the church into being lay-led with female priests in all respects but ordination that they were actually deliberately rejecting applicants to the seminar. Now, of course, in England, the Catholic Church is not the State Church — that’s the Church of England, of course — but I suspect that a “take the parishoners for granted” mentality is at play.

Does this mean that America is “safe”? Not by a long shot. There are a lot of factors at play, and one of them certainly is the path-dependence. Let’s assume that a certain percentage of the population is just hardwired to be believers, another portion to be atheists, and a large number will just go along with whatever they’ve been taught — that means that once a shift has occurred towards secularism, and the numbers of people who attend church and take their kids to Sunday School because it’s important in order to be Good Moral People decline, then the next generation will likewise lack that formative experience. And it’s certainly the case that, much more now than in the past, atheists are pushing back pretty hard and getting their message out that “you don’t need to go to church to be a good person.”

So that’s what I have to offer for today.

UPDATE (Monday):

A commenter suggested that, in general, healthy churches require stable families, so the tendency of Americans to be mobile might be contributing to the weakening of the church-attendance norm — but I’m thinking that exactly the opposite might be true and might be a further component of an explanation of why America is more religious than Europe is: Americans are a much more mobile lot than Europeans. Sure, there were the big upheavals of the past — such as the ethnic cleansing of the ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe, but the conventional wisdom is that people just don’t move around as much in Europe as in the U.S., where people have immigrated to the country in the first place, and their descendants moved out West, or North to factories, or any place that opportunity beckoned.

Certainly for immigrants, the church played an important role in providing a haven, a way to connect with others from the Old Country, and church affiliation wasn’t just based on denomination and geographical proximity but on ethnic origin — one church for the Polish Catholics, another for the Germans, and so on. My grandmother’s baptismal and first communion certificate, which were passed down to me, were in German, even though she herself has a third-generation American at that point. And even well past the point when people ceased to look for connections to people who spoke their native language and preserved their customs, a church was/is an institution that provides a “point of entry” to a new community for newcomers who haven’t got generations of relatives living nearby — especially for smaller churches, or churches that emphasize Bible study or similar groups.

Now, for many people, this doesn’t matter much, and in any case, matters much less than it did in the past. But I would guess that, to some degree, this has, on average, made a difference in the relative church-going-ness of the US and Europe.

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