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Not a Time of Slumping Religion: An Interview with Rodney Stark

September 08, 2010 by Timothy Dalrymple

Continued from Page 1

The second factor was, when the clergy in the mainline denominations decided that they could no longer save souls -- because there were no souls to save -- they decided that they should save the world instead. They switched from religion to politics, and that was a politics of Left-wing radicalism.

It's fine, of course, to be a Left-wing radical. But it was far out of step with the people in the pews. The people in the pews still believed in God, and the people in the pews did not believe that they needed a socialist government next week. Consequently, they stopped sitting in those pews and started going to other pews.

Jeffrey Hadden published a book in 1968 called The Gathering Storm in the Churches. He understood what was happening. He said that a big gap has opened up between the pulpit and the pews. It has two dimensions. One is religious, that the people in the pulpit are no longer really men of God. And the other is political, that the people behind the pulpit are very much men of the Left, and most of the people in the pews are not. The upshot of this, he anticipated, was going to be the continuing decline of the so-called mainline denominations.

And what he said was true. The decline has continued. I believe the Episcopalians lost another 3 percent last year. These have become small, not very important denominations.

So what will happen? Will the mainline denominations eventually decide to shut down shop?

My old hometown is a perfect model of what the American religious market is like. When I was a kid, Jamestown, North Dakota was split about 60 percent Protestant and 40 percent Catholic. The Protestants came in about seven varieties of Lutheran, and the biggest church was the Methodist and the second biggest was the Presbyterians. They're big churches and they stood on the corner of two downtown blocks, two churches facing one another. The Assemblies of God met in an apartment above an auto parts store. The Church of the Nazarene met in what had been a little one-room country schoolhouse that had been moved into town and had a steeple attached to it.

If you go to Jamestown today, the Nazarenes could not even fit their choir into what was their church when I was a kid. The Methodist and the Presbyterian churches are still sitting there on their corners and staring across the street at one another -- but they're empty, except for some very elderly people. The Assemblies of God has got a great big church building on the edge of town, they have two full-time ministers, and they're the biggest church of town.

What happened? Well, the sons and daughters of the people who used to go to the Methodist and Presbyterian churches left, and they went to the Nazarenes and to the Assemblies of God. There's just as much religion in Jamestown now, if not more, than when I was a kid. But who practices and who supplies it has changed radically. I could never have anticipated that when I left for college. I could never have anticipated it -- but it happened, and it happened that way all over the country.

As a matter of fact, one of the big changes is that the second-largest Protestant body in the United States today, second only to the Southern Baptists, is the non-denominational Evangelical Protestant churches. They hardly existed forty years ago, but today they probably have half as many members as the Southern Baptists. That's real growth, and it shows that the product matters and effort makes a great deal of difference. People in evangelical churches witness their faith and bring their friends and neighbors to church, and the people in liberal churches -- at least according to survey data -- don't witness and don't invite anybody into their church.

What about scholars and pollsters who have said that the younger generations are abandoning the evangelical churches?

George Barna scared every evangelical preacher in America a couple of years ago by coming out with the remarkable finding that people under 30 had left the church. There were screams and hollers and everybody was going to organize all of these campaigns to save the young people.

Nonsense. As long as there has been survey data, it has shown the same thing. Even back in the 1930s, it was true that people under thirty are less likely to go to church than people over 30. It's been true ever since.

Whenever you find a difference between two groups, you have two options. Does that difference reflect social change? That is to say, is it a generational effect? Or is it an aging effect? The answer in this case is that it's an aging effect. People leave home, they stop going to church, the sleep in on Sunday mornings. Then they get married, have children, and go back to church. Simple as that, and it's been going on for the fifty or sixty years that we know about.

Article Continued On Next Page

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9/8/2010 4:00:00 AM

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About Timothy Dalrymple

Timothy Dalrymple is the CEO and Chief Creative Officer of Polymath Innovations, a strategic storytelling agency that advances the good with visionary organizations and brands. He leads a unique team of communicators from around North America and across the creative spectrum, serving mission-driven businesses and nonprofits who need a partner to amplify their voice and good works. Once a world-class gymnast whose career ended with a broken neck, Tim channeled his passions for faith and storytelling into his role as VP of Business Development for Patheos, helping to launch and grow the network into the world's largest religion website. He holds a Ph.D. in Religion from Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Tim blogs at Philosophical Fragments.

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