{"id":126,"date":"2015-01-04T18:43:00","date_gmt":"2015-01-04T18:43:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2015\/01\/more-on-christianity-in-america-with-bonus-updates.html"},"modified":"2015-02-24T23:23:54","modified_gmt":"2015-02-25T05:23:54","slug":"more-on-christianity-in-america-with-bonus-updates","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2015\/01\/more-on-christianity-in-america-with-bonus-updates.html","title":{"rendered":"More on Christianity in America (with bonus updates)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

(originally written 1\/4)<\/p>\n

Funny how your mind wanders during church . . .<\/p>\n

Our new assistant pastor is Indian. \u00a0No, not \u201cof Indian ancestry\u201d and not \u201cIndian-American\u201d (which, you\u2019ll recall<\/a>, I think should only be applied to someone who does have dual nationalities rather than American nationals with Indian ancestry or national origin). \u00a0No, he\u2019s Indian-Indian, meaning that he\u2019s here on something more like an expat assignment\/sabbatical.<\/p>\n

Anyway, one way in which he brings his culture along with him, apparently, is that he gives long homilies. \u00a0Don\u2019t get me wrong \u2014 they\u2019re well-thought-out and well-delivered homilies, and I don\u2019t object to the length, but the mind does tend to wander \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

Here are my thoughts:<\/p>\n

The conventional wisdom says that this is all the inevitable result of the wealth of modern developed nations. \u00a0Religion is a means for the poor to find comfort and consolation, and the hope that you\u2019ll be better off in the next life than this one, so when you are no longer poor, you no longer need this.<\/p>\n

But shouldn\u2019t 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? \u00a0Certainly, when Christianity was first becoming established, it wasn\u2019t the poor but the upper classes that were drawn to this message. \u00a0And St. Francis came from a wealthy family. \u00a0Now, too, in China, the reported boom in conversions to Christianity are coming as a reaction to the new-found wealth, a sort of \u201cis there all there is?\u201d spiritual hunger. \u00a0Besides which (sorry, no citation), it seems to me that I\u2019ve read recently that in America it\u2019s actually the poor that are \u201closing their religion.\u201d<\/p>\n

So here\u2019s my Big Thought of The Day: \u00a0what\u2019s the difference between the US and Europe? \u00a0We don\u2019t have a State Church, or any history of a State Church. \u00a0Instead, we have all manner of denominations competing for adherents.<\/p>\n

Now, I\u2019m 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. \u00a0But 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 \u201cformula\u201d to attract worshippers.<\/p>\n

(The Catholic Church is in part a bit \u201cstuck\u201d in a past in which all its parishoners followed their parents and grandparents before them, and hasn\u2019t really adapted to the American religious rough and tumble.)<\/p>\n

Compare this to Europe:<\/p>\n

In Germany, this past fall, there were multiple reports (see here<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

And with respect to England, I read an unsettling blog post <\/a>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. \u00a0Now, of course, in England, the Catholic Church is not the State Church \u2014 that\u2019s the Church of England, of course \u2014 but I suspect that a \u201ctake the parishoners for granted\u201d mentality is at play.<\/p>\n

Does this mean that America is \u201csafe\u201d? \u00a0Not by a long shot. \u00a0There are a lot of factors at play, and one of them certainly is the path-dependence. \u00a0Let\u2019s 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\u2019ve been taught \u2014 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\u2019s important in order to be Good Moral People decline, then the next generation will likewise lack that formative experience. \u00a0And it\u2019s certainly the case that, much more now than in the past, atheists are pushing back pretty hard and getting their message out that \u201cyou don\u2019t need to go to church to be a good person.\u201d<\/p>\n

So that\u2019s what I have to offer for today.<\/p>\n

UPDATE (Monday):<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 but I\u2019m 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: \u00a0 Americans are a much more mobile lot than Europeans. \u00a0Sure, there were the big upheavals of the past \u2014 such as the ethnic cleansing of the ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe, but the conventional wisdom is that people just don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t just based on denomination and geographical proximity but on ethnic origin \u2014 one church for the Polish Catholics, another for the Germans, and so on. \u00a0My grandmother\u2019s 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. \u00a0And 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 \u201cpoint of entry\u201d to a new community for newcomers who haven\u2019t got generations of relatives living nearby \u2014 especially for smaller churches, or churches that emphasize Bible study or similar groups.<\/p>\n

Now, for many people, this doesn\u2019t matter much, and in any case, matters much less than it did in the past. \u00a0But 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.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(originally written 1\/4) Funny how your mind wanders during church . . . Our new assistant pastor is Indian. \u00a0No, not \u201cof Indian ancestry\u201d and not \u201cIndian-American\u201d (which, you\u2019ll recall, I think should only be applied to someone who does have dual nationalities rather than American nationals with Indian ancestry or national origin). \u00a0No, he\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[6,92,91],"class_list":["post-126","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-christianity","tag-church-attendance","tag-secularism"],"yoast_head":"\nMore on Christianity in America (with bonus updates)<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"(originally written 1\/4) Funny how your mind wanders during church . . . 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