Lovett H. Weems has written an interesting article in a September 22, 2010 article in The Christian Century. He shows that worship attendance among mainline Protestant churches increased slightly in the 1990's, but has had a steep decline in the first part of the 21st century.
David A. Roozen, reporting on the findings of the 2008 Faith Communities Today survey of American congregations of all types, points out that the "erosion of vitality" holds not only for "oldline" Protestants but also for evangelical Protestants, Catholics, Orthodox and "other world religions." The new century has brought a "retreat for America's congregations," according to Roozen. Churches averaging 350 or more have declined steadily since 2001. However, churches averaging over 1000 have continued to increased in worship attendance.
What are the reasons for the drop?
One possibility is less frequency in worship attendance. Some studies show that people consider as "regular" worship attendance in a local church is changing. The percentage saying they attend once a week has steadily gone down.
Another reason is that the mainline congregations have a disproportionately high number of people over 65. For health reasons, they may be attending church less often. Further, these churches have not reached the younger generation.
A third reason is that the 25-34 age group has the highest proportion of persons responding "no religion." Studies indicate that this will be difficult to change.
Curiously missing are reflections on theology and social positions of these denominations. I have no studies to which to refer. I do, however, have a suspicion in these areas.
I am also suspicious that authors like Richard Dawkins, and many others, may have had their influence in terms of undermining "religion." Their basic position, like that of Freud, is that religion is an expression of narcissism and superstition, and thus needs to be eliminated, much like belief in the tooth fairy.
What do you think might be some of the reasons for the decline?
One of the most interesting articles I've read on the subject, written from a Catholic perspective, was in First Things in August 2008. The article was titled "The Death of Protestant America: A Political Theory of the Protestant Mainline" by Joseph Bottum. The article is subscription only online but I think you would find a lot of interesting information in it.
ReplyDeletehttp://lectionarypondering.blogspot.com/2010/10/pondering-worship-attendance-with.html?spref=fb
A friend emailed me this response:
ReplyDeleteA friend emailed me and said
The King does too have clothes on!!!!!!!!
That's not an elephant in my front room!!!!!
"Curiously missing are reflections on theology and social positions of these denominations."
Good thoughts, George, the Thinker.
An interesting quote from the article mentioned by Sandy C above:
ReplyDelete...somewhere around 1975, the main stream of Protestantism ran dry. In truth, there are still plenty of Methodists around. Baptists and Presbyterians, too—Lutherans, Episcopalians, and all the rest; millions of believing Christians who remain serious and devout. For that matter, you can still find, soldiering on, some of the institutions they established in their Mainline glory days: the National Council of Churches, for instance, in its God Box up on New York City’s Riverside Drive, with the cornerstone laid, in a grand ceremony, by President Eisenhower in 1958. But those institutions are corpses, even if they don’t quite realize that they’re dead. The great confluence of Protestantism has dwindled to a trickle over the past thirty years, and the Great Church of America has come to an end.
And that leaves us in an odd situation, unlike any before. The death of the Mainline is the central historical fact of our time: the event that distinguishes the past several decades from every other period in American history. Almost every one of our current political and cultural oddities, our contradictions and obscurities, derives from this fact: The Mainline has lost the capacity to set, or even significantly influence, the national vocabulary or the national self-understanding.