….the story of religion in America over the last two generations is a story, not of outright secularization, but of institutional decline. Contemporary Americans are as religiously-minded as ever, but the rise of church-switching and do-it-yourself faith and the steady weakening of the traditional churches and communions has left the country without religious institutions capable of playing the kind of social role that [Yuval] Levin describes…This organizational decline has been most pronounced within what’s often described as liberal Christianity ”” in the churches of the Protestant Mainline, and in the “Spirit of Vatican II” wing of the Catholic Church. But among more self-consciously conservative believers, too, constant church-shopping is commonplace (just ask Marco Rubio), national political causes often excite more interest than local social engagement, and the glue of confessional and denominational traditions is much weaker than in generations past. The vitality of American Christianity today is too often a vitality of individuals rather than institutions, or else of institutions that depend too heavily on a single personality for their strength and survival. We have plenty of celebrity pastors and authors and bloggers and television hosts, but the more corporate and communal forms of faith are growing weaker every day.
I have much more to say about this in the book, but so far as Murray’s argument is concerned, I think that religious institutions are both one of the areas of American life hit hardest by elite self-segregation (you can’t pastor a church in suburban Buffalo from a corner office in Washington D.C.) and one of the few areas where it’s plausible to imagine his call for elites to leave their cocoons and live among the people actually being answered. Institutions are only as strong as their personnel, and the major religious bodies in the United States have struggled mightily since the 1960s to attract large numbers of the best and brightest (and, indeed, large numbers period) to the ministry.