{"id":85924,"date":"2019-10-29T08:00:50","date_gmt":"2019-10-29T12:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=85924"},"modified":"2019-10-29T08:49:50","modified_gmt":"2019-10-29T12:49:50","slug":"nyt-op-ed-ross-douthat-the-overstated-collapse-of-american-christianity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=85924","title":{"rendered":"(NYT Op-ed) Ross Douthat–The Overstated Collapse of American Christianity"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Pew survey shows a definite decline in weekly churchgoing, alongside the growing disaffiliation of people who once would have been loosely attached to churches and denominations \u2014 cultural Catholics, Christmas-and-Easter Methodists, Jack Mormons and the like. But recent Gallup numbers<\/a> indicate that reported weekly and almost-weekly church attendance has only \u201cedged down\u201d lately, falling to 38 percent in 2017 from 42 percent in 2008 \u2014 a smaller drop than the big decline in affiliation reported by Pew. And long-term Gallup data<\/a> suggest that any recent dip in churchgoing is milder than the steep decline in the 1960s \u2014 and that today\u2019s churchgoing rate isn\u2019t that different from the rate in the 1930s and 1940s, before the postwar religious boom.<\/p>\n

The relatively stability of the Gallup data fits with analysis offered by the sociologists Landon Schnabel and Sean Bock in a 2017 paper<\/a>, \u201cThe Persistent and Exceptional Intensity of American Religion.\u201d Drawing on the General Social Survey, they argued that the recent decline of institutional religion is entirely a function of the formerly weakly affiliated ceasing to identify with religious bodies entirely; for the strongly affiliated (just over a third of the American population), the trend between 1990 and the present is a flat line, their numbers neither growing nor collapsing but holding steady across an era of supposedly dramatic religious change.<\/p>\n

That resilience should not be entirely comforting for Christian churches, since both their everyday work and their cultural influence depends on reaching beyond their core adherents, and inspiring a mix of sympathy and interest among people who aren\u2019t at worship every week. Indeed, combining an enduring core of belief with a general falling-away could make the Christian position permanently embattled, tempting the pious to paranoia and misguided alliances while the wider culture becomes more anticlerical, more like 19th-century secular liberalism in its desire to batter down the redoubts of traditional belief.<\/p>\n

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But for now that resilience also puts some limits on how successfully anti-Christian policies can be pursued, how easily religious conservatism can be marginalized within the conservative coalition (not easily) and how completely the liberal coalition can be secularized \u2014 not completely at all, so long as its base remains heavily African-American and Hispanic.<\/p>\n

Read it all<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Always a nice surprise to see where a simple tweet can end up. @DouthatNYT<\/a> makes a good point here – the collapse of American Christianity is much more complex than the rise of the “nones.” It has to do with birth cohorts and the life cycle effect, too. https:\/\/t.co\/b7q6GhjT8s<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2014 Ryan Burge 📊 (@ryanburge) October 29, 2019<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n