"Religion" Is Declining And Why That's Good News For Religion

Jim Hinch, at The American Scholar, has an interesting article about the reported decline of the evangelical churches from their high point of influence and power in the last 20 years.   Unfortunately, it's not a quick and dirty and cut and dry and black and white report on the triumph of irreligiosity with the young so it's bound to be largely ignored in these post-literate times.  Apropos of the topic of my last post, he says this about one of the Pew surveys reporting that decline.

The most recent Pew Research Center survey of the nation’s religious attitudes, taken in 2012, found that just 19 percent of Americans identified themselves as white evangelical Protestants—five years earlier, 21 percent of Americans did so. Slightly more (19.6 percent) self-identified as unaffiliated with any religion at all, the first time that group has surpassed evangelicals. (It should be noted that surveying Americans’ faith lives is notoriously difficult, since answers vary according to how questions are phrased, and respondents often exaggerate their level of religious commitment. Pew is a nonpartisan research organization with a track record of producing reliable, in-depth studies of religion. Other equally respected surveys—Gallup, the General Social Survey—have reached conclusions about Christianity’s status in present-day America that agree with Pew’s in some respects and diverge in others.)

Which leads me to ask if there are problems with the survey questions at the widely esteemed Pew, how do they know the results are reliable?   I've looked at Gallup's questions before and they are usually even less worthy of confidence. How do you really find this stuff out from varying and often either leading or far from clear questions?   Especially, how do they expect to be able to measure an alleged exaggeration between reported and actual religious commitment?   Religion, I'd guess especially in some evangelical traditions, such as among some Baptists, is an intensely  personal and individual matter.  You would never guess from the coverage that Baptists get but the movement originally and still does advocate freedom in deciding the meaning of The Bible.

I will note that Hinch did one very good thing which I have never seen the author of an article on this topic do, he notes:

Secularization alone is not to blame for this change in American religiosity. Even half of those Americans who claim no religious affiliation profess belief in God or claim some sort of spiritual orientation.

Which is something I've repeatedly complained of in every other report I've read or heard of the Pew surveys.  And the reason he does note that is the reason that this is a worth while article.  It's not about the End of Religion ©  it's about changes in religion,  centered around the transfer of Robert H. Schuller's Crystal Cathedral from his bankrupt outfit to the Catholic archdiocese of Orange County*.   He, accurately from my point of view, describes the building and Schuller's operation.

Schuller was at the height of his influence, preaching to a congregation of thousands in Orange County and reaching millions more worldwide via the Hour of Power, a weekly televised ministry program. Among the show’s annual highlights were “The Glory of Easter” and its companion production, “The Glory of Christmas,” multimillion-dollar dramatic extravaganzas staged inside the cathedral with a cast of professional actors, Hollywood-grade costumes, and live animals. The setting for the spectacles was a striking, soaring, light-filled structure justly praised by architecture critics. But it was not a cathedral. It was never consecrated by a religious denomination. The building is not even made of crystal, but rather 10,000 rectangular panes of glass. Like the much beloved, much pilloried Disneyland three miles to the northwest, the Crystal Cathedral is a monument to Americans’ inveterate ability to transform dominant cultural impulses—in this case, Christianity itself—into moneymaking enterprises that conquer the world.

They weren't turning The House of God into a place of money changers and dove peddlers, they were peddling God from corporate headquarters.  The few times I saw some of his show it's "Christianity" seemed to me to be a branding operation having nothing to do with the gospel of Jesus.  It was a business venture having about as little to do with the Christian religion as so many organizations with freedom and equality in their names have to do with freedom and equality.   I seem to remember feeling a deep sense of dismay when the great Beverley Sills sang at the place.

Another great difference from the Xeroxed "End of Religion" themed articles is that this one notes the considerable diversity and life of what I'd feel a lot more comfortable considering religions, including Christian ones.

Other faiths, like Islam, perhaps the country’s fastest-growing religion, have had no problem attracting and maintaining worshippers. No, evangelicalism’s dilemma stems more from a change in American Christianity itself, a sense of creeping exhaustion with the popularizing, simplifying impulse evangelical luminaries such as Schuller once rode to success.

... The adjacent city of Westminster is home to the world’s largest population of Vietnamese outside Vietnam. In another neighboring city, Santa Ana, 82 percent of the families speak at home a language other than English, primarily Spanish. These mostly poor residents cram several families into tract houses, work low-wage jobs, and reliably vote Democratic (the county’s registered voters are evenly split between Democrats and Republicans; Barack Obama won in 2008, Mitt Romney in 2012). They also gravitate not to evangelical megachurches like Schuller’s but to Catholic parishes, Buddhist temples, mosques, and storefront Pentecostal churches. The Islamic Society of Orange County, which owns a mosque, school, and mortuary five miles from the Crystal Cathedral, is one of America’s largest centers of Islamic worship. The Hsi Lai Temple in Hacienda Heights, a few miles north of Orange County, is the largest Buddhist temple in the United States. Orange County’s Catholic diocese is one of the nation’s largest and fastest growing.

The description of the vitality of Christian religious communities is something as rare as reporting on liberal Protestantism in the American media.

These days, young Christians in Orange County attend very different kinds of churches, some unrecognizable as churches at all. Laundry Love, a ministry in Santa Ana, is an ad hoc community of young Christians who gather monthly at various inner-city, coin-operated laundries and wash patrons’ clothes for free. The ministry is an offshoot of Newsong Church, a mostly Asian evangelical congregation founded nearly three decades ago by a pastor named Dave Gibbons, who sought to reach people like himself, mixed-race descendants of immigrants (his parents are white and Asian) who felt out of place in mainstream American society. Newsong now has branches in Thailand, England, Mexico, and India—all of which function like self-sustaining Christian communes oriented around humanitarian relief initiatives. Gibbons has emerged as one of a growing number of in-house critics of evangelical Christianity’s wholesale adoption of corporate American values. “The church has become involved in big business,” he told me by phone. “That’s why artists and creatives don’t want anything to do with church. What’s unique about how we’re trying to do things is we focus on people who aren’t like us. We don’t have to build our own brand.”

And this is why I doubt this article will get as much traction as the next "end of religion" article.  This doesn't look like the end of religion but the restoration of something closer to the point than the Schuller Show and Christianity as feel good self-esteem.


*  I think the building is probably going to turn out to be a disaster.  Its 10,000 large panes of glass are going to need constant maintenance.   In fact  that's one of the things the priest in charge of the conversion mentioned.  The description of the excessive vulgarity of the physical plant - the Catholics are removing lots of the kitsch - is in keeping with the vulgarity of Schuller's show.  If I were surveyed as to its being a manifestation of religion I'd have had to say I didn't consider it religious.

On a recent tour of the cathedral, Father Christopher Smith, the Catholic priest charged with supervising transformation of the complex into a Catholic worship space, did his best, but frequently failed, to be diplomatic about Schuller’s design sensibilities. “It was a beautiful campus,” he said. “It’s still beautiful. But it’s tired.” He pointed up toward the cathedral’s sloping glass roof. “We recaulked 1,500 panes of glass. We’re really trying to fix the leaks.” In its final years, Schuller’s cash-strapped ministry skimped on building maintenance.

Outside, on the plaza, the priest stopped beside a statue of children surrounding a beneficent Jesus. “Some of these are awful,” he remarked. Most, he said, would be removed during the diocese’s $53 million renovation. The diocese, taking its inspiration from the historic cathedrals of Europe, envisions the structure as something wholly different from Schuller’s ministerial showplace. “Traditionally, cathedrals are centers of art and culture,” Smith said. “We want it to be that.” He spoke of touring symphony orchestras playing in the sanctuary, academic and theological conferences in the Welcoming Center’s exquisitely spare meeting spaces, ecumenical worship services, art exhibits, the bustling cultural activity of a civic gathering place—something Orange County, built over decades with little central planning in car-mad Southern California, simply doesn’t have.

A civic gathering center seems to me to be a move in the right direction,  going from a show centered on a single character to a community and the wider community.   The churches around here, especially the United Church of Christ church the next town over, are only as vital as they are open to community activities, especially those which are in line with feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, caring for the sick, the stranger and those imprisoned, in and outside of prison and in addiction and despair.