By Scott Dickison
Reading the by-now-infamous Pew Research Center’s report on the state of religious affiliation in America this past week, I was taken back to a conversation I had as a divinity school student with an undergraduate considering ministry. He was an incredibly bright guy and could have decided to go into any field that he wanted and been immensely successful, but he was feeling a call to the priesthood in the Episcopal tradition in which he was raised.
I of course supported him in this call, and we talked about different seminaries he might consider and whether or not it would be a good idea to wait a year or two and get some “real world experience” before entering into another degree program (always a good idea in my book). But then, almost as an aside, I asked him how his parents were reacting to his call to ministry, expecting him so say something like “proud and supportive,” since he had spoken fondly of being raised in the church. But he got quiet.
“Not well,” he said. “Especially my father. He doesn’t understand why I would want to waste my time going into ministry. He says my gifts could be better suited somewhere else, and that the church probably won’t be around by the time I’m his age anyway.”
I was kind of taken aback. I felt myself getting a little defensive since I had recently made the decision to commit whatever gifts I had to ministry and the church.
“Well, what does he do?” I asked, probably too accusatorially.
“He’s a priest,” he said. “I’m a P.K.”
“Oh,” I said.
After graduation he ended up taking a fellowship with some big think-tank in D.C.
At least at face value, the contents of the Pew report seem to support this father’s concerns for his son’s chosen vocation and his own. The church in America is in decline. Unfortunately, that is not news — it seems like we hear some new report on the decline of the church every other week. What is news, and what this report revealed, is just how steep and far reaching the decline is. It’s being felt cross-denominationally, in every demographic and in every region of the country.
Meanwhile the percentage of Americans who identify as “religiously unaffiliated” (the “nones” as you’ve heard them called), continues to grow and as RNS pointed out, represents more people than all Evangelical Lutherans, United Methodists and Episcopalians put together. And the percentages get even worse for the church in the younger generations.
There’s a lot to be said about this report and the findings, and there’s already been a good bit written about it from both ends of the theological spectrum. There have also been some important qualifiers offered. Ross Douthat of the New York Times pointed out, rightly, that all of these numbers of decline have to do with religious affiliation and not religious practice. The rate of church involvement has actually stayed pretty steady. In fact, a recent Gallup poll showed that weekly church attendance is close to where it was in the 1940s and ‘50s.
What appears to have changed is that the folks who used to be “nominally” Christian or once felt compelled to identify as Christian socially aren’t feeling compelled to do so anymore. Douthat also makes a great point that much of this depends on whether or how Millennials will “grow up.” As he points out, there has always been a trend for people to drift away from religion until they get married or have children. Is it just that younger generations are waiting longer to come back to church just as they are waiting longer to get married and have babies? Only time will tell.
Yet even given these qualifiers, there’s no getting around the fact that the church is getting smaller and older and has less influence in society. These are all things that we’re now seeing reflected in data but that anyone familiar with church has known for years. My young friend’s father certainly had seen it.
And yet.
Call me naive. Call me overly optimistic. Call me nostalgic or blinded by self-interest. Call me a fool.
But I’m hopeful.
Despite all of the doom and gloom to be squeezed from the numbers, I’m hopeful about the future of the church. I don’t know that I would go so far as some, who say all of this decline is a good thing. While I do think it’s a good thing that people feel more free to be honest about their religious convictions or lack there of, I still grieve that there are so many people out there who grew up in church but once they reached adulthood didn’t feel that the church was an important or vital part of their life. That’s something the church needs to be honest with itself about.
But I do think that much good can come from this new normal. Yes, the church is smaller. No, no one is paying attention to us like they used to, but if they were I think they’d see some pretty incredible things happening. They’d see people being valued and loved their whole lives, from cradle to the grave. They’d see families being supported. They’d see meals being served. They’d see comfort being given. They’d see grief being honored. They’d see reconciliation being brokered. They’d see justice being advocated. They’d see new life springing up in the most unexpected of places. Even in an “institution in decline.”
But they aren’t looking, and that may be a good thing after all. Maybe it will free us up a little bit to get back to what we’ve been here to do all along, which is preach the good news that God really is God, Christ really was raised from the dead, the Holy Spirit really does live and move among us, and that we really do have something to offer the world that no one else does: the truth of this hope.
So maybe it’s more accurate to say that I’m hopeful about what God is up to in the world, and despite our obvious failings and deficiencies, I still think the church is the best thing going in the Kingdom of God.
And about my friend. I got a call from him a year later saying that he was headed to seminary after all. He had given politics a shot, but was so turned off by the whole experience he was convinced that the church was the best place for him to live out his call. And his father had even come around. Turns out he had seen that kind of conviction before.
Was it the right move? Only time will tell. But I’m hopeful.