The Death/Loss Of Religion In America (1 Viewer)

[culdeus]

I'm using the metric of looking around and asking myself if what I see resembles a healthy society on a positive trajectory.

- Murder rates are lower in more secular countries.
- Of the top 50 least violent cities in the world, nearly all of them are in less religious countries.
- In the US, there's a positive correlation between states with higher murder rates and religiosity.
- In the US, there's a positive correlation between states with higher violent crime and religiosity.
- In the US, the most religious states suffer the highest poverty, obesity, infant mortality, STDs, and teen pregnancy.

What exactly is "healthy" about being more religious?

This is one of those things where being secular is correlated with having higher education and more income. You can correlate a lot of things with money.

I doubt when controlling for education you find a connection.

 

[[icon]]

If most people could practice their faith without judging or pushing it on others... I'd be neutral.

In my experience, that is not the case... generally speaking.

So, I voted that it's positive for society to be less religious.

Background:
Former catholic who went to catholic school, served as lectern and altar boy in catholic mass, etc.

Spending my teens and then some in the Bible Belt of the south has made me realize that a LARGE number of southern "Christians" are massively judgmental of others while being generally subpar humans in their private lives. Baptists largely being the archetype for the "two-faced" tag.

 

[hagmania]

Thinking more on this.

I have a small group of guys I meet with weekly. It started as part of a bible study project group with the goal of learning more about how to put our faith into practice and to further friendship and fellowship with one another. The fancy church word for that is "sanctification". It means a person is supposed to become more proficient in living out one's faith.

I've been meeting with this same group for 20+ years now and I have seen with my own eyes, this process play out. And I believe I've seen it in myself. You folks see me post here - I obviously have many many many miles to go. But I have seen a clear and impactful change in myself over the years as well as a change in the guys in the group.

Of course, one could say any man should be "better" at 60 than they were at 40. That's just maturity. This is beyond that. I see improvements in emotional intelligence, in empathy, in kindness and lots of of other areas in these guys that I believe is supernatural. Again, that's not to say we have it remotely "figured" out or have "arrived". Far from it. But I've seen marked improvement and progress that is notable to me.

So if I were to switch the original question to something more like "Is living out your faith a good thing for society?", I would say in my experience, it's yes.

I haven't been a part of a group like this, but I know exactly what you mean when you talk about how trying to live out your faith has results that add up slowly over time. I definitely do not claim to be a good person, but I'm a less bad husband, father, and colleague than I was 25 years ago, and I credit that largely to religion. Aristotle argued that they way you become virtuous is to act with virtue, whether you feel like or not. Eventually your beliefs catch up with your actions, and that code of conduct gets internalized. Today, we tend to denigrate that as "fake it 'till you make it," but Aristotle wasn't stupid and I think his argument deserves better than a bad aphorism.

But I wonder how much of this sort of thing would apply to non-believers as well. Imagine a world where there is a secular version of church -- once a week, non-believers get together in a little club to talk seriously and self-critically about how to properly live one's life, and they raise their kids in that club and donate to the club and pitch in around the club in their spare time and organize some of their social activities around the club. Over the course of a few decades, that sort of practice would probably make a similar difference for them just like church does for us. I imagine that's sort of what Unitarian churches are going for, but I've never attended one of those. (Not disagreeing with you -- just trying to look at it from the POV of our secular GBs).

We do that. It's called having friends!

My wife and I have a fantastic friend couple that we talk about deep matters and personal edification. It's a wholly unique friendship to any I've had before.

Highly recommend.

 

[Captain Cranks]

This is one of those things where being secular is correlated with having higher education and more income. You can correlate a lot of things with money.

I doubt when controlling for education you find a connection.

Just to be clear, I'm not saying correlation = causation. There are some here who want to attach the reduction in religiosity with what they view is an unhealthy society. If that's truly the case, they have a lot of objective data to explain away.

 

[massraider]

We do that. It's called having friends!

 

[Joe Bryant]

This is one of those things where being secular is correlated with having higher education and more income. You can correlate a lot of things with money.

I doubt when controlling for education you find a connection.

Just to be clear, I'm not saying correlation = causation. There are some here who want to attach the reduction in religiosity with what they view is an unhealthy society. If that's truly the case, they have a lot of objective data to explain away.

So I'm understanding what you're saying, are you saying you can attach the reduction in religiosity with what you view as a healthy society?

 

[Captain Cranks]

So I'm understanding what you're saying, are you saying you can attach the reduction in religiosity with what you view as a healthy society?

Not necessarily although there are certain attributes that have improved due to society becoming more secular. Gay rights, for one.

Ultimately, I don't think the equation is either more religion = healthier society or more religion = less healthy society. There are pros and cons of religion in this country and trying to jam things into one of the two aforementioned equations ignores a lot factors that have a much higher impact on the health of our society (social media, tribal news/entertainment, political corruption).

 

[Joe Bryant]

Ultimately, I don't think the equation is either more religion = healthier society or more religion = less healthy society.

Thank you for clarifying. I agree with that.

 

[KarmaPolice]

If most people could practice their faith without judging or pushing it on others... I'd be neutral.

In my experience, that is not the case... generally speaking.

So, I voted that it's positive for society to be less religious.

Background:
Former catholic who went to catholic school, served as lectern and altar boy in catholic mass, etc.

Spending my teens and then some in the Bible Belt of the south has made me realize that a LARGE number of southern "Christians" are massively judgmental of others while being generally subpar humans in their private lives. Baptists largely being the archetype for the "two-faced" tag.

That was my first impulse as well when I first read the OP and question. Similar to your experiences, my upbringing and history is filled with similar b.s. My dad's side of the family was very religious and excluded everybody non-Lutheran, including my mom which by default meant my dad and the rest of our immediate family. My wife's family is Catholic and has similar stuff going on as you can imagine. I am fairly strongly anti organized religion for those reasons. In my experience it does more harm than good and I would have voted yes.

After thinking about it longer, what I think our issue is as a country on the whole is that we did not replace the positive things that comes with the community of the church with things that are positive and fulfilling. What I mean by that was I was amazed at how my mother in law's church community rallied around her when my father in law passed. On top of that, church/religion was something that could unite people with different backgrounds and opinions. It gave people an excuse to be around others and interact face to face. All things that are sorely missing in 2024. Lastly, while I am anti organized religion, I am very pro people finding spirituality and seeking questions like that.

After all that, right now my answer is it's a net negative currently because people haven't filled that void with community, unity, or things that have a positive impact on our mental health. We are becoming increasingly isolated and hopeless.

 

[KarmaPolice]

I guess more accurately what I object to and would like done away with is religious fundamentalism, not religion or organized religion in general.

 

[rockaction]

Dang, to follow up on KP's point I was going to read this article, but it's behind a paywall. It's from The Atlantic, so it's likely coming from a secular point of view about religion. I think the author is about to argue that we've replaced our religious observances with staying atomized and watching more television and possibly will opine about what that's doing to us. If somebody can sneak behind the paywall and let us know it would be greatly appreciated.

"The True Cost Of The Churchgoing Bust"

https://twitter.com/DKThomp/status/1775514586696839186

In his tweet, Thompson says, "The point isn't to prescribe forced belief in the almighty and a weekly dose of church to fix America's hanging out crisis—but rather that the loss of religion in the US is so sudden that I'm not sure we've fully grasped the sum of what's been lost."

 

[Runkle]

If somebody can sneak behind the paywall and let us know it would be greatly appreciated.

Non-paywall version posted on msn.com

The True Cost of the Churchgoing Bust
Opinion by Derek Thompson •

As an agnostic, I have spent most of my life thinking about the decline of faith in America in mostly positive terms. Organized religion seemed, to me, beset by scandal and entangled in noxious politics. So, I thought, what is there really to mourn? Only in the past few years have I come around to a different view. Maybe religion, for all of its faults, works a bit like a retaining wall to hold back the destabilizing pressure of American hyper-individualism, which threatens to swell and spill over in its absence.

More than one-quarter of Americans now identify as atheists, agnostics, or religiously “unaffiliated,” according to a new survey of 5,600 U.S. adults by the Public Religion Research Institute. This is the highest level of non-religiosity in the poll’s history. Two-thirds of nonbelievers were brought up in at least nominally religious households, like me. (I grew up in a Reform Jewish home that I would describe as haphazardly religious. In kindergarten, my parents encouraged my sister and me to enthusiastically celebrate Hanukkah—and, just as fervently, to believe in Santa Claus.) But more Americans today have “converted” out of religion than have converted to all forms of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam combined. No faith’s evangelism has been as successful in this century as religious skepticism.

Secularization is old news. The scientific revolution that pitted the Church against stargazers like Galileo comes from the 1600s, and Nietzsche famously declared “God is dead” in the 1880s. But even as secularism surged throughout the developed world in the 20th century, America’s religiosity remained exceptional. Seven in 10 Americans told Gallup that they belonged to a church in 1937, and even by the 1980s, roughly 70 percent said they still belonged to a church, synagogue, or mosque.

Suddenly, in the 1990s, the ranks of nonbelievers surged. An estimated 40 million people—one in eight Americans—stopped going to church in the past 25 years, making it the “largest concentrated change in church attendance in American history,” according to the religion writer Jake Meador. In 2021, membership in houses of worship fell below a majority for the first time on record.

The sudden decline of religion likely relates to changes in both politics and family life. In the 1970s and ’80s, the religious right became a formidable fundraising machine for the Republican Party. As the GOP consolidated its advantage among conservative Christians, religion seemed less appealing to liberal young people, especially if they or their parents already had a tenuous relationship with the Church. In the late 1980s, only one in 10 liberals said they didn’t belong to any religion; 30 years later, that figure was about four in 10. Meanwhile, the decline of marriage, especially among low-income Americans, accompanied their move away from the Church.

That relationship with organized religion provided many things at once: not only a connection to the divine, but also a historical narrative of identity, a set of rituals to organize the week and year, and a community of families. PRRI found that the most important feature of religion for the dwindling number of Americans who still attend services a few times a year included “experiencing religion in a community” and “instilling values in their children.”

When I read the PRRI survey, this emphasis on community is what caught my eye. As I recently reported, the United States is in the midst of a historically unprecedented decline in face-to-face socializing. The social collapse is steepest for some of the groups with the largest declines in religiosity.

For example, young people, who are fleeing religion faster than older Americans, have also seen the largest decline in socializing. Boys and girls ages 15 to 19 have reduced their hangouts by more than three hours a week, according to the American Time Use Survey. There is no statistical record of any period in U.S. history where young people were less likely to attend religious services, and also no period when young people have spent more time on their own.

A similar story holds for working-class Americans. In 2019, a team of researchers published a survey based on long interviews conducted from 2000 to 2013 with older, low-income men without a college degree in working-class neighborhoods around the country. They found that, since the 1970s, church attendance among white men without a college degree had fallen even more than among white college graduates. For many of these men, the loss of religion went hand in hand with the retreat from marriage. “As marriage declined,” the authors wrote, “men’s church attendance might have fallen in tandem.” Today, low-income and unmarried men have more alone time than almost any other group, according to time-use data.

Did the decline of religion cut some people off from a crucial gateway to civic engagement, or is religion just one part of a broader retreat from associations and memberships in America? “It’s hard to know what the causal story is here,” Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist at NYU, told me. But what’s undeniable is that nonreligious Americans are also less civically engaged. This year, the Pew Research Center reported that religiously unaffiliated Americans are less likely to volunteer, less likely to feel satisfied with their community and social life, and more likely to say they feel lonely. “Clearly more Americans are spending Sunday mornings on their couches, and it’s affected the quality of our collective life,” he said.

Klinenberg doesn’t blame individual Americans for these changes. He sees our civic retreat as a story about place. In his book Palaces for the People, Klinenberg reported that Americans today have fewer shared spaces where connections are formed. “People today say they just have fewer places to go for collective life,” he said. “Places that used to anchor community life, like libraries and school gyms and union halls, have become less accessible or shuttered altogether.” Many people, having lost the scaffolding of organized religion, seem to have found no alternative method to build a sense of community.

Imagine, by analogy, a parallel universe where Americans suddenly gave up on sit-down restaurants. In surveys, they named many reasonable motivations for their abstinence: the expense, the overuse of salt and sugar and butter, the temptation to drink alcohol. As restaurants disappeared by the hundreds, some mourned their closure, while others said it simply didn’t matter. After all, there were still plenty of ways for people to feed themselves. Over time, however, Americans as a group never found another social activity to replace their dining-out time. They saw less of one another with each passing decade. Sociologists noted that the demise of restaurants had correlated with a rise in aloneness, just as the CDC noticed an increase in anxiety and depression.

I’ve come to believe that something like this story is happening, except with organized religion playing the role of restaurants. On an individual basis, people can give any number of valid-sounding reasons for not frequenting a house of worship. But a behavioral shift that is fully understandable on the individual level has coincided with, and even partly exacerbated, a great rewiring of our social relations.

And America didn’t simply lose its religion without finding a communal replacement. Just as America’s churches were depopulated, Americans developed a new relationship with a technology that, in many ways, is the diabolical opposite of a religious ritual: the smartphone. As the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt writes in his new book, The Anxious Generation, to stare into a piece of glass in our hands is to be removed from our bodies, to float placelessly in a content cosmos, to skim our attention from one piece of ephemera to the next. The internet is timeless in the best and worst of ways—an everything store with no opening or closing times. “In the virtual world, there is no daily, weekly, or annual calendar that structures when people can and cannot do things,” Haidt writes. In other words, digital life is disembodied, asynchronous, shallow, and solitary.

Religious rituals are the opposite in almost every respect. They put us in our body, Haidt writes, many of them requiring “some kind of movement that marks the activity as devotional.” Christians kneel, Muslims prostrate, and Jews daven. Religious ritual also fixes us in time, forcing us to set aside an hour or day for prayer, reflection, or separation from daily habit. (It’s no surprise that people describe a scheduled break from their digital devices as a “Sabbath.”) Finally, religious ritual often requires that we make contact with the sacred in the presence of other people, whether in a church, mosque, synagogue, or over a dinner-table prayer. In other words, the religious ritual is typically embodied, synchronous, deep, and collective.

I’m not advocating that every atheist and agnostic in America immediately choose a world religion and commit themselves to weekly church (or synagogue, or mosque) attendance. But I wonder if, in forgoing organized religion, an isolated country has discarded an old and proven source of ritual at a time when we most need it. Making friends as an adult can be hard; it’s especially hard without a scheduled weekly reunion of congregants. Finding meaning in the world is hard too; it’s especially difficult if the oldest systems of meaning-making hold less and less appeal. It took decades for Americans to lose religion. It might take decades to understand the entirety of what we lost.

 

[rockaction]

Thanks, Runkle. I appreciate it.

 

[rockaction]

Interesting article. That's pretty much what I've been trying to say in this thread and is something that KP just discussed right before the article. I have to say that I've been heavily influenced by the whole Nietzsche "God is dead" formulation as applied to the rational West, and I always worried what it would look like in America when it inevitably came to pass here.

Now, for sure there are movements afoot to codify religious observances into our laws and religion still has a strong and animating impulse among the populace, but I'm not sure if that sort of codification will increase its sway over the younger generations. It might hasten its decline.

 

[Goldminer1]

Good article. I believe that there is an afterlife, I have no idea what it looks like, but I don't think that when we die, that, we just end. I don't practice any organized religion or go to Church.

Recently, I've actually considered going to church, literally just for the social aspects of being a part of the community.

I'm pretty familiar with the "story" of Christianity as I grew up going to Catholic Church (parents both went to Catholic HS). There are a lot of things that religions teach that I think are nonsense and/or totally disagree with, but as social isolation becomes worse, there are fewer and fewer places to connect to those around us in real life. Maybe the person next to me in Church, believing that a guy with a beard built a boat that was big enough for 2 of every animal to survive an apocalyptic flood in, isn't worth missing out on those real world, interpersonal connections?

People want to -belong- to -SOMETHING- that brings them closer together in the world that exists outside of their cell phone and social media. For some, that sense of belonging has come from a political figure or party, for others it may be a sports team or a social cause.

But the bottom line is - we're lonely. Is it covid? Is it social media? Is it politics? Is it all of the above? Who knows.

I will say though, that as time goes on, I feel more and more like the division, isolation and loneliness that so many of us are experiencing, feels like it is at least on some level "intentional." And I don't say that to mean that there is some secret society of evil people that get together and decide to do this to the populace, but I think that as our isolation has become deeper, that there are groups and people that are using our isolation, to their advantage. Whether that is for monetary, political or social gain, for some people, this lack of connection, isn't a bad thing, it is something to lean into and use to further their own agenda. No matter where you fall politically, religiously or socioeconomically, those are the influences that we need to get out of our culture - not our neighbors that belong to a different poltical party or religion.