In my last blog post I looked at the beginning of the
article “Explaining Why More Americans Have No Religious Preference: Political
Backlash and Generational Succession, 1987-2011”.
Here is a link to the article:
And here is a link to my last blog post:
The main takeaway from the introduction to the article was
that the increase in “Nones” (those with No Religious Preference) in America
was 7 percent between 1987-2000. 3 percent of this change was from political
backlash, 3 percent was from generational shifts, and 1 percent was from
children coming of age who were not raised in a religious home.
The authors of the article came to these conclusions (of
changes in 1987-2000) through cleaning up previous work that they had done. The
next part of the article will cover the changes in Nones from 2000-2011.
The first thing they did was change the time series of the
data, adding the years 2000-2011. The trend that they saw was that the increase
in Nones was steady, that it was neither increasing or decreasing relative to
previous 13 years studied. Next, they recalibrated the reasons for the increase
in Nones, now that the number was a 13 point increase (for the 1987-2011 time
frame) instead of a 7 point increase (for the 1987-2000 time frame). What they
found was that political backlash was still important, but a larger percent of
the increase comes from generational succession. There was still limited weight
given to secularization. Finally, they did some work on modeling of
generational cohorts to see if there could be some clarity for the reasons of
the changes.
With these changes, the final conclusion reached by the
authors of the paper is “Americans decreasingly identify with organized
religions despite still holding religious beliefs because political backlash
and generational succession, both rooted in cultural changes and conflicts in
the 1960s, continue.”
So, as I read this, I would suspect that religious beliefs,
for example opinions on God, heaven and hell, the role of the church, the
search for meaning and purpose, etc. are really not all that changed across
generations. However, due to political backlash, which I discussed in my previous
post and will discuss soon, and cultural changes, including the general
acceptance of people being able to identify as None, America is seeing people
move away from organized religion.
The next sections of the paper are as follows:
-Updating the Time Sequence
-Explaining Trends I: Political Backlash
-Explaining Trends II: Generational Replacement
-Explaining Trends III: Beliefs
-Explaining Differences Among Cohorts
-Politics and Personal Change
-Conclusion and Discussion
I will dig into each of these sections in this post and in
the subsequent posts following.
Updating the Time Sequence:
I have touched on this already in this post. The authors
changed the time sequence of their data from 1987-2000 to 1987-2011. The
background for this is that the percent of those who identified as Nones
increased from 5.5 to 6.2 percent between 1972 and 1973 and remained relatively
stable at around 6.2% until some time in the late 1980s. At this point, which
is the beginning of the study, there seemed to be the start of a steady
increase in those who identify as Nones.
From some point in the late 1980s until 2012, there seemed to be an
approximately 0.5% increase each year in those who identify as Nones, seen as
8% in 1990 to 20% in 2012.
While I don’t have a graph on the blog, this is a relative
consistent increase each year, which is why they concluded that there has not
been a increasing or decreasing rate in the growth of Nones.
The two initial explanations offered by the authors, which
will be fleshed out more, are the fact that political debates have not subsided
over this time frame. In fact, the timeframe of 2000-2012 have seen an increase
in not only the political debates, but seemingly a more active engagement from
religious institutions on a specific side of the debate. The issues that are
mentioned are abortion, gay marriage and legalizing marijuana. Religious
organizations are seen as generally oppose all three, and their positions are
leaking from outside the religious institutions into the public political
discourse. Also, religious organizations that oppose all three do seem to flock
to a specific political party. This is again an example of the corruption of
conjoining the church and state.
This corruption plays out in two fascinating ways in my mind,
one from the “conservative” side and one from the “liberal” side. I put those
in quotes because I think it is difficult to completely box in political
beliefs. I like to think that people are a little bit more complicated than two
buckets of political views, no matter what our political system seems to offer.
But, in many ways, these three issues represent the current culture wars that
the church has inserted itself into.
I do want to keep abortion somewhat to the side, because
that is a much more complicated issue as far as general trend is concerned.
While no doubt the political party in power has some impact on abortion
policies in a wide range of ways, the general attitudes on abortion are
relatively unchanged over the past several decades, in the sense that the same
percentage of people have maintained relatively similar views on abortion
across generations, and even the younger generations do not hold positions,
unlike on gay marriage and marijuana, that are significantly different from
older generations. Also, the debate on abortion very much precedes the scope of
this study in a way that the debates on gay marriage and marijuana do not.
Also, from a personal perspective, and this is admittedly
anecdotal, but I really haven’t encountered people who are upset with the
church (or other religious organizations) for their position on abortion, or
see a position on abortion as a reason to join or leave the church when
compared to the other two issues (and especially gay marriage, which will be
covered soon). Perhaps we are reaching a point where the politics of
contraceptives will fill in some of this gap, but this is outside the scope of
this study, and is probably best left for another day.
(Or if you want, you can check out my blogs on the Hobby Lobby
case that deal with contraception:
So, with these caveats, I want to expand my thoughts on the
“conservative” and the “liberal” side of the church respectively to these
trends.
First, the “conservative” side. I have personally seen an
increase in the amount of articles and postings on the idea of persecution.
There is a sense that Christianity is under attack and that the cultural
movement is away from them. In a sense, they are absolutely correct. Cultural
movement is moving away from their beliefs and Christianity, as they understand
it, is surely under attack. When Christianity is defined as taking certain
positions on social issues, when those issues are starting to be beaten, both
at the ballot box and via judges, that is seen as an attack on the faith and
persecution. There is always discomfort when things that were assumed and taken
for granted are no longer the case, but that does not necessarily mean
persecution. There are calls for First Amendment rights, Freedom of Speech,
returns to the way it used to be, a Biblical understanding and tradition, and
the like.
The problem is that none of these social issues are
explicitly addressed in scripture. There are certainly scripture verses and
religious traditions that inform positions, but it is not clear. And the other
problem is that it really doesn’t matter, as far as political positions are
concerned. In a pluralistic society such as the US, things change and things
progress. The issue is that when faith is tied to a political position, and
that political position is no longer tenable, that results in crisis. That results
in feeling that you are under attack, and the easy way out is to scream
“persecution” or to start concocting all sorts of fanciful visions of what the
future holds.
Take, for example, this video:
The other response is that which comes from the “liberal”
side of the debate within the church. They sense an opportunity here as a
response to conservative position that is slowly slipping away. They do not
need to read reports or crunch data to know that political positions that are
being held tightly by the conservatives but are becoming less popular in the
general public, especially the younger generations, are a significant cause to
people not wanting to associate with the church. They can gather this perfectly
well through conversations with people around them and see that the church is
not attractive.
The mistake, though, comes in what is offered instead. It is
basically the same thing conservatives offer, just in reverse. It is
“Christianity with better political positions”. So, the main focus in the
debates of the church is pretty much a continuation of the culture wars that
are already happening, only now the very fate and identity of Christ becomes
wrapped inside of it. The focus is now on what do you have to believe to
“really” know Jesus rather than focus on what Christ did for you and what He
demands from you in response.
In way too many ways the church is becoming an extension of
the culture, and in all the worst ways. I suspect that this, truly, is the
heart of the political backlash within the church. As I mentioned before, I
genuinely believe that many people are looking for something bigger than
themselves and some sort of meaning within their lives, but they are not
finding it within the church, and that this is surely a big part of it. Christ
and the church can offer so much more, it is up to the people in the church to
show that.
My next post will continue this discussion by looking closer
at how the article explains the trends it is seeing.
No comments:
Post a Comment