I have written before about the polling that shows church attendance and membership have declined recently. But reading a couple of books by sociologist Rodney Stark have put some new perspective on the current situation.
Like a lot of people, I had long seen the concept that the US was a Christian nation. It has been promoted by a lot of authors and speakers over the years. But over time I found myself agreeing more with the opinion of Francis Schaeffer, that America was not a “Christian nation” but was strongly influenced by Christianity.
But in his book “The Churching of America, 1776-2005” (co-authored by Roger Finke), Stark gives a new perspective on the issue. The authors did a lot of research—looking at census figures, church records, local records from the early US, and more. And they found that in 1776, only about 20% of the people in the British colonies that became the USA were attending church regularly! Even in Puritan New England, supposedly founded and governed by Christians, they concluded that the church buildings recorded as existing then only had space to accommodate about 20% of the known population! And it was worse in the southern states like Virginia, where the Anglican church was dominant.
That was the situation in the coastal areas. In the “back country” and frontier regions closer to the Appalachian Mountains, it was even worse. And part of that was because the clergy—the Congregational (Puritan) and Anglican pastors especially—stayed in the towns and cities where they could live a comfortable life. They were educated men, who had studied at Harvard and Yale, or Cambridge and Oxford in England. Most of them saw no compelling reason to endure the harsher living conditions of the back country.
The exceptions to this were the Methodists and Baptists, two less-favored groups who began growing during the Great Awakening of the mid-1700s. The early Methodists did not rely on church buildings and resident pastors. They gathered in “class meetings” that were often in homes, with a local lay leader, supervised by “circuit-riding preachers” who traveled continuously to minister to people over a large area, maybe showing up at a particular location every couple of months. The Baptists relied on local preachers, not highly educated, who supported themselves by farming like their members did.
The growth of these two groups accelerated even more during the Second Great Awakening that began in the new western states in 1800 and after. The Red River Revival and Cane Ridge Revivals were actually started by back-country Presbyterian preachers, but the Methodists and Baptists joined in. And the Presbyterians back east repudiated the revival movement, so Barton Stone of Cane Ridge and others left the Presbyterians for other groups. But the Methodists and Baptists kept on.
The adoption of the US Constitution brought another change to the religious scene in the new nation. The Bill of Rights—the first ten amendments to the Constitution—included the provision that the new nation would not have an “established” church. The nations of Europe mostly had “established churches”—churches that were favored by the government and funded with tax money. Most of the American colonies had them as well—Congregational Church in the New England states, Anglican (now Episcopal) in the southern states and New York. But the new nation did not have one. Over time, the states who had established churches followed the federal example and dropped them.
This ended up being a disaster for the Congregational and Episcopal churches and clergy. They lost their government favor; but they were culturally not prepared to compete with groups like the Baptists and Methodists. And they mostly failed to compete after that. They remained the favored churches of the upper class; but the majority of the people mostly ignored them and went elsewhere.
The Methodist growth did slow down eventually—because they drifted away from their successful practices. In the 1850s the “circuit riding preachers” began to settle down. They built nice church buildings, served by educated pastors living in parsonages instead of traveling long distances. And their growth slowed down. The Baptists kept going longer, but by the end of the 19th century they were sending their pastors to seminaries also.
The American practice of revivals did keep going, however. And church attendance continued to grow. It kept on going well into the 20th century, with Billy Graham starting to preach in the late 1940s. But decline finally began in the later decades of the century. Now it has reached the point where barely half the population is in church on a Sunday.
And yet this is not proof of a decline of faith. There is a definite decline in churches. The “mainline” liberal denominations have been losing members ever since the 1960s. The “evangelicals” have either held steady or seen minor declines. For years now there has been a growth of “non-denominational” churches. But since 2000 there has also been an increase in what Pew Research has called “Nones”—people with no religious affiliation. But sociologists Josh Packard and Ashleigh Hope showed in their 2015 book “Church Refugees” that as many as half of the “Nones” were actually what they called “Dones”—people who still had faith but were “done” with the church system that has evolved from the traditional denominations. And most of them were not the folks from the back pews drifting out, but members who had been active as Sunday school teachers, board members, and even pastors.
There has been a lot of bad news for the churches in recent years. The Roman Catholic church has had years of sex scandals. The Southern Baptists are also dealing with that issue among their clergy—and they are not the only ones, they have just been in the news more. But there is a case to be made that this is a problem of the organized church—not necessarily a decline of faith among the American people. The percentage of atheists in the US population has not budged; some of them make a lot of noise, but they are not really gaining ground. And the hard times we are entering into currently may spark a return to faith, even if it doesn’t do anything for the organized denominations.