BOWLING ALONE Read online

  Churches have been and continue to be important institutional providers of social services. American religious communities spend roughly $15–$20 billion annually on social services. Nationwide in 1998 nearly 60 percent of all congregations (and an even higher proportion of larger congregations) reported contributing to social service, community development, or neighborhood organizing projects. Congregations representing 33 percent of all churchgoers support food programs for the hungry, and congregations representing 18 percent of all churchgoers support housing programs like Habitat for Humanity. Partners for Sacred Places found that the overwhelming majority (93 percent) of older urban congregations provide community services, such as food pantries, self-help groups, and recreational programs, and that 80 percent of the beneficiaries of these programs are not members of the congregations. Black churches have been especially prominent in recent efforts to rebuild inner-city communities, such as the Boston 10-Point Coalition. What is widely regarded as the most successful model for grassroots community organizing in America—the Industrial Areas Foundation—is rooted institutionally in local parishes and congregations.16

  Churches have provided the organizational and philosophical bases for a wide range of powerful social movements throughout American history, from abolition and temperance in the nineteenth century to civil rights and right-to-life in the twentieth century. According to one of the leading analysts of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s,

  [T]he Black church functioned as the institutional center of the modern civil rights movement…. Churches provided the movement with an organized mass base; a leadership of clergymen largely economically independent of the larger white society and skilled in the art of managing people and resources; an institutionalized financial base through which protest was financed; and meeting places where the masses planned tactics and strategies and collectively committed themselves to the struggle.17

  Faith-based organizations are particularly central to social capital and civic engagement in the African American community. The church is the oldest and most resilient social institution in black America, not least because it was traditionally the only black-controlled institution of a historically oppressed people. African Americans in all social strata are more religiously observant than other Americans. The black religious tradition distinctively encourages mixing religion and community affairs and invigorates civic activism. Both during and after the civil rights struggle, church involvement among blacks has been strongly associated with civic engagement, in part because the church provides a unique opportunity for blacks to exercise civic skills.18 C. Eric Lincoln, the sociologist of religion, says:

  Beyond its purely religious function, as critical as that function has been, the Black church in its historical role as lyceum, conservatory, forum, social service center, political academy, and financial institution, has been and is for Black America the mother of our culture, the champion of our Freedom, and hallmark of our civilization.19

  In sum, religious involvement is a crucial dimension of civic engagement. Thus trends in civic engagement are closely tied to changing patterns of religious involvement.

  MEASURED BY THE YARDSTICK of personal beliefs, Americans’ religious commitment has been reasonably stable over the last half century—certainly much more so than one might assume from some public commentary about the secularization of American life. Virtually all Americans say they believe in God, and three out of four say they believe in immortality. There is no evidence that these beliefs have wavered over the last half century. The Gallup poll and other survey organizations have asked Americans repeatedly over the decades how “important religion is in [their] life,” and the responses suggest only a modest slippage in this metric of religiosity.20 However, as one of the leading American religious historians has observed, “Unless religious impulses find a home in more than the individual heart or soul, they will have few long-lasting public consequences.”21 What does the evidence tell us not just about religious beliefs, but about participation in religious institutions?

  Trends in religious behavior have been hotly debated among specialists for many years. The classical sociological theory of secularization—that as society becomes modern, it becomes more secular—fits the experience of Western Europe reasonably well, but even in the 1950s and 1960s many observers expressed doubt about whether it fit the facts in this country. In recent years the continuing vitality of religion in America has been “rediscovered” by academic specialists, and by century’s end, as America’s leading sociologist of religion observed, “Scholars have had it with talk of secularization. They earn their spurs by telling what’s good about churches.”22 Because of these quasi-religious struggles about religion’s fate, it is important to weigh carefully the conflicting evidence about trends in participation in religious institutions over the last half century or so.

  Both sides in the “secularization” debate agree that church membership was very likely at an all-time high in the 1950s, and both discern what stock market gurus would term a modest “market correction” (that is, a falloff in religious observance) in the 1960s and early 1970s. Trends over the last quarter century are more controversial, in part because of uncertainties about the reliability of available evidence. Denominational membership figures are debatable because denominations vary in the strictness of their definition of membership, membership figures are only irregularly updated, self-reports may be inflated, and not all churches keep or report accurate records. Poll data avoid some of these drawbacks but generally record higher membership figures than the ecclesiastical records, probably because many lapsed members continue to identify themselves as Presbyterian, or Jewish, or Catholic.23

  Despite these ambiguities, however, as figure 12 shows, survey evidence and denominational reports are generally consistent in showing a rise in church membership from the 1930s to about 1960, followed by a plateau and then a long, slow slump of roughly 10 percent in church membership between the 1960s and the 1990s. The percentage of Americans who identify themselves as having “no religion” has risen steadily and sharply from 2 percent in 1967 to 11 percent by the 1990s.24

  Just as in the case of secular organizations, however, we need to go beyond formal membership to actual participation if we are to assay trends in religious participation. Five independent survey archives, covering much of the last half century, generally agree that in any given week over these five decades, roughly 40–45 percent of Americans claim to have attended religious services.25 The earliest surveys show a sharp rise of 15–20 percent in the rate of church attendance from the 1950s to the 1960s and a decline of that same magnitude by the early 1970s.26 The five archives produce slightly divergent estimates of the trends after 1975, but the most reasonable summary is that attendance has slumped—modestly but unmistakably—by roughly 10–12 percent over the last quarter century.27 The slump appears to have been more marked in the second half of this period—that is, from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s.

  Figure 12: Church Membership, 1936–1999: Church Records and Survey Data

  To put these recent trends into a somewhat longer perspective, figure 13 charts the consolidated evidence from these five archives over the last half of the twentieth century.28 The surveys converge in suggesting a sharp rise in church attendance in the first several decades after World War II, followed by a decline in church attendance of roughly one-third between the late 1950s and the late 1990s, with more than half of the total decline occurring in the 1960s.

  Recently some skeptical sociologists have begun to question whether Americans really are as religiously observant as surveys suggest. Careful comparisons of survey responses with actual counts of parishioners in the pews suggest that many of us “misremember” whether we actually did make it to services last week. Estimates of the overreporting of church attendance range as high as 50 percent.29 Some scholars believe that the rate of overreporting is actually higher today than a generation ago, and if that is so, then the survey e
vidence may underestimate the falloff in actual church attendance. In short, participation in organized worship services is probably lower today than it was twenty-five years ago and is surely lower than it was forty years ago.

  Americans’ involvement in the social life of the church beyond worship itself—in Sunday schools, Bible study groups, “church socials,” and the like— appears to have fallen at least as fast as church membership and attendance at

  Figure 13: Trends in Church Attendance, 1940–1999

  worship services. In the 1950s roughly one in every four Americans reported membership in such church-related groups, apart from church membership itself. By the late 1980s and 1990s comparable studies found that that figure had been cut in half to roughly one in eight.30 The carefully controlled University of Michigan-NIMH study of change in personal behavior between 1957 and 1976 found a decline of 50 percent in membership in church-related groups. The General Social Survey reports that between 1974 and 1996 membership in church-related groups fell by at least 20 percent.31 Americans’ involvement in the social life of their religious institutions apart from formal worship services has fallen, probably by one-third since the 1960s and by one-half or more since the 1950s.

  These results are fully confirmed by evidence from the time diaries completed by samples of Americans in 1965, 1975, 1985, and 1995. Americans in 1995 devoted on average only two-thirds as much time to religion (both worship and religiously related social activities) as we did in 1965—a steady decline from one hour and thirty-seven minutes a week in 1965 to one hour and seven minutes in 1995.32 It is not that sermons were getting shorter; rather, the fraction of the population that spent any time on religion at all fell by nearly one-half.

  In sum, over the last three to four decades Americans have become about 10 percent less likely to claim church membership, while our actual attendance and involvement in religious activities has fallen by roughly 25 to 50 percent. Virtually all the postwar boom in religious participation—and perhaps more—has been erased. This broad historical pattern in religious participation—up from the first third of the century to the 1960s and then down from the 1960s to the 1990s—is very much the same pattern that we noted earlier for secular community-based organizations, as well as for political participation.

  What is more, in all three cases, the more demanding the form of involve-ment—actual attendance as compared to formal membership, for example— the greater the decline. In effect, the classic institutions of American civic life, both religious and secular, have been “hollowed out.” Seen from without, the institutional edifice appears virtually intact—little decline in professions of faith, formal membership down just a bit, and so on. When examined more closely, however, it seems clear that decay has consumed the load-bearing beams of our civic infrastructure.

  The decline in religious participation, like many of the changes in political and community involvement, is attributable largely to generational differences.33 Any given cohort of Americans seems not to have reduced religious observance over the years, but more recent generations are less observant than their parents. The slow but inexorable replacement of one generation by the next has gradually but inevitably lowered our national involvement in religious activities.

  Assessments of trends in religious behavior are inevitably controversial because many people have strong personal stakes on one side or the other of the debate, but one special complexity is a well-established “life cycle” pattern in religiosity.34 Generally speaking, marriage and children encourage greater involvement in church activities. In addition, middle-aged and older people (perhaps more conscious of our own mortality) seem more drawn to religion than are younger people. In order to detect significant long-run change, we must compare rates of religious participation among people of the same age in different eras. If the younger people today are less observant than people their age used to be, then in all likelihood even if today’s young people themselves gradually become more religiously involved as they age, they may well never catch up with the pace of their predecessors, and thus the aggregate level of religious engagement in society will tend to fall over time. Between the 1970s and the 1990s, church attendance among people under sixty dropped by roughly 10–20 percent, whereas among people sixty and over church attendance increased slightly.35 That modest increase in religious involvement among the oldest generation in the population—those born in the 1930s or earlier—was not enough to counterbalance the declining involvement of their children and grandchildren.

  This pattern applies in particular to the religious habits of the baby boomers. When they were in their twenties (in the 1960s and 1970s), boomers were more disaffected from religious institutions than their predecessors had been in their twenties. As the boomers married, had children, and settled down, they tended to become more involved with organized religion, just as their parents had, but the boomers began this life cycle move toward the church at a much lower level of religious involvement and have never closed the gap. Even now, in their forties and fifties, though (as we would expect) more religious than they once were, boomers remain less religiously involved than middle-aged people were a generation ago. Sociologist Wade Clark Roof estimates that two-thirds of all boomers reared in a religious tradition dropped out, while something less than half have returned.36 So as the boomers’ more religious parents depart from the scene, the average level of religious engagement continues to decline.

  Wade Clark Roof and William McKinney summarize American religious behavior in this era:

  Large numbers of young, well-educated, middle-class youth… defected from the churches in the late sixties and the seventies…. Some joined new religious movements, others sought personal enlightenment through various spiritual therapies and disciplines, but most simply “dropped out” of organized religion altogether…. [The consequence was a] tendency toward highly individualized religious psychology without the benefits of strong supportive attachments to believing communities. A major impetus in this direction in the post-1960s was the thrust toward greater personal fulfillment and quest for the ideal self…. In this climate of expressive individualism, religion tends to become “privatized,” or more anchored in the personal realms.37

  Privatized religion may be morally compelling and psychically fulfilling, but it embodies less social capital. More people are “surfing” from congregation to congregation more frequently, so that while they may still be “religious,” they are less committed to a particular community of believers. The last several decades have witnessed a flourishing of publicity about various cult groups, from transcendental meditation to the Unification Church of the Reverend Moon, but careful studies have shown that none of these movements attracted an enduring American membership of more than a few thousand, an infinitesimal fraction in an adult population of two hundred million.38 Even for those who remain religiously inclined, “privatized religion knows little of communal support, and exists by and large independent of institutionalized religious forms; it may provide meaning to the believer and personal orientation, but it is not a shared faith, and thus not likely to inspire strong group involvement…. ‘Believers’ perhaps, but ‘belongers,’ not.”39

  It is not my argument here that privatized religion is morally or theologically frivolous, or that inherited religious traditions are inherently superior. On the contrary, as Stephen Warner, an admirer of the freer market for self-determined religious affiliation, argues, “There is considerable evidence that religious switchers are morally serious.”40 But by most accounts, “the big ‘winner’ in the switching game is the growing secular constituency.”41

  As Phillip Hammond reports from a survey of churchgoers in North Carolina, Massachusetts, Ohio, and California, “The social revolution of the 1960s and 1970s accelerated the shifting balance between [the collective and individual role of the church], doing so by greatly escalating a phenomenon we will call ‘personal autonomy.’ Personal autonomy thus has not only led to a decline in parish invol
vement … but it has also led to an alteration in the meaning of that involvement.” Active involvement in the life of the parish depends heavily on the degree to which a person is linked to the broader social context—having friends in the parish, in the neighborhood, at work, being part of a closely knit personal network. As we shall see in the next two chapters, those supporting beams for religiously based social involvement have themselves been weakened in recent decades. The bottom line: While for many boomers privatized religion is a worthy expression of autonomous moral judgment, institutionalized religion is less central to their lives than it was to their parents’ lives.42

  • • •

  THE RELIGIOUS ORIENTATIONS of the so-called Generation X strongly suggest that this long-run ratcheting down of religious involvement has not yet run its course. For more than three decades college freshmen across America have filled out a standard questionnaire about their senior year in high school— grades, career interests, life goals, social activities, and so on. When the boomers entering college in 1968 completed this questionnaire, 9 percent said that they “never” attended church services. By the late 1990s, when the boomers’ children were filling out that same questionnaire, this same index of complete disengagement from organized religion had doubled to 18 percent. Similarly, the fraction of college freshmen who avowed “none” as their religious preference doubled from 7 percent in 1966 to 14 percent in 1997. Another rigorous series of annual surveys has found the fraction of high schoolers who attend church services every week fell from 40 percent in the late 1970s to 32 percent in the early 1990s.43