BOWLING ALONE Page 9
I have generalized about trends in American religious participation in the aggregate over the last three decades, but in at least two important respects that is an oversimplification. First, not everyone in American society has been affected equally by the trends I have described so far. While one group of Americans has tended to withdraw from active involvement in faith-based communities, another group is as fully involved as ever. While the fraction of the population that is entirely disconnected from organized religion has increased, the fraction that is intensely involved has been relatively stable. In other words, religious dropouts have come at the expense of those whose religious involvement was modest but conventional. The result is that the country is becoming ever more clearly divided into two groups—the devoutly observant and the entirely unchurched.44 (Some might see here a certain parallel to trends in politics—more true believers, more dropouts, and fewer moderates.) This is the sociological substratum that underlies the much discussed “culture wars” of recent years. Although this polarization should not be exaggerated, it may also have a regional dimension, since there is some evidence that religious disengagement has been most marked in the North (especially the Northeast) and most limited in the southern Bible Belt.45
Second, the pace and direction of change has varied markedly among different denominations. Protestant and Jewish congregations have lost market share in terms of membership, while Catholics and other religions have gained. Since World War II the percentage of Protestants in the U.S. population has fallen by roughly 3 to 4 percentage points per decade, a decline of roughly one-quarter overall, while the percentage of Jews has fallen by about .5 percentage point per decade, a decline of roughly half overall. By contrast, the Catholic share of the population has risen by 1 to 1.5 percentage points per decade, an increase of roughly one-third overall, while “no religion” rose by about 2 percentage points per decade, roughly quadrupling. The fraction of the U.S. population that claimed to be Protestant fell by 12 to 15 percentage points (or nearly one-fifth) in the last third of the twentieth century, probably the sharpest such decline in U.S. history.46
In some measure, these divergent growth rates are influenced by immigration from Latin America for Catholics and from Asia for other religions. By some estimates, for example, Hispanics now constitute one-quarter of American Catholics. Their involvement means that the Catholic Church is once again playing an important role in connecting immigrants to the broader American society, and in that sense continuing to contribute to social capital formation, but this new influx only partially conceals the degree to which native-born Americans are becoming less involved in the church.
The shifts have been even more marked within the broad family of Protestant denominations. Over the last forty years mainline denominations (Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopal, Lutheran, Congregational, American Baptist, and so on) have heavily lost “market share,” while evangelical and fundamentalist groups (Southern Baptist, Pentecostal, Holiness, Assemblies of God, and Church of God in Christ, as well as Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, and independent congregations) have continued to grow, although sometimes at a pace slower than before and now barely matching national population growth. While mainline Protestantism still is a significant part of the religious landscape, these congregations are dwindling, aging, and less involved in religious activities. The fraction of all church members who belong to evangelical churches has risen—probably by roughly one-third in the quarter century after 1960—but for Protestants as a whole, the evangelical gains were not enough to offset the mainline losses. One result is that growth has occurred at both ends of the religious spectrum, the most orthodox and the most secular, while the middle has collapsed.47
Measures of church attendance tell a slightly different story. While the numbers of self-identified Catholics have continued to grow, the traditionally high Catholic rate of observance as measured by attendance at mass has declined steadily. Among the dwindling number of Protestants, the rate of weekly attendance has held up reasonably well, in part because of the shift among Protestant denominations toward more evangelical congregations; but since there are fewer self-identified Protestants now, the fraction of Americans who attend Protestant worship services regularly has declined significantly over the last three to four decades. In other words, more and more Catholics are becoming merely nominal church members, while a large and steadily growing number of Protestants and Jews are abandoning their religion entirely.48
These declines in religious involvement characterize blacks at least as much as whites, even though blacks continue to be more religiously observant than whites. The decline in church attendance between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s was nearly as great among blacks as among whites, and membership losses from church groups were slightly greater among blacks. Also, among blacks as among whites, mainline Protestant denominations seem to have suffered relative decline, while evangelical congregations have surged.49
The revitalization of evangelical religion is perhaps the most notable feature of American religious life in the last half of the twentieth century. As church historians Roger Finke and Rodney Stark have argued, this development is merely the latest reenactment of a familiar drama from American religious history: an insurgent, more disciplined, more sectlike, less “secularized” religious movement overtakes more worldly, establishmentarian denominations. The Methodists did this to the Episcopalians in the mid–nineteenth century, and now the fundamentalists have done it to the Methodists.
From one perspective this development reinvigorates religion and creates vibrant social capital within the new evangelical churches. The achievements of evangelicals over the last several decades in creating energetic religious communities are justly admired by religious leaders across the spectrum. Many of the most important episodes of social capital formation in American history have been rooted in religious revivals, and we may be on the cusp of another such period.50
However, as Wade Clark Roof has observed, “Conservative religious energies are channeled in the direction of recovery of faith within the religious tradition and of reaffirmation of religious and life-style boundaries within the dominant culture…. Growing churches and synagogues are usually exclusive in character, capable of drawing both social and religious boundaries.”51 Historically, mainline Protestant church people provided a disproportionate share of leadership to the wider civic community, whereas both evangelical and Catholic churches put more emphasis on church-centered activities. Reviewing the sweep of American history, Robert Wuthnow, one of the country’s most acute and sympathetic observers of religion, concludes that “whereas the mainline churches participated in progressive social betterment programs during the first half of the twentieth century, evangelical churches focused more on individual piety.”52
Both individually and congregationally, evangelicals are more likely to be involved in activities within their own religious community but are less likely to be involved in the broader community.53 Evangelicals attend church more regularly than mainline Protestants, are far more generous philanthropically (giving an average of 2.8 percent of family income vs. 1.6 percent), attend Sunday school and Bible study groups more regularly, and have more close friends in the same congregation. According to George Marsden, “The fundamental-ist churches offer far stronger community to their members than do their moderate-liberal Protestant counterparts…. [They] are some of the most cohesive non-ethnic communities in America.”54
The social capital of evangelicals, however, is invested at home more than in the wider community. Among evangelicals, church attendance is not correlated with membership in community organizations. There are exceptions to the generalization that evangelicals don’t reach out: Charles Colson’s Prison Fellowship Ministries, for example, is widely praised for working across denominational and racial lines in six hundred prisons nationwide to restore inmates to membership in the community. Most evangelical volunteering, however, supports the religious life of the congregation itself—
teaching Sunday school, singing in the choir, ushering at worship services—but does not extend to the broader community as much as volunteering by members of other faiths.55
Today’s mainline Protestants and Catholics are more likely to be involved in volunteering and service in the wider community. Among mainline Protestants, and to a lesser extent Catholics, church attendance is less closely tied to religious volunteering but more closely tied to secular volunteering. In these faiths, church attendance is correlated with membership and indeed leadership in secular groups. In both evangelical and mainline congregations, the religiously involved learn transferable civic skills, such as management and public speaking, but mainline Protestants are more likely to transfer them to the wider community. As Robert Wuthnow concludes: “Mainline Protestant churches encourage civic engagement in the wider community, whereas evangelical churches apparently do not.”56
The same contrast appears at the congregational level: self-described conservative congregations are less likely than liberal or moderate congregations to offer social outreach services or programs, with the notable exception of right-to-life activities. (We shall look more closely at the political participation of evangelical Christians in chapter 9.) Similarly, during the civil rights era, black civic engagement was positively correlated with involvement in mainline black churches, but negatively associated with involvement in black fundamentalist denominations. Thus the fact that evangelical Christianity is rising and mainline Christianity is falling means that religion is less effective now as a foundation for civic engagement and “bridging” social capital. Wuthnow gets to the heart of the matter:
Religion may have a salutary effect on civil society by encouraging its members to worship, to spend time with their families, and to learn the moral lessons embedded in religious traditions. But religion is likely to have a diminished impact on society if that is the only role it plays. What interested Tocqueville about voluntary organizations was…their ability to forge connections across large segments of the population, spanning communities and regions, and drawing together people from different ethnic backgrounds and occupations.57
It is that broader civic role that, with few exceptions, evangelical religion has not yet come to play in contemporary America.
• • •
LET US SUMMARIZE what we have learned about the religious entry in America’s social capital ledger. First, religion is today, as it has traditionally been, a central fount of American community life and health. Faith-based organizations serve civic life both directly, by providing social support to their members and social services to the wider community, and indirectly, by nurturing civic skills, inculcating moral values, encouraging altruism, and fostering civic recruitment among church people.
Second, the broad oscillations in religious participation during the twentieth century mirror trends in secular civic life—flowering during the first six decades of the century and especially in the two decades after World War II, but then fading over the last three or four decades. As in secular life, the more intense the form of involvement, the greater the recent decline, even though a minority of the population continues to find demanding denominations especially appealing. Moreover, as in politics and society generally, this disengagement appears tied to generational succession. For the most part younger generations (“younger” here includes the boomers) are less involved both in religious and in secular social activities than were their predecessors at the same age.
Finally, American religious life over this period has also reenacted the historically familiar drama by which more dynamic and demanding forms of faith have surged to supplant more mundane forms. At least so far, however, the community-building efforts of the new denominations have been directed inward rather than outward, thus limiting their otherwise salutary effects on America’s stock of social capital. In short, as the twenty-first century opens, Americans are going to church less often than we did three or four decades ago, and the churches we go to are less engaged with the wider community. Trends in religious life reinforce rather than counterbalance the ominous plunge in social connectedness in the secular community.
CHAPTER 5
Connections in the Workplace
WORK-RELATED ORGANIZATIONS are conventionally seen through two different lenses. Economically, unions and professional societies are sometimes criticized as a form of monopoly cartel, as a modern-day guild, a means by which workers in a particular industry or profession can combine to suppress competition and boost income. Sociologically, however, these organizations are an important locus of social solidarity, a mechanism for mutual assistance and shared expertise. Fundamentally, of course, these two images are mutually reinforcing, since solidarity is a crucial precondition for economic collaboration. Even those who bemoan the economic consequences of teachers’ unions or bar associations might acknowledge the social capital they represent.
Work-related organizations, both unions and business and professional organizations, have traditionally been among the most common forms of civic connectedness in America. In our inventory of social capital, this is an important ledger. Figure 14 summarizes trends in the rate of union membership in the United States over the course of the twentieth century. The details of this historical profile are linked to the specific history of American labor, such as the favorable effects of two world wars and the New Deal on collective bargaining.1 However, the broad pattern is reminiscent of the pattern we have noted for both community-based and religious organizations: modest growth in the first third of the century; rapid growth coming out of the Depression and World War II; a high plateau from the 1950s into the 1960s; and a sharp, sustained decline during the last third of the century.
For many years, labor unions provided one of the most common organizational
Figure 14: Union Membership in the United States, 1900–1998
affiliations among American working men (and less so, working women), and to some extent that has remained true in recent decades.2 However, the rate of union membership has been falling for more than four decades, with the steepest decline occurring since 1975. Since the mid-1950s, when union membership peaked, the unionized portion of the workforce in America has nose-dived from 32.5 percent to 14.1 percent. By now, virtually all of the explosive growth in union membership that was associated with the New Deal has been erased. Moreover, the type of involvement in unions has slackened. Unions are now seen mostly as hired bargaining agents, not as a social movement. Although unions, like other voluntary associations, have often been plagued by oligarchy, apathy, and corruption, historically they both created and depended upon social capital—that is, networks of reciprocity. By the end of the twentieth century, however, this once central element in the social life of working Americans had virtually vanished. The solidarity of union halls is now mostly a fading memory of aging men.
But isn’t this decline in unionization simply a natural reflection of the changing structure of the postindustrial American economy? Many people consider collective bargaining “primarily suited for the male, blue-collar, production workers in the goods producing industry—the bastion of unions in the ’50s—and of little interest to the female, white-collar, knowledge worker in the service industries—the vanguard of the new labor force in the post-industrial economy.”3 The decline of manufacturing, the movement of commerce and jobs from the smokestack states of the Northeast to the antiunion Sunbelt, the increase in educational levels, and part-time employment—all those factors that economists refer to as “structural changes”—are plausible explanations for an inevitable decline in union membership.
In fact, however, the strictly economic change from an industrial to a service economy is only about one-quarter of the story, and all these structural changes together account for barely half of the total decline in union membership.4 In other words, even within specific jobs and industries, the fraction of the workforce that is unionized has fallen sharply over the last four decades. Between 1953 and 1997 union
membership rates declined by 62 percent within manufacturing, by 79 percent within mining, by 78 percent within construction, by 60 percent within transportation, and by 40 percent within the service sector. The only sector to resist this ebbing tide even temporarily was government employment, in which unionization increased sharply for a decade and a half between 1962 and 1979, following a legal change in the basis for collective bargaining in the executive branch introduced by the Kennedy administration. However, over the last two decades even in the public sector union membership has been stagnant. Union decline is not mainly a result of the bleaching of blue collars into white collars.5
Labor economists have offered a variety of other interpretations of the decline in unionization—adverse changes in public policy, such as the antistrike policy introduced by the Reagan administration during the air traffic controllers strike of 1982, virulent employer resistance, flaccid union strategy, and so on. There is some truth in each of these interpretations, but despite much debate, no consensus yet exists among the experts as to their relative weight, and this is not the place to sort them all out. Interestingly, however, one comprehensive study concluded that “virtually all the decline in unionization between 1977 and 1991 seems to be due to decline in demand for union representation”6—fewer union members because fewer workers want to join.
Might this decline in “demand” reflect public disgust at improper union influence, featherbedding, corruption, and the like? At one time that explanation might have been plausible, but public resentment of union power has declined steadily for more than two decades, while membership has continued to plunge. Public resentment may have been a consequence of union power, but it is not a cause of continuing union decline. Perhaps the problem with union membership is not so much skepticism about the idea of “union” as skepticism about the idea of “membership.” As labor economist Peter Pestillo presciently observed two decades ago, “The young worker thinks primarily of himself. We are experiencing the cult of the individual, and labor is taking a beating preaching the comfort of coalition.”7