Longtime readers will know that I’m somewhat preoccupied with the changing demographics of American religion. I’ve commented in this space many times on Putnam & Campbell’s finding that all forms of organized religion, both liberal and conservative, are in numerical decline — and nobody seems to know what to do about it. There’s strong evidence that younger people — the ones who are staying away from churches — are more liberal on sexual issues … but the liberal churches aren’t picking up these disaffected youth. The conservative churches say, with reason, that people will be drawn to a religion that stands for something, that makes demands on one, as opposed to one that offers formless, emotive mush. But it’s not turning out that way.

Why? As you know, I think this has to do with broader changes in our culture that have made the idea of organized religion far less compelling than it previously was. We live in a culture now in which many people think of religion in terms of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. God is a vague presence who wants us to be good, and to be happy, but beyond that, who can say? If religion is primarily about providing therapeutic benefits to its adherents — that is, teaching them how to live more comfortably, as distinct from teaching them how to live and to worship God — then really, why go to church? Under MTD, you go when you feel the desire to go. You design the religion around yourself. Years ago, in his book “Habits of the Heart,” sociologist Robert Bellah called this “Sheilaism”:

Sheila Larson is a young nurse who has received a good deal of therapy and describes her faith as “Sheilaism.” This suggests the logical possibility of more than 235 million American religions, one for each of us. “I believe in God,” Sheila says. “I am not a religious fanatic. [Notice at once that in our culture any strong statement of belief seems to imply fanaticism so you have to offset that.] I can’t remember the last time I went to church. My faith has carried me a long way. It’s Sheilaism. Just my own little voice.” Sheila’s faith has some tenets beyond belief in God, though not many. In defining what she calls “my own Sheilaism,” she said: “It’s just try to love yourself and be gentle with yourself. You know, I guess, take care of each other. I think God would want us to take care of each other.” Like many others, Sheila would be willing to endorse few more specific points.

Bellah elaborates on this in a lecture:

But the case of Sheila is not confined to people who haven’t been to church in a long time. On the basis of our interviews, and a great deal of other data, I think we can say that many people sitting in the pews of Protestant and even Catholic churches are Sheilaists who feel that religion is essentially a private matter and that there is no particular constraint on them placed by the historic church, or even by the Bible and the tradition. We quote in Habits of the Heart a recent Gallup poll, which indicated that 80 percent of Americans agreed with the statement that “an individual should arrive at his or her own religious beliefs independent of any churches or synagogues.” Now, again, that isn’t the way it really happens. But just the notion that religious belief ought to be a purely internal thing, and then you go to the church or synagogue of your choice, shows how deeply ingrained a kind of religious privatism is, which turns the church into something like the Kiwanis Club or some other kind of voluntary association that you go to or not if you feel comfortable with it-but which has no organic claim upon you.

Bellah then offers a fascinating anecdote illustrating the insufficiency of this view of religion:

Now I would like to shift gears here and quote from the opening of a very interesting report of the Doctrine Commission of the Church of England on the problem of belief within the church that begins by referring to a play of Dorothy Sayers, which I think is raising the issue quite vividly. This play of Dorothy Sayers was written in 1946 and concerns a pilot in the RAF who was killed and then returns to his native city of Litchfield in England, and finds himself welcomed by the town’s people from the past centuries and required to stake his claim to citizenship. The town recorder says to the young man, “What matters here is not so much what you did as why you did it. Can you recite your creed?” And the airman says, “I believe in God.” And then the chorus of town’s people, picking him up and carrying him along, says, “The Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth and in Jesus Christ,” and then suddenly the airman breaks in and says, “No! No! No! What made me start off like that. I reacted automatically to the word creed. My personal creed is something totally different.” So here we have Sheila in England already in 1946.

And then the town recorder says to him,

What is speaking in you is the voice of the city, the church and the household of Christ, your people and country from whom you derive. Did you think you were unbegotten, unfranchised, with no community and no past? Out of the darkness of your unconscious memory, the stones of the city are crying out, ‘Go home.’

We are living through a time of radical upheaval in religious life in our country — and its very radicalism is concealed by its gentleness. I am part of it too, as one of the 40 percent of Americans who no longer belongs to the church or religion of his birth. The same shift in consciousness that enabled me to easily consider conversion, and that permitted me to do so without paying any social penalty for abandoning the religious commitments of prior generations, is also allowing many more people to drift away from organized religion entirely. Conservatives are by temperament and commitment more likely to remain practitioners of formal religion, it seems to me, but American society is clearly moving at a broad level toward MTD, toward Sheilaism. And I don’t know how the churches should respond. Nobody seems to.

The Catholic journalist Peter Steinfels wrote a long, penetrating meditation on this general theme as he’s seen it play out in the Catholic Church. I commend it to you. Excerpts:

Catholics becoming Protestants were less apt to stress unhappiness about specific teachings and more likely to pinpoint failures to meet their spiritual needs, frequently stating a general appreciation of their new affiliation and its manner of worship. These former Catholics were also more likely to have been affected by a change in life circumstances, like marrying someone of another faith or moving to a new place. Pew found that the vast majority of Catholics leaving the faith of their childhoods do so before age twenty-four. Those becoming unaffiliated reported having had a weaker faith in their childhood and significantly lower Mass attendance as teens. Most of the former Catholics, especially among those now unaffiliated, reported having just “drifted away” rather than undergoing a sudden change of mind or heart. Relatively few rated the sexual-abuse scandal high among reasons for leaving. That may reflect the calm-between-the-storms moment when the survey was taken. I suspect it also suggests that the scandal often functions less as a trigger to leave than as a confirmation of the dissatisfaction, distrust, or doubt people have already come to feel about the church. Very few, whether now unaffiliated or now Protestant, complained that Catholicism had drifted too far from traditional practices.

Why have I spent so much time on those of Catholic upbringing who have left the church? First, because the numbers are not trivial, to put it mildly. “Catholicism,” the Pew study found, “has lost more people to other religions or to no religion at all than any other single religious group.” In American Grace, their new study of religious polarization and pluralism, Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell quote a member of the Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd in Acton, Massachusetts, where it is estimated that former Catholics make up nearly half the congregation. “If it weren’t for people leaving the Catholic Church,” he said, “the Episcopal Church would have died a long time ago in America.” [See William A. Galston, “Getting Along.”]

Second, these numbers are not only not trivial—they are not just numbers. They are our siblings, our cousins, nieces and nephews, our friends, neighbors, classmates, and students, our children and grandchildren, even in some cases our parents.

Third, this pattern of loss may well be the wave of the future. Faltering Catholic religious education, declining Mass attendance rates among adolescents, drops in what younger people report about the importance of religion in their lives are the advance signs of generational loss. Unlike the familiar drift from faith of individuals, which may correct itself over the course of a life, the shift of a generation will be felt for decades. And from preboomers to millennials, each generation of young Americans has taken greater distance from organized religion.

More:

My impression is that bishops are constantly called upon to boost morale and lift up spirits in the face of often daunting problems. Appearances at parishes, reunions, conferences, or conventions are hardly occasions for dwelling on ominous trends, let alone encountering former Catholics. Many bishops bounce from event to event and from crisis to crisis. Except for financial matters, they may have little opportunity to contemplate the Big Picture, even on the diocesan level, let alone the national one. Their diocesan newspapers are rife with boosterism. In addition, bishops generally shun polemics. There are notable exceptions, even a few who may see the one-out-of-three who depart not as lost sheep but as good riddance, dead wood that should be cast into the fire, or even wolves preying upon the remaining flock. Most bishops, however, for good or ill, have reached their present positions by avoiding conflict, and they try to be what they should be, a point of unity for the local church. Findings like Pew’s can certainly unleash polemics. After their release, ultras and even moderates all along the ecclesiastical and theological spectrum flooded the blogosphere with accusations. Everyone else was to blame for the losses; one’s own viewpoint was the sure recipe for stanching them.

These partisan reactions cannot survive the most cursory look at the data, in which issues transcending camps like spiritually compelling worship, congregational leadership, and the need for effective adolescent catechesis rank alongside hot-button issues like abortion, homosexuality, treatment of women, sexual abuse, and episcopal forays into politics.

And:

But it would be inane to hold the bishops or any other specific group in the church responsible for the social and economic forces that dissolved the Catholic subculture, or for “the sixties,” or for the inevitable succession of generations. We can only be responsible for the ways we have responded, or not responded, to such huge shifts—with energy, sensitivity, and creativity, or with timidity, inertia, and stock formulas.

I doubt whether any diocese is without some energetic, sensitive, and creative initiatives to improve pastoral practice, liturgy, catechetics, preaching, faith formation, financial support, social witness, and all the other things that could reverse the current decline. I continue to hear of successful programs, learn of valuable research, meet inspiring individuals, and see ads for attractive guides and educational materials for clergy and lay leaders alike. Yet somehow all these initiatives seem too scattered, too underfunded, too dependent on an always limited number of exceptional talents to coalesce into a force equal to the forces of dissolution.

Read the whole thing.  I bet most of us, whatever church we’re in today or whatever church we’ve left, will find that Steinfels’s analysis resonates in some way with the experiences in our communions. Each side has its own set of reasons explaining the decline, and they usually amount to, “If only the church did it my way, we wouldn’t be in that fix.” (Or, as Steinfels characterizes this, “Everyone else was to blame for the losses; one’s own viewpoint was the sure recipe for stanching them.”) I used to think that way. I don’t think that way anymore, simply because that theory does not fit the data.

I now believe that we in the church — liberals, moderates, conservatives — are simply going to have to accustom ourselves to being a lot smaller for the foreseeable future. A friend, a popular Christian writer, e-mailed not long ago to express a sense of futility over his work. He said he really thought he could change things with his work, but as each year passes, things seem to get worse, and the church loses more and more a sense of itself, and loses the young. I told him that I agreed that it’s a terrible time for the church, and that we did ourselves no good with false optimism. We cannot turn back the incoming tide of the times. The tsunami rolling over this culture today is only the most recent aftershock of the massive earthquake that struck the ocean floor in the 16th century, with the Reformation. [And no, I’m not “blaming” the Reformation for our troubles today.] While we can’t stop the tidal wave coming in, we can give people a life raft to cling to, to keep them from being swept away in the maelstrom. Your books offer people that life raft, I said.

My friend the writer is a small-o orthodox Christian, which makes him count as a conservative, I guess, though he’s not a political conservative (or even political). I think he would agree that little is sadder than churches that bend over backwards to accomodate the Zeitgeist in hopes of staying “relevant” to young people. For one thing, it’s as sad as middle-aged people adopting the lingo and the fashions of the young, trying to stay hip. It doesn’t work. For another, it can be a betrayal of one’s doctrinal convictions. If everything is up for grabs, then nothing in the tradition is solid. You find yourself with people who think they can rewrite the Our Father, or rehabilitate long-forgotten heresies. It’s a recipe for chaos and, with the passing of time, irrelevance and dissolution.

And yet, conservative churches, which in principle understand this and resist it, are not prospering either. You can point to anecdotal successes, of course, but the overall drift from the church, and from orthodoxy, is undeniable. Conservatives, like liberals, have failed to come up with, to use Steinfels’s phrase, “a force equal to the force of dissolution.”

Why not? I put it to you readers for discussion. I know we have religiously observant readers from along the spectrum, so I exhort you to please avoid in your answers the dead end of everyone else is to blame for the losses; my viewpoint is the sure recipe for stanching them. I would really like to see, and would profit from seeing, an honest, non-defensive discussion about this challenge facing organized religion, and how the church universal should respond to it. I’m going to work harder than usual to moderate this discussion, because it can so easily degenerate into finger-pointing and chastising. Maybe a good way to start would be for everyone who wishes to participate to attempt an honest assessment of how their side has failed to meet the challenge. It’s okay to fault the other side too, but I don’t think the data give any of us solid ground on which to claim that our side has been successful and the others have failed.

Me, I think Pope Benedict has called this more or less correctly, in his analysis of the near future of Christianity in Europe. The decline cannot be soon arrested. The faithful will need to build cohesive communities of belief strong enough to resist the Dark Age upon us (Benedict, to my knowledge, doesn’t use that term, just so you know), and to find ways of being a joyful, “creative minority” within a post-Christian culture.

One more thing: in my experience, too many churches see themselves and their communities, consciously or not, as an end in themselves, and not as a means to a higher end. I can’t tell you how many Catholic sermons I sat through over the years in which the pastor spoke of the community gathered there as the point of it all — this enjoying each other in community. Well, yes, you have to have community, but religion seen this way doesn’t point to anything beyond itself. The community has to have a mission beyond perpetuating itself, it seems to me. And this is where things break down, because to determine what that mission is, you have to have agreement on what the church stands for — what its principles are, and what it expects of its people. Bellah has pointed out that Americans want community, but they don’t want to make any sacrifices to get it. This is why MTD is so powerful: it allows you to enjoy the warm glow of religion without making any real demands on you. But the young are onto this nonsense. They well understand that if you can have God entirely on your own terms, then why put up with the community unless you really want to? I suspect that the biggest challenge facing all churches, whatever their orientation (liberal, conservative, etc.), is to convince a generation conditioned by radical individualism, consumerism, relativism and emotivism why churches of any sort are necessary at all.