Charles Murray has pointed out — as have many social scientists — that the white working class is rapidly being lost to organized religion. In the US, the better educated you are, the more likely you participate in church. This doesn’t fit the culture-war story line, but it’s true.

In trying to figure out why this has happened among Catholics, Mark Stricherz considers whether or not the abandonment of the Baltimore Catechism has something to do with it. Excerpt:

As a rule, I am wary of heaping the Church’s woes after 1965 at the feet of Vatican II. The secularization of non-Catholic America was well underway in the 1950s, and Catholics were all but helpless to stop it. But to the extent that the reforms of Vatican II, and the liberal reaction to them, contributed to the decline in religious devotion, the behavior of a few dissident priests does not strike me as the main or sole reason. In my opinion, the institutional Church’s failure to appeal to ordinary Catholics was the bigger reason.

Specifically, this:

In other words, the Baltimore Catechism was not elaborate, overly complex, or opaque. It didn’t require an advanced degree to read and understand. As a result, Catholicism was accessible to ordinary church-goers, including the working classes. It was the way of our people.

I would like to agree with this, but I think it’s wrong. It’s hard for me to imagine Catholicism more stripped down and basic than postconciliar parish Catholicism. For Stricherz’s hypothesis to be correct, one has to assume that the institutional Church replaced the simple, declarative, easy to grasp teaching of the Baltimore Catechism with an elaborate, complex, opaque catechism. Does this strike any Catholic as true to what happened? To the contrary, most Catholics I know complain that the rigor and complexity of Catholic thought and teaching has been radically dumbed down and denatured. Who needs an advanced degree to understand quotidian Catholicism today? Whatever is keeping the working classes away from mass, it’s not liturgies in Latin and sermons that are classes on Scholastic theology.

A few years back, my friend Leon Podles, who is Catholic, published a book called “The Church Impotent” — now available for free in PDF form — arguing that Western Christianity (Catholic and Protestant) has for centuries failed to appeal to men. Excerpt from the introduction: In reading about war, I realized that here was something that men took with deadly (both literally and metaphorically) earnestness. War, and the vicarious experience of war in literature and reenactments, as well as the analogues and substitutes for war in dangerous sports and avocations, provide the real center of the emotional, and I would even say

the spiritual, life of most men in the modern world. The ideology of masculinity has replaced Christianity as the true religion of men. We live in a society with a female religion and a male religion: Christianity, of various sorts, for women and non-masculine men; and masculinity, especially in the forms of competition and violence that culminate in war, for men.

My personal experience is limited to North America, and most sociological work on religion and men has been done in North America and France. Nevertheless, the comparative lack of masculine interest in Christianity is much the same throughout Western Christianity, Catholic and Protestant. South America is notorious. The church is for women; the bars are for men.

I suspect Lee’s onto something here. But it’s at best a partial explanation. Why aren’t working-class women going to church like they used to? It’s not because the working classes are becoming atheist. As the political scientists Robert Putnam and David Campbell wrote in their landmark book on contemporary American religious life, American Grace:

While atheism has recently gained prominence, particularly on the bestseller lists, self-identified atheists and agnostics comprise a vanishingly small proportion of the U.S. population. For instance, in the 2006 Faith Matters survey precisely five people out of 3,108 chose either label.

What Putnam and Campbell did find is a large and rising number of Americans who say they believe in God, but who decline to affiliate with a church or tradition (the “Nones,” they call them). My guess is that as religion in contemporary America has come to mean mostly a matter of emotion, and vague moralism (the dreaded MTD!), the idea of needing to participate in religious community and formal worship to establish a sufficient relationship to God makes very little sense to people. That, and the individualism in American life, which means that there is no longer any such thing as (to use Stricherz’s phrase) “the way of our people,” not when it comes to religion. Increasingly, “the way of our people” is to treat religion like we do everything else: as a matter of private, personal choice. I am one of the 40 percent of Americans who no longer belong to the church or religion into which I was born. I invite you to take a look at this meditation I posted on the decline of American religious life in an age of religious privatism. Notice especially the deeply felt, penetrating material from Peter Steinfels, a progressive Catholic, who says that we can argue over the role liberalism and conservatism has played in advancing the dissolution of American religious life, but the fact is nobody has yet come up with “a force to equal to the forces of dissolution.” I ended my essay like this:

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.

Could it be that the working classes are quicker to understand the logic of American religiosity, in which every man is not only his own pope, but his own cathedral as well?