Bad Numbers Can't Change the Good News

My hometown of St. Louis, MO, has developed something of an abandoned church problem. Since many of these buildings are hundreds of years old, the city is hesitant about demolishing them. The entrepreneurial spirit has come to the rescue, however, as many of these churches are being bought up and repurposed. For instance: St. Liborius, a Catholic church completed in 1889, is now the indoor skate park SK8 Liborius. Immanuel Congregational Church closed its doors around 2010, but a local businessman bought the building ten years later and is now converting it into “a 9,000-square-foot mancave” for patrons to enjoy things like tabletop games and beer tastings. 

The market for deconsecrated churches will likely grow at a quickening pace over the next few decades. Last year, the Pew Research Center projected that by 2070, less than half of Americans will identify as Christian (and much less will go to church on a regular basis). To put this in context, around 90% of American adults claimed Christianity as recently as 1990. Large-scale “disaffiliation” seems to have finally come for the United States, which has long been an outlier in religiosity amongst rich Western countries. 

But in a recent article for the Atlantic, Wendy Cadge and Elan Babchuck argue that Americans aren’t so much abandoning religion wholesale as discovering spiritual outlets outside the walls of church and synagogue. According to Cadge and Babchuck, religion does four main “jobs” for people: (1) it makes sense of the vagaries of life; (2) it provides rituals to mark, celebrate, and process significant life events (and especially death); (3) it establishes and nourishes community; and (4) it inspires social action to combat injustice. 

Americans are finding new ways of getting these four jobs done without ever having to sit in a pew. The authors note phenomena ranging from the high demand for chaplains and spiritual directors, to the rise of online communities focused on spiritual growth or grief support, to interreligious social justice organizations, and even to a Christian house group movement called the New Wine Collective that shuns “hierarchies” in favor of decentralization and inclusivity. 

Cadge and Babchuck do not really delve into the reason behind this shift from traditional churchgoing, but that’s frankly not very hard to figure out. Gaining access to some of the lovely things religion offers without all the annoying stuff – like the puzzling metaphysical distinctions, sacred texts that say weird and offensive things, and institutions with all their power structures and checkered pasts – certainly seems like a good deal. This is especially true for people who experience deep spiritual longings but who have also been deeply wounded by a church. 

Even so, some of us are still getting our kids out the door on Sunday morning to attend a brick-and-mortar church that hasn’t yet been converted into a skate park. How do we respond to this seismic shift in American religiosity? I’d like to offer three humble recommendations: 

Don’t get cranky

For people with deep-rooted theological convictions, it is easy enough to dismiss most of these trends as vacuous, DIY spirituality. But dismissiveness isn’t going to bring people back to church. If anything, grousing will only reinforce the impression that the church is on the defensive. 

More importantly, there is room here for Christians to feel a certain degree of optimism. Ongoing interest in spiritual community and quasi-religious rituals is good evidence that full-bore secularism (i.e., indifference to all things spiritual or religious) is incapable of sustaining human flourishing over the long term. Man simply cannot live on 401(k)’s, vacations, or even loftier things like social activism and artistic expression alone. The sensus divinitatis has not disappeared, nor will it ever. 

Ongoing interest in spiritual community and quasi-religious rituals is good evidence that full-bore secularism (i.e., indifference to all things spiritual or religious) is incapable of sustaining human flourishing over the long term.

Don’t despair

If religion were a stock market, most people would be shorting the church. It certainly does feel like the church is losing a competition for survival with these new forms of spiritual expression – and, worse still, it’s at least in part a self-inflicted defeat given the depressingly numerous cases of scandal and hypocrisy that have shaken every major branch of Christianity. 

But the church does not stand or fall based on how well it performs the four jobs outlined by Cadge and Babchuck. The church is not a corporation producing religious goods, which is being gradually replaced by competitors who offer a better product.* It’s a people who have come to accept the proclamation that the God of Israel has raised Jesus of Nazareth from the dead and has declared him Lord. Our institutional failures and stupidities can make this proclamation less credible (and that is certainly tragic), but they cannot make it untrue. 

Do keep inviting your friends to your church’s chili cook-off

Granted that the alternatives to church described by Cadge and Babchuck are able to do the “four jobs” of religion, the real question is, “For how long?” The persistent impulse to find spiritual community is matched by the persistent reality that community is difficult. People are mercurial; the organization necessary for almost any community is tedious. Such a community will survive in the long run only if the individuals who comprise it come to believe that it is rooted in eternity in some identifiable and understandable way. The church, for all its problems, knows how it is so rooted. For this very reason, I’m optimistic that some people are going to filter back in over the coming decades. So let’s keep inviting them in. Perhaps they’ll come for the chili and stay because Jesus is very God of very God. 

At this present moment in American religious history, the church is waning rather quickly in terms of numbers, power, and influence. This has actually happened before: church membership rates were surprisingly low in Revolutionary-era America, for instance. But eternity is still in the human heart. Most importantly: even if the numbers are bad, the news about Jesus crucified for sinners and raised to new life hasn’t become any less good. 

* In the meantime, however, traditional churches may have to learn lessons from decentralizing movements like New Wine Collective on how to practice the Christian faith with fewer human and financial resources, without jettisoning important theological distinctives.