The misunderstood reason millions atlantic

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A recent opinion piece in The Atlantic complains that Christianity is in decline because of 'how American life works in the 21st century. Lately, The Atlantic is pushing hard on a particular narrative of American Christianity. It spins a story of Real True Christianity being subverted somehow—but poised to return in glorious triumph if only Real True Christians start living out their faith in the correct ways. One of their recent stories spins that narrative. Alas and alack, its author misses some extremely important truths—about both American Christianity itself and American culture. This is a particularly inbred flavor of Christianity, too.

The misunderstood reason millions atlantic

In pretty short order, the article was widely shared on social media. People were talking about it online, writers were writing about it. Why this is happening has been of significant concern and importance to religious leaders, as well as interest to sociologists. While many would point to corruption and abuse scandals that have plagued the church sexual abuse, residential schools, pandemic restrictions, etc… , the most predominant reasons that sociologists are finding are more mundane. The central thesis of the article is that the shape of American life has changed to be productivity and achievement focused. Many have shifted their lives to find identity and meaning in jobs and work — workism as the article calls it. Truths that ring true for Canadians as well. Because of this social shift from community life to individualistic pursuits, people have generally become lonelier and more anxious, forgetting how to live in community. As I have pondered this question for almost two decades now, this feels like a diagnosis that gets much more deeply to the heart of the matter. The easy answers like youth sports and dance, Sunday shopping and laziness are inadequate to the question of why people are drifting away from church. There is something deeper in the way we are living as a society that is causing us to forget how to be a community in ways that seemed effortless and natural not that long ago. Side note: It has to be stated that economic forces have made us more work- focused since the 70s. Rising inequality and wage stagnation has meant that single income earner households dealt with the increasing cost of living by adding more income earners. More simply put, wives and mothers who once stayed at home and could devote weekday time to the church or school or community group now MUST work because minimum wage has been kept low, jobs have been outsourced and corporations have suppressed wages for the sake of profit.

Nearly everyone I grew up with in my childhood church in Lincoln, Nebraska, is no longer Christian. In pretty short order, the article was widely shared on social media.

Millions of Americans are leaving church, never to return, and it would be easy to think that this will make the country more secular and possibly more liberal. After all, that is what happened in Northern and Western Europe in the s: A younger generation quit going to Anglican, Lutheran, or Catholic churches and embraced a liberal, secular pluralism that shaped European politics for the rest of the 20th century and beyond. Something similar happened in the traditionally Catholic Northeast, where, at the end of the 20th century, millions of white Catholics in New England, New York, and other parts of the Northeast quit going to church. Today most of those states are pretty solidly blue and firmly supportive of abortion rights. So, as church attendance declines even in the southern Bible Belt and the rural Midwest, history might seem to suggest that those regions will become more secular, more supportive of abortion and LGBTQ rights, and more liberal in their voting patterns. But that is not what is happening.

N early everyone I grew up with in my childhood church in Lincoln, Nebraska, is no longer Christian. Forty million Americans have stopped attending church in the past 25 years. As a Christian, I feel this shift acutely. My wife and I wonder whether the institutions and communities that have helped preserve us in our own faith will still exist for our four children, let alone whatever grandkids we might one day have. This change is also bad news for America as a whole: Participation in a religious community generally correlates with better health outcomes and longer life , higher financial generosity , and more stable families —all of which are desperately needed in a nation with rising rates of loneliness, mental illness, and alcohol and drug dependency. The Great Dechurching finds that religious abuse and more general moral corruption in churches have driven people away. This is, of course, an indictment of the failures of many leaders who did not address abuse in their church. But Davis and Graham also find that a much larger share of those who have left church have done so for more banal reasons. The book suggests that the defining problem driving out most people who leave is … just how American life works in the 21st century. Rather, it is designed to maximize individual accomplishment as defined by professional and financial success.

The misunderstood reason millions atlantic

Nearly everyone I grew up with in my childhood church in Lincoln, Nebraska, is no longer Christian. That's not unusual. Forty million Americans have stopped attending church in the past 25 years. That's something like 12 percent of the population, and it represents the largest concentrated change in church attendance in American history. As a Christian, I feel this shift acutely. My wife and I wonder whether the institutions and communities that have helped preserve us in our own faith will still exist for our four children, let alone whatever grandkids we might one day have.

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Forty million Americans have stopped attending church in the past 25 years. Rather, it is designed to maximize individual accomplishment as defined by professional and financial success. Of course, at our worst, churches succumb to the achievement and productivity narratives by measuring ourselves by how many members we used to have and how big our budgets used to be. Popular Latest Newsletters. Side note: It has to be stated that economic forces have made us more work- focused since the 70s. Church communities — at our best — proclaim a reality in which our worth and value, our meaning and purpose come from outside of our own efforts. Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter. Beck is getting at the same point as Meador: Many Americans seem to have forgotten how to create truly deliberate communities with one another. In theory, the Christian Church could be an antidote to all that. Explore Podcasts All podcasts. Bird flu has never done this before.

Millions of Americans are leaving church, never to return, and it would be easy to think that this will make the country more secular and possibly more liberal.

I suspect this new reality is part of what drove Meador to write that post: The evangelical complementarian ideal of one wage-earning husband supporting a wife and a passel of kids has been completely out of reach for most Americans for decades now. My own analysis of General Social Survey data has suggested that white southerners who identify as Christian but do not attend church are overwhelmingly conservative in their attitudes on race and social welfare just as church-attending southern white Christians are. American churches have too often been content to function as a kind of vaguely spiritual NGO, an organization of detached individuals who meet together for religious services that inspire them, provide practical life advice, or offer positive emotional experiences. Numerous victims of abuse in church environments can identify a moment when they lost the ability to believe, when they almost felt their faith draining out of them. Or a wildly-unsuited Christian couple insist on marrying, since Jesus himself must have commanded such a pair to unite. How long do you suppose a church like the one Meador and Dechurched idealize will last before desperate people discover it? Consider one of the composite characters that Graham and Davis use in the book to describe a typical evangelical dechurcher: a something woman who grew up in a suburban megachurch, was heavily invested in a campus ministry while in college, then after graduating moved into a full-time job and began attending a young-adults group in a local church. Put another way, we cannot simply talk about marriage and the sexes and gender roles; we must talk about the place where those things are acted out. She writes about the intersection of psychology, belief, popular culture, science, How American Life Works. Though churches have a reputation in some circles as promoting hyper-politicization, they can be depolarizing institutions. But the economy is historically strong, Derek Thompson writes. There is something deeper in the way we are living as a society that is causing us to forget how to be a community in ways that seemed effortless and natural not that long ago. Sign up. Especially as many people are losing the relational skills of being in community.