America's Religious Identity -- Boom, Shocks, and After-shocks (Part 3 -- First Aftershock)

I graduated from high school in 1976, and we were by most measures a rather religious bunch.  My principal told my mother that my class was the most religious he'd ever seen come through the school (and he'd been there a long time).  Back in the mid to late 70s we saw Jimmy Carter ride a wave of evangelical support into the White House.  Being a Republican at the time I had to defend Gerry Ford's Christian faith.  The Moral Majority was active, Pat Robertson was popular, and Bill Bright sponsored his "I Found It" campaign, wherein blue bumper stickers got placed everywhere imaginable.  Oh, and I left my Episcopal church home for the excitement of the local Foursquare Church, along with a lot of other mainliners, who were attracted to the Jesus People message, and the Christian rock and roll (Love Song, Larry Norman, Barry McGuire, Keith Green, et al). 

According to Robert Putnam and Dennis Campbell, I was part of a conservative aftershock.  The excesses of the 1960s, which had been accompanied by major social/cultural changes, including the Civil Rights Movement and the Sexual Revolution, led to Richard Nixon's election in 1968 as voice of the so-called "Silent Majority," the "majority" that had not come of age in the 1960s.  As I came of age, I was caught up in this reaction that stemmed for a time, at least, the attendance decreases in the churches -- only the more liberal mainline churches continued to empty out -- in part due to a lower birth rate -- but also because many young adults, like me, chose to move over to the more conservative evangelical churches.  My cohort, which came of age in the late 70s and early 80s even saw an increase in attendance.  

Putnam and Campbell write that conservative religiosity in the 1970s and 1980s was most visible in the same niche as was the radicalism of the 1960s -- the college age group.  They note that while student radicalism peaked around 1968, by 1971 a new quietism had hit the campuses.  Interestingly, a more liberal view of sex continued through this era (we didn't go back to the 50s in this area).  What is interesting is the change in religious identification.  Whereas the number of college freshman who rejected a religious identity doubled between 1966 and 1971, it went up just as quickly in the following decade (my decade).  

But, again the key component here is not just that they returned to church, but the churches to which they turned.  

Just as in politics, many Americans of all ages were deeply troubled by the moral and religious developments of the Sixties.  For the next two decades, these people -- conservative in both religion and politics -- swelled the ranks both of evangelical Protestant denominations and of the rapidly growing evangelical megachurches that disavowed denominations and termed themselves simply "Christian." (American Grace, pp. 102-103). 

Thus, we can see the evangelical boom as a conservative reaction to the 1960s, but like all things, booms tend to come to an end, even if their after-effects continue long afterward.  One of the explanations for evangelical growth has been higher birth rates and more effectiveness in retaining one's young people.  

But as important as this growth in evangelicalism, Putnam and Campbell note that this evangelical rise began to dissipate in the early 1990s, and that over the past two decades the number of evangelicals has actually declined.  In fact, without the increases in non-denominational churches, the evangelical decline would have been even greater.  Therefore, and here is the kicker, "In twenty-first century America expansive evangelicalism is a feature of the past, not the present" (American Grace, p. 105). 

What this leads us to is the current cohort, and another aftershock -- a response to the aftershock of the Carter/Reagan era!  But that's for Part 4 of this series.  What is clear, and what Putnam and Campbell want us to understand is that the aggregate picture changes, gradually and slowly, but it changes none the less.  The 1960s provided clear change, especially in reaction to the perceived political radicalism of the age and the moral excesses (but even then a more permissive attitude persisted, even if tempered by a more conservative religious perspective).  But, as the Greatest Generation dies off, their conservatism will dissipate, and the early Boomers (those who came of age in the 1960s will see their influence grow), and on we go until we reach the current cohort, my son's cohort. 

Where will the political and religious trends take us?

America's Religious Identity -- Boom, Shocks, and After-shocks (Part 2 -- Long 1960s)

In the Post World War II era, religion boomed in America, along with all sorts of other service and fraternal organizations.  Their wives, many of whom had worked at America's factories during the war, returned home, had babies (remember Leave It to Beaver?).   This is the generation to which the famed Baby Boomer Generation was born, and as the War babies and post-war babies matured into adulthood, they encountered a new kind of world, and in many ways remade the world -- especially religiously. 

According to Robert Putnam and Dennis Campbell, writing in American Grace, there has been one major shock (the Long 1960s) and two Aftershocks since the religious boom of the 1950s.  Religious attendance among young adults reached its apex in 1957, when 51% of young adults claimed regular church attendance (growing from about 31% in 1950).  That number would fall just as quickly as it rose as the 1960s hit.   

This new era of "Shock" is labeled the "Long 1960s" by Putnam and Campbell, because it stretched into the early 70s. As for me, having been born in 1958, I was spending my days in elementary school and junior high.  This was a decade of exceptional change, as war babies and the first cohorts of Baby Boomers started coming of Age.  During this long "decade" we witnessed the full expansion of the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War, three assassinations (two Kennedys and a King), and the birth of the sexual revolution.  Yes this was the era of "Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll," and of course the period in which a group of theologians declared that "God is Dead."   Historian Sydney Ahlstrom is quoted by the authors:  "It was perfectly clear to any reasonably observant American that the postwar revival of the Eisenhower years had completely sputtered out, and that the nation was experiencing a crise de conscience of unprecedented depth" (p. 92). 

Of course not everyone joined in embracing this season of change -- it was the youngest of adults who came of age during this period -- the older generations continued attending church and doing what they had been doing, and many as we'll see in Part 3, were scandalized by what they were observing, especially regarding the change in understanding of the permissibility of premarital sex.  In the cohort that came of age in the 1960s 80% said it was only sometimes wrong or not wrong at all, and in 1970 nearly 50% of Americans reported that they were more liberal on this subject than were their parents.  Although we will witness a conservative reaction to the alleged excesses of the 1960s, even among younger adults (first aftershock) there would continue to be considerable liberality on this subject.  

But, our focus here is not on politics and sexuality, but on religion, and here things were changing as well.  The authors note that whereas huge numbers were heading off to seminary in the 1950s and early 1960s, a survey of clergy in 1971 showed that 40% of clergy under forty were considering leaving the ministry.  The sale of religious publications dropped by a third.  Oh, and this was also a period of religious experimentation -- the beginnings of what has become known as the "spiritual but not religious" group.  

Here is the kicker that I want to leave with you, before I turn to the first aftershock in the next posting.  Concerning the dramatic decline in religious observance that was seen in the 1960s, Putnam and Campbell write:

The fraction of all Americans who said that religion was "very important" to them personally fell from 75 percent in 1952 and 70 percent as late as 1965 to 52 percent in 1978, while the fraction who said that "religion can answer today's problems" dropped from 81 percent in 1957 to 62 percent  in 1974.  According to the Gallup Poll, weekly church attendance nationwide plummeted from 49 percent in 1958 to 42 percent in 1969, by far the largest decline on this measure ever recorded in such a brief period. (American Grace, pp, 97-98). 

What is most telling is that even as total attendance figures saw  a decline, this was most pronounced among young adults.  They note that "among twenty-somethings, the rate of decline was more than twice the national average."  For those fifty and over, there was no change recorded, but for those who were age 18 -29, the drop from 1957 to 1971 was from 51% to 28%.  This cohort is now in their late 50s to early 60s, and while some of them came back to church, not all did.    The reasons for the decline are many -- including reactions to war, civil rights, sexuality, and more. 

This was the period of Shock, there was an aftershock to follow, and we must move to it in the next posting.

America's Religious Identity -- Boom, Shocks, and After-shocks (Part 1)

The 1950s saw one of the largest booms in religiosity that Americans have ever witnessed.  All you had to do was open the doors and the churches were full.  Liberal and conservative, Mainline, Catholic, Evangelical -- everyone was doing well.  And the key to success, interestingly enough, were the men returning home from the War.  Yes, it was the returning GI's and their wives, the so-called "Greatest Generation" that fueled this incredible spike in religious (and civic) involvement.   Robert Putnam and Dennis Campbell lay out this scenario in American Grace.

[T]he distinguishing features of the men now accompanying their wives to church were that they were mostly young fathers, mostly veterans, and mostly college-educated.  The postwar boom in church going was fueled above all by men who had survived the Great Depression as teenagers and World War II as grunts, and were now ready at last to settle into a normal life, with a steady job, a growing family, a new house, and a car, and respectable middle-class status.  Church going was an important emblem of that respectability. (American Grace, pp. 85-86).

Thus, between 1940 and 1960 church membership climbed from about 49% of the population to 69%.  My parents were part of this generation -- well, my father was in the war, my mother was still in her mid-teens when the war ended and the Baby Boom began.   During this period Mainline churches were out front, the bastions of religious respectability.  I remember growing up in the late 1960s and early 1970s in Klamath Falls, Oregon, and our Episcopal Church was full of families.  The Disciples of Christ, like many denominations, purchased land in new subdivisions and planted churches there, expecting them to boom.  Consider that, according to the authors, between 1945 and 1960, in inflation-adjusted dollars, church construction went up from about $26 million to $615 million dollars.  As the construction of churches expanded, people did come, at least for a time, but then as the 1960s set in things began to change.  A new generation came of age and they were looking for something else besides religious respectability.  But more about this "shock" generation in Part 2. 

What needs to be noted here is that this generation of joiners and builders, the men and women who provided the backbone for our religious institutions and "peopled" our churches with children, are passing from the scene, and they are being replaced by generations much less interested in sustaining religious institutions.  [To be continued]