In my book, Between a Church and a Hard Place, I describe the debate among sociologists about the secularization of American society. Some point to the decline in churchgoing and church affiliation as evidence of the same waning power and significance of religious institutions in the world that has been emptying pews across Western Europe since the 1960s. Others argue that organized faith is alive and well in the United States and that young Americans will gravitate back to it, as they always have, when they marry and start their families, which they are doing later in life than their parents and grandparents did.
Disillusioned with the faiths of their youth, my parents were among the minority of Americans in the 1970s who chose to raise their children without any religion. It wasn't until they were well into middle age that they returned to church after a 30-year absence. Is it possible that the Millennials will outgrow their disinterest in Sunday services and denominational labels and engage with communities of faith bigger numbers as they age, too? That seems inevitable. But it seems equally likely that they will change the very nature of what it means to be religious in America. We are already seeing this with the rise of house churches, neo-monastic communities, workplace ministries, "video venues" and Internet-based worship.
None of these trends represent good news for the traditional pillars of organized religion that depend on people belonging in large numbers. But they're worth watching to see whether they preserve or even expand the prevalence of belief even as our knowledge and values change, which ultimately would be a more interesting shift. A family friend I interviewed for my book told me that "there seemed to be as many religions as there are people in the world," which struck me as having an element of truth. I still find it difficult to imagine all of them dying out in my lifetime or my children's.
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7/18/2010
Is the Future of Religion Belonging or Believing (or Neither One)? | Psychology Today
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