New Atheism didn't beget the 'nones'

New Atheists can take credit for the recent increase in religiously unaffiliated people, the so-called "nones," according to Daniel Dennett. The movement of best-selling books and their readers took a country where religious identity was de rigueur and made is possible to announce one didn't have any such religious identity.

In a recent five minute debate with Guardian editor Andrew Brown, arguing for New Atheism's accomplishments, Dennett says:

It was important to turn the tide and I think we've done that. I'm really very proud to say that the New Atheism has changed the face of America, as far expression of religious belief or disbelief .... What we gave [the religiously unaffiliated] was permission to declare their lack of interest in religion, which was something people were rather afraid to do before we wrote our books. 

There are several obvious problems with this claim.

The first and most obvious problem with saying that New Atheism made it possible to "declare a lack of interest in religion" is that significant numbers began making that kind of declaration a full decade before New Atheists' wrote their books. As a matter of simple chronological fact, the claim of a link is hard to support:

There isn't a New Atheist book that can take credit for a social trend that started in the 1990s.

Dennett should know this. After all, when he was arguing people should come out and call themselves "brights," he noted that a significant number of people -- 27 million -- already didn't consider themselves religious. He was attempting to organize those people with a new name, and encourage others to take on this name too. But it wouldn't have made sense in 2003, just when New Atheism was becoming a thing, to take credit for those people's freedom to be not religious.

Nor does it really make sense now. The evidence doesn't support it.

For another thing, religious disaffiliation isn't the same thing as "lack of interest in religion." This has been extensively documented. Belief hasn't notably declined; affiliation and identification have. It's easy to misrepresent this demographic, and Dennett seems to listing into that territory.

Thirdly, it doesn't seem like an accurate representation of Dennett's own ideas to say that he worked for or was interested in getting people to not be interested in religion. In his book Breaking the Spell, one of the main targets is actually tolerance of faith. He doesn't just want people to not have faith themselves, but to reject the idea that other people's faith is good or even benign. He writes,

Are we like families in which the adults go through all the motions of believing in Santa Claus for the sake of the kids, and the kids all pretend still to believe in Santa Claus so as not to spoil the adults' fun? If only our current predicament were as innocuous and even comical as that! In the adult world of religion, people are dying and killing, with the moderates cowed into silence by the intransigence of the radicals in their own faiths, and many afraid to acknowledge what they actually believe for fear of breaking Granny's heart, or offending their neighbors to the point of getting run out of town, or worse.  

If this is the precious meaning our lives are vouchsafed thanks to our allegiance to one religion or another, it is not such a bargain, in my opinion. Is this the best we can do? Is it not tragic that so many people around the world find themselves enlisted against their will in a conspiracy of silence.

It's not at all clear how that argument connects at all to people saying they're not religious.

Even if the "nones" were, as Dennett implies, disbelieving, rather than just disaffiliating, and even if it were possible that a movement that started in the early 21st century could be credited with social change that started in the end of the 20th century, the New Atheists weren't advocating religious disinterest. They worked to end religious accommodation, the casual acceptance that faith is a fine thing to have.

To say that New Atheism "changed the face of America," making it socially safe for "nones," is a misrepresentation of the facts, a misrepresentation of the "nones," and a misrepresentation of New Atheism. Dennett's just wrong here.

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Mis-measuring American irreligion

Americans, polls report, are convinced that America is fast losing religion.

Earlier this year, Gallup found that 77 percent of Americans agree with the statement, "religion is losing its influence on American life." Some thought that was good, others bad, but most agreed it was happening.

Part of that belief, at least, is due to the Pew studies and subsequent headlines that have trumped the recent, rapid rise of the religiously unaffiliated, the "nones," in the United States. This has been one of the big stories in religion in America in the last few years.

Those reports are problematic in how they simplify the "nones," which is something I've looked at.  What it means when someone says they're not religious should be interrogated more fully that it usually is. But the studies do show a change. The question is what the change means, not whether or not there is something shifting in American religiosity.

Or maybe not. Maybe the studies aren't to be trusted.

The methodology of the studies that have reported on a rapid rise in American "nones" has recently been called into question. Perhaps, it has been suggested, American religiousness isn't changing, it is just being mis-measured.

According to Rodney Stark -- a sociologist of religion who's done important work but who has also been "out in left field" on some things -- there are serious problems with the major studies that shows a decline in American's religious affiliations. It's a serious problem that he suggests undermines the whole story of "the rise of the 'nones.'"

In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece, Stark writes:

When I was a young sociologist at Berkeley's Survey Research Center, it was assumed that any survey that failed to interview at least 85% of those originally drawn into the sample was not to be trusted. Those who refused to take part in the survey or could not be reached were known to be different from those who did take part. Consequently, studies were expected to report their completion rates. 

Today, even the most reputable studies seldom reach more than a third of those initially selected to be surveyed and, probably for that reason, completion rates are now rarely reported. The Pew Forum researchers are to be commended for reporting their actual completion rates, which by 2012 had fallen to 9%.

Given all of this, only one thing is really certain: Those who take part in any survey are not a random selection of the population. They also tend to be less educated and less affluent. Contrary to the common wisdom, research has long demonstrated that this demographic group is the one least likely to belong to a church.

As the less-affluent and less-educated have made up a bigger share of those surveyed, so has the number of those who report having no religion.

Maybe the much touted change is a matter of mis-mesauring?

Or maybe not. There are reasons to be believe that the measurements are reliable.

This isn't a new or unheard of issue that Stark is raising, and current polling practices are calibrated to deal with the issue. Dropping response rates and completion rates have been documented by pollsters, including Pew. Polling experts have been thinking about this problem for a while, and have developed methodology they think counter balances the possible problem of bias and over or under sampling certain groups.

They have done this, according to statistician Nate Silver, "mostly through the 'magic' of demographic weighting."

This means that the people who do respond are taken as representative for their demographic. Perhaps a poll reaches and gets responses from fewer hispanics than there are in the population. The pollsters can re-calibrate, valuing each hispanic response as representative for three, ten, etc. This is logic by which polls work anyway -- i.e., they're "representative" -- so while it might seem that demographic weighting is "cheating," it's part of the process, part of the analysis that's necessary to produce those numbers.

The people at Pew, where the questioned study was done, have thought about this question that STark is raising and have responded at length. Citing multiple studies on the matter of response rates, Pew concludes that "carefully conducted polls continue to obtain representative samples of the public and provide accurate data about the views and experiences of Americans."

Where polls accuracy can be checked, for example with elections, this methodology, which is really a defense mechanism for what Stark is criticizing, has be shown to work. Silver calls it the "uncanny accuracy of polls." Looking at voter surveys prior to elections specifically, Pew found "there is little to suggest that those who do not participate hold substantially different views" than those who do.

Perhaps questions of religious affiliation are different. Stark, at least, seems to think so. Given the research that's gone into the methodological question he raises, though, and the continued good-enough accuracy of polls in other, more easily verified, areas, the declining poll response rates aren't enough, in and of themselves, to seriously call the reports of declining religious affiliation into question.

It's necessary to be careful and thoughtful in interpreting the reports of rapid rising rates of irreligion. They probably don't mean as much as they're commonly thought to mean. However that change should ultimately be understood, though, it seems likely that the reports that there is a change are reliable.

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The correlation of unaffiliated people, unaffiliated churches

There are two major changes in the recent American religious landscape, which both start in the 1980s and get to be really dramatic by the 90s but continue into the 00s. 

Here they are depicted in graphs created by sociology professor Bradley Wright:

Here we see that the growth of religiously unaffiliated people is quite similar, historically, to the growth of denominationally unaffiliated churches. 

Regarding the growth of "generic" Protestants, Wright reports it is "One of the more robust trends in American Christianity," that "the percentage of Protestants who are inter- or non-denominational has skyrocketed."

The growth of the religiously unaffiliated has been much discussed, here and elsewhere (see: Time, USA Today, PBS). Wright, with this second graphs, notes that three different polls, asking different questions, have ended up with very similar results.

Looking at the similarities between the two cultural shifts, I can't help but wonder if they're not best understood as connected. Not that these two distinct developments should be collapsed into one, but that they both result from underlying changes. My intuition is that a good explanation of one development would work, as well, for the other. 

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America's religious regions, according to geo-coded data

A map of the Christian denominational landscape of the United States, as represented by internet-user-generated data. 

The creators, Matthew Zook and Taylor Shelton from the University of Kentucky and Mark Graham from Oxford, use a software program to mine online, geo-coded data -- Google Maps placemarks, Flickr and Instagram photos, tweets, etc. -- and produce maps such as the above. They write that the internet 

serves to represent and reproduce society in a variety of ways [....] Particularly compelling are the new types of linkages made between online activity and offline locations in which Internet users associate meaning -- ranging from the prosaic to the profound -- to specific sites in the material world. These novel phenomena, commonly referred to as geotagging (also georeferencing or geocoding), provides an innovative means for studying the spatial contours of the virtual dimension of practically any subject, including religion.

This is a different, interesting way to conceptualize the religious landscape of America.

The obvious weakness of this map is the extent to which it relies on denomination names. It's interesting, though, that even as more Protestant churches downplay organizational affiliations, and non-denominational churches are on the rise, there's still quite a bit of information that can be gathered using the organization names generated by internet users, and that information gives one a decent overview of the strong regional differences in American's religious choices.

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Religiously unaffiliated now at 20%

One wonders: What happened in 1988?

A new survey, done by the University of Chicago and analyzed by sociologists from UC Berkeley and Duke, puts the religiously unaffiliated at 20 percent of the American population. Atheists, meanwhile, come in at about 3 percent, and don't seem to be growing.  

Elizabeth Drescrer writes:

The report makes clear that the trend away from affiliation with organized religion is not an indication of declining religious belief. They write that “conventional religious belief, typified by belief in God, remains very widespread—59 percent of Americans believe in God without any doubt,” adding that, “Atheism is barely growing,” with 1% in 1962 and 3% in 2012 indicating no belief in God.

Also interesting: even though we've now seen two decades of rapidly growing disaffiliation, the number of those raised outside of religious organizations is still very, very small. Only 8 percent say they were raised without religion. This could be connected to fact that people tend to get more religious when they have children. David E. Campbell and Robert D. Putnam point this out in American Grace. For each generation since the '60s, religious affiliation has increased at about the time that generation has children. 

For those who came of age in the '60s, for example, about 12 percent said they had no religious preference in the mid-'70s. By 1985, though, that number had dropped to about 8 percent. In fact, that generations' irreligion only rose again in the early 2000s, around the time their children came of age. By the end of the 2000s, the generation that came of age in the '60s was again as likely to profess no religious preference as they had been in the mid-'70s. That trend holds for each successive generation. For those who came of age in the 2000s, for example, irreligion spikes in the first few years of the millennium (possibly for historical reasons, rather than generational ones) to the point that 30 percent said they didn't have a religious preference. But then that number drops. By the late 2000s, 25 percent say they have no religious preference. They're still, of course, a lot less religious than previous generations, but it seems that even a lot of that 25 percent will raise their children with a religious preference. 

All the normal caveats about misinterpreting and over-interpreting this data from this new study apply. What we might be looking at, here, is the waning usefulness of the term "religion."

The question asked, specifically, was: "What is your religious preference? Is it Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, some other religion, or no religion?" That's slightly different that the question asked by Pew, and the difference in the phrasing of the question could account for the difference in answers. 

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The "nones" of 87 years ago

Most of the debates about the "nones" have had to do with interpretation. The question is, who are they? The question is, what does it mean?

A question that hasn't been so prominently raised is whether this new thing is really so new.

Charles Richter, of (Ir)religion in America, has turned up some evidence it's not. From the University of Illinois student newspaper in 1926, a letter from a student questioning the interpretations of a survey of university students' religious affiliations. According to the letter, only one student out of more than 10,000 identified as an atheist, but there were more than a few that were religiously unaffiliated.

The letter writer, who signs A.B.C, argues:

Shall we say that only one is an atheist and the rest are religious, but merely indifferent to church attendance, or shall we take into consideration the deadliness of Christian intolerance and admit that some of the 1,828 did not register as atheists for fear of ostracism? I am an atheist, but when I registered I did not admit that fact because I knew the registers would be made public, and some enthusiastic religionist might bring the information to the attention of the Great Christian Majority, to my discomfort.

There's a familiarity of this argument -- atheists need to "come out," and so on. This is a very contemporary debate, happening 87 years ago. While clearly the ranks of the unaffiliated have swelled since the days when less than two percent of university students said they didn't belong to any specific religion, the category of those who don't fit comfortably into a religious demographics survey, it turns out, is not new.

It's just that they didn't have a clever name for it in 1926.

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Understanding the "nones" as a demographic dissent

Some people are very uncomfortable with the category of race. Whether for personal, biographical reasons, they just feel like they don't fit any particular category, or for political or philosophical reasons, they get the US census at the beginning of every decade and balk at the question, What is this person's race?

This reticence, interestingly, does not show up in the final results. The final census doesn't list some small percentage of people as not having a race or as not having answered the question. This is because, as NPR recently reported:

When respondents don't choose a race, the Census Bureau assigns them one, based on the racial makeup of their neighborhood, among other factors. The method leads to a less accurate count.

A similar phenomena has happened with the new studies of religious demographics, where an increasing number of people have refused to answer the question, the now notorious "nones." Analysts have tried to interpret this response in various ways. The fundamental mistake that has been made, as I have argued, is to treat the people who answer the religious affiliation question this way as a unified group of people.

The problem may go deeper than that, though.



My interpretation of this group has been to insist on pluralizing the "nones," and talk about how cultural shifts have allowed for a new variety of ways to position oneself in relationship to religion. I.e., there are more people willing to self-identify as atheists and humanists, but there are also increased numbers of religious people who understand themselves to be religious but who aren't affiliated with any group, there are those who are affiliated but uncomfortable with public identification, the spiritual-but-not-religious, and so on.

When I have done that, though, I was still insisting on reading this group as defined in terms of ways of affiliating and belonging, as essentially being a complicated subset of a category but still, despite the complications, in that category of religious affiliation. Perhaps, though, that is what the "nones" object to.

Another way to understand this group is as objecting to religious classifications. Not strictly religious affiliations, though there's some of that, but to the project, in general, of religious demographics. 

Elizabeth Drescher, who I have criticized on this before, makes this point excellently in a recent piece, "None" means "None". After re-reading her more recent piece, and reflecting back on a point that Michael J. Altman made about the implicit problems of understanding the "nones" in terms of affiliation, I'm having to rethink my approach. It still seems fairly accurate, as far as it goes, but the unwieldy complication of the taxonomies of (dis)affiliation cause me to suspect I'm missing the point when someone says "none."

Drescher reports on one interview with a young "none" that's specifically enlightening in this regard:

When I asked if he would see himself as 'spiritual but not religious,' he rolled his eyes and groaned dramatically.  

'I don't want you to be thinking of me in terms of spirituality or religion,' he continued. 'Not my religion—if I have one—not your religion. These designations just should not be part of how we relate to each other no matter what we believe.' So, he eventually concluded, 'You can go ahead and call me ‘none.’ But only if you know I really mean "none" by that.'

The suggestion, I think, is quite interesting: rather than thinking of this group as religious in a specific way, might we not think of them as simply dissenting from the category?

Perhaps the "nones" aren't mainly to be thought of as religious or non-religious in a new or different way, but as a group that has a problem with the question, in much the same way that some protest self-identifying with a particular race.

Those people aren't themselves a new demographic, but rather are saying that they think the category is a problem.

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The faiths of Congress

From the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life:

The new, 113th Congress includes the first Buddhist to serve in the Senate, the first Hindu to serve in either chamber and the first member of Congress to describe her religion as “none,” continuing a gradual increase in religious diversity that mirrors trends in the country as a whole. While Congress remains majority Protestant, the institution is far less so today than it was 50 years ago, when nearly three-quarters of the members belonged to Protestant denominations.

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Interrogating the "nones"

One of the big, big stories in the study of religion in the last few years has been the "rise of the nones." The Pew Forum on Religious & Public Life has documented a shift in religious identifications, and popularized the term "none," a new category of religious affiliation, that of disaffiliation.

At least, that's one way to understand what's meant by "none."

The term has begotten lots of confusions, it seems. When I was last in America, and spent a little time in  an evangelical church in Chicago, I was told by both ministers and lay leaders that atheism and agnosticism was sweeping America. These people didn't know the Pew poll, and but they knew the phrase "nones," and they used that phrase to explain what they thought was happening to the culture around them. They were quite surprised when I told them that while there were some atheists among the "nones," more than 90 percent of them actually say they believe in God.

Others have similarly used the term to reach foregone conclusions.

A recent example of this is a piece at Religion Dispatches, where author Elizabeth Drescher suggests a reading list for those "keen to explore what Nones are up to on their own terms." Those terms, as Drescher understands them, are spiritual but not religious.

Talking about the problems with that interoperation of the "nones" started a twitter exchange that became something of an impromptu internet round table interrogating the term, the category, and consequences of various taxonomies in understanding religious and nonreligious groups.

I've storified the twitter discussion below in the hopes that, as Michael J. Altman says, we might use it a place marker to know where to dig.

Starting the conversation is Chris Cotter of the Nonreligion and Secularity Research Network, who is joined by me, Michael J. Altman of Emory University, and Per D. Smith co-chair of the Secularism and Secularity group of the American Academy of Religion.




Update: Elizabeth Drescher says she doesn't mean to lump all the "nones" into the category of spiritual-but-not-religious. She points to other articles, such as here and here, as examples of where she was clearer on this point.

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What it means to be Mainline Protestant

In 1972, a quarter of young adults in America -- 25 percent -- self-identified as Mainline Protestantism. In 2010, that was down to a mere 6 percent.

That's a 19 percent plummet, apparently.

This bit of data from LifeWays Research is consonant with two major stories that are regularly repeated about religion in America today: 1) that the mainline churches are in decline, and 2) that an increasing number of people are giving up on religion altogether, and now you have these "nones."

A second bit of data complicates both these story lines, though:

Of the quarter of self-identified Mainline Protestants in 1972, only 4 percent said they attended a Mainline Protestant church on a weekly basis. In 2010, that number had declined by half, so only 2 percent of self-described Mainline Protestants also said they attended church every week.

This means that in the '70s, lots of people would say they were Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Congregationalists, etc., but that identification did not connect in their minds to the cultural practice of church attendance. Church identification was not taken to mean weekly church attendance.

It's possible that the dramatic change we're currently seeing is only a change in that idea of what it means to say one is a Mainline Protestant.

That is itself a kind of secularism, as religion's dominance has declined at least in the sense that's it's now increasingly okay to say you don't have one, but this is a lot, lot less than is usually claimed for secularism, and a lot, lot less than is usually claimed for these sorts of statistics.

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Rodney Stark's strange interview w/ Kathryn Jean Lopez

I can't remember the last time I've seen an interview as strange as the one National Review published recently, where Kathryn Jean Lopez asks sociologist Rodney Stark about his new book on the evidence of the benefits of religious adherence. 

This really reads like an interview where something has gone horribly wrong:

LOPEZ: Religion can keep me from mental illness? My inbox suggests it is evidence of my mental illness.
STARK: Several hundred studies are unanimous that frequent church-attenders are far less likely than non-attenders to suffer from mental illness — I devote many pages to the matter.  

LOPEZ: The 'higher the church membership of a city, the lower its crime rates.' What evidence do you have for this contention?
STARK: I cite many published studies. 

LOPEZ: How can you prove that 'religious parents are better parents, who raise better-behaved and better-educated children'?
STARK: I cite a very large research literature.

It continues from there, with Lopez asking strange questions that seem -- best I can guess -- to be bad imitations of the kinds of questions she thinks atheists and/or liberals would ask. The gag, maybe, is that all of these things are obvious, and so obvious as to obviously not need evidentiary support. But now there is statistical evidence ... so, hahaha. Or something.

Stark, who's done some important work in the sociology of religion but has also been sharply criticized for some of his work, and, generally, seems way over-defensive when questioned about the conclusions he draws from his facts, gives answers that equal the questions in oddity. With some answers, he sounds like your standard resentful conservative ("the media are dominated by the irreligious. So are universities". With others, Stark sounds as cranky someone with a toothache listening to a baby cry.

One of his answers, literally, is "See Scandinavia."

I suspect there are serious problems with this book. The whole thing appears to be based on a basic misunderstanding of evidence, and the kinds of correlation-causation confusions that one would hope an accomplished sociologist would understand and avoid. I'm disinclined to read the book and find out if that's the case, though, after this very weird case of book "promotion."

Update:
Via twitter, Per D. Smith suggests that it's been hard to take Stark seriously as a sociologist for more than a decade, citing the article "Atheism, faith, and the social scientific study of religion" in the Journal of Contemporary Religion from 1999.

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The religious shape of capitalism

A new study published in Management Science is making a very Max Weber-like claim about the essential differences of religions affecting engagements with capitalism & shaping capitalism.

According to the University of Georgia and Southern Methodist University study, mutual funds are done differently in areas dominated by Catholics than they are in areas dominated by Protestants. The study says that difference is best explained by the respective natures of the different versions of Christianity.

From the abstract:

"Funds located in low-Protestant or high-Catholic areas exhibit significantly higher fund return volatilities. [...] Risk-taking associated with local religious beliefs manifests in higher portfolio concentrations, higher portfolio turnover, more aggressive interim trading, and more "tournament" risk-shifting behaviors, but not over-weighting risky individual stocks. Overall, our results suggest that local religious beliefs have significant influences on mutual fund behaviors."

One of the study's authors told CNN that Baptists in particular make a difference.

The theory, here, is that Baptists are more suspicious of promises of "great solutions" and "great returns," and that, in certain concentrations, that suspicion is adopted by the whole culture.

It will be interesting to see if this holds up & how far the study goes in attempting to explain the data. There's a real statistical difference, apparently, but the more useful/interesting part of the study for religion will be if there's any good argument as to why. Weber's own version of this idea that religion shapes economics, which was an inversion of Marx's claim, has the tendency to seem really persuasive on a certain level, but to not withstand a lot of detailed historical analysis.

A bit of Weber, from the classic The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, written in 1904 and '05:

"[I]t is a fact that the Protestants (especially certain branches of the movement to be fully discussed later) both as ruling classes and as ruled, both as majority and as minority, have shown a special tendency to develop economic rationalism which cannot be observed to the same extent among Catholics either in the one situation or in the other. Thus the principal explanation of this difference must be sought in the permanent intrinsic character of their religious beliefs, and not only in their temporary external historico-political situations."

"[...] one might be tempted to express the difference by saying that the greater other-worldliness of Catholicism, the ascetic character of its highest ideals, must have brought up its adherents to a greater indifference toward the good things of this world. Such an explanation fits the popular tendency in the judgment of both religions. On the Protestant side it is used as a basis of criticism of those (real or imagined) ascetic ideals of the 'Catholic way of life,' while the Catholics answer with the accusation that materialism results from the secularization of all ideals through Protestantism."

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The odd non-relation of the economy & religious construction

Despite signs of an economic recovery in other sectors of construction, religious construction has not picked up again. 

The stats from the US Department of Commerce show that the economic recovery -- sluggish though it may be -- isn't notable at all in spending on construction of houses of worship. The rate of decline with this construction spending isn't steep as it has been at some points since the economic crisis, but things are still moving in the downward direction. 

In the Spring, there was no hint of a reversal to the downward trend. Now, with two more month's worth of data, there's still no sign that spending on religious construction in America will do anything other than continue to decrease. The Summer just hasn't seen a significant uptick in construction spending by religious organizations. 

Given that construction typically increases in Summer months, and that religious construction has not increased this Summer, it doesn't seem likely that there religious construction will increase anytime soon. 

In January 2012, religious organizations spent a bit over $4 billion on construction. That dipped to $3.8 billion in April, $3.9 in May, and came in at $3.8 in June and $3.9 in July, according to the Department of Commerce numbers.

This means the market for religious construction is not responding to the economy in the same way the markets for residential and non-residential construction are responding. One can see the recovery in the statistics for private, non-government spending on other sorts of construction. But not with religious construction. 

Perhaps the era of construction of houses of worship is over in America. Certainly it now seems it was an era, rather than just being normalcy. 

It's difficult to imagine the near future will witness construction spending of the volume seen even during the recession. It's seems less likely still to see how these numbers might again reach the heights they did a decade ago, when nearly $9 billion per month was spent on religious construction in the United States.

The most recent numbers continue to support the point I made in July that there doesn't seem to be any clear relationship between economic conditions and religious construction. The decline in religious construction spending doesn't neatly correlate to the economic crisis, and the economic recovery doesn't   appear to have any bearing on religious construction either. 

It's just not clear what material conditions are conducive to religious construction. There's a kind of strange disconnect between the economy and this sector of the construction market. 

Comparisons to other sectors of construction make this clear. The signs of a recovery are apparent when one looks at the data for private spending on residential construction and non-residential construction. With residential construction, there's a bottom to the collapse of the market, and things turn around in mid 2011:

With non-residential construction -- only taking into account that construction funded by private sources, so as not to muddle things with government spending -- the same patter is visible. Spending drops from nearly $420 billion in 2008 to about $220 billion in January 2011. From that point on, spending as trended upwards:

Comparing all three data sets, the relationship between residential and non-residential construction spending is apparent. These look like they're responding to the same economic reality, the same economic conditions. Religious spending, by comparison, seems totally detached from the reality affecting the other sectors of construction:

It's still not at all clear to me why this is so. The economics of religious construction are ambiguous.

There's a temptation, I think, to see the change in idealist rather than materialist terms, but that doesn't particularly work either. One could argue and might want to argue that what's happened to spending on houses of worship in America isn't most basically economic, but theological. One could argue, for example that sometime around 2002, when the decline in spending seems to start, something shifted in the terms religious leaders and people used to conceive of and conceptualize spending, so that perhaps, for example, there was a shift from language about "sowing" and "expectations" and "enlarg[ing] the place of your tent," to language about "stewardship."

There's some evidence to support the idea that this has happened among evangelicals. The tide may have turned against megachurches, or at least the under girding theory of megachurches. 

Famously, for example, Willow Creek, the very influential megachurch that had served as a model for many, announced that their model was flawed and wasn't working as they'd predicted it would. Pastor Bill Hybels announced, pretty bluntly, "We made a mistake."

That's only evangelicals, though. Evangelicals count for roughly a third of Americans, so theological changes in that tradition that directly relate to church's construction spending are not irrelevant, but there's still the other two-thirds to consider. Surely it's not the case that most religious construction is done by just one-third of religious people? The Department of Commerce doesn't break down the religious construction number, but the statistics include Catholic construction, other Protestant construction, and non-Christian construction, too. 

If one posits a theological change as the condition for the change in religious construction spending, one either has to argue that 1) the change in one theological tradition was significant enough to cause the bulk of the affect of decline in religious spending; 2) that the theological change happened across traditions and across religions; or 3) that there were multiple, basically simultaneous theological changes in a variety of religious groups.

Those are difficult arguments to make. None of them seem, on the face of things, plausible. Perhaps with more data, an idealist argument for the root cause of the collapse of religious construction spending would have some support. 

I'm personally still inclined to look for a materialist answer, though I don't know of a decent one right now. It seems to me that it must be the case that, however decisions are made on a micro, case-by-case, congregation-by-congregation level, there must be some marco explanation that shows that certain social conditions relate to and result in increased spending on the construction of houses of worship, and that other social conditions are strongly connected to the decrease of spending seen over the last decade. 

What are those conditions, though? At least for now, there does not seem to be an answer. 

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Exorcists in America

How many Christian exorcists are there in America?

A new study, which bills itself as "the first of its kind to empirically investigate the practice of Christian exorcism in North America," identified 316 exorcists in the U.S.

Of those, 170 filled out a questionnaire for the psychometrics study, 140 were willing to be interviewed, and 15, randomly chosen, were interviewed.

The study is really interesting, and as far as I know the first of its kind. The findings are difficult to evaluate, though, if one doesn't know if the subjects of the study are representative of the field of exorcists as a whole. And it's difficult to know if the 170 studied in the article published by the Journal of Christian Ministry are representative if one doesn't know how many there are total. How the question of representativeness is answered dramatically changes the claim this study can legitimately make for its findings. The stronger possible claim -- i.e., that this is "how Christian exorcism is practiced in America today" -- depends on this sample of 170 being representative. A weaker version -- e.g., this is how some Christian exorcists practice exorcism -- would still be really interesting, though obviously much more circumspect.

So how many exorcists are there? What do we know about the number?

There are at least 316. This seems like a fair start.

In the study, Kenneth D. Royal reports that he found these 316 through the method of "snowballing," which means identifying someone involved in exorcisms, and then asking them if they know anyone else similarly suited to the study, then asking those people who they know, and so on. This means that the exorcists Royal found are networked, possibly in two or three or four groupings. Whether this is only because of how he did the study or actually represents the way Christian exorcists in America are at the moment is hard to say. It would be good to know if he simply stopped at 316, taking that as a large enough sample, or if at that point people were only giving him names he already had, and there was some sense that this was more or less all the Christian exorcists in America. Even if it is the case he exhausted his networks, it could still be that there are other networks out there, which just don't happen to have connections to the groupings Royal discovered.

There is a bit of variety, though, in the denominations these exorcists belong to, which would lend support to the idea that Christian exorcists aren't isolated, but are generally known to other exorcists. The exorcists he spoke to apparently aren't connected only strictly to other exorcists in their respective denominations. Exorcism looks like a very ecumenical enterprise. Twenty different denominations were represented in the study, including some I wouldn't have expected, such as Mennonite and Lutheran.

That denominational variety gives us an angle on the question of the total number, too.

Royal found four Catholic exorcists, for example. They account for 2.3 percent of his 170 respondents. The Catholic Church in the U.S., however, has been reported to have between 30 and 40 official exorcist-priests in operation right now. It seems unlikely, if Royal found four of 30, that he found all the exorcists in American Christianity with his snowball-style search, and that the total number is somewhere around 300. It is possible, though, that the percentage of Catholic exorcists he found is more or less right, and Catholics account for 2.3 percent of the exorcists in the U.S. If that's assumed, the picture that emerges is of a much larger field.

If there are, say, 30 Catholic exorcists, and 30 Catholic exorcists amounts to 2.3 percent of the total number of exorcists -- which would mean Royal's study is representative -- that would mean there are roughly 1,300 exorcists in America.

Is it possible that there are 1,300 Christian exorcists at work in America?

That would be one exorcist for every approximately 240,000 Americans. So: 11 for a city the size of Chicago; 34 for New York City; two each for Indianapolis, Ind.; San Jose, Calif.; and Jacksonville, Fla. It seems strange but not unthinkable that there are two Christians in Jacksonville who have ministries casting out demons. There could be 34 in New York City. It seems like a lot, but not so many as to be dismissed out of hand.

There's at least anecdotal evidence that there's enough demand for, say, two exorcists in Indianapolis. Fr. Vincent Lambert is the designated exorcist for that diocese of the Catholic Church, and he has said he has consulted with hundreds of people who suspected they were possessed by demons in the few years he's had the job. Lambert has, by his own account, performed less than one rite of exorcism per year. But lots and lots of his time is taken up with counseling, and exorcists are apparently very much in demand even if they don't ultimately do exorcisms. If one priest in Indianapolis is meeting with this many people who want to talk to a religious leader about their possible demons, one could certainly imagine enough work for two exorcists in a city that size.

Michael W. Cuneo, a sociologist of religion, has pointed out that there is lots of demand for exorcists, however many there actually are. He attributes this volume of demand to the many popular media representations of demonic possession since the 1970s. "In a sense," Cuneo wrote in his book American Exorcism, "the real curiosity isn't that exorcism is practiced in contemporary America, but that it isn't practiced more widely."

So perhaps 1,300 active Christian exorcists isn't an unreasonable estimate.

On the other hand, if one takes the Catholics as representative and the study as basically right -- which is just an assumption made of the sake of experiment -- and then extrapolates for the other groups, things seem less plausible.

If there are 1,300 exorcists and Royal's sampling of 170 is accurate, that would lead to the conclusion there are also around 30 Mennonite exorcists, for example. Royal found four Catholic exorcists, and it's known that there are about 30. He also found four Mennonites. If we accept the parity of Mennonite and Catholic exorcists, that would mean there are another 26 or so Mennonite exorcists Royal didn't find in his snowball-produced sample.

Is it really the case, though, that there are an equal number of Catholic and Mennonite exorcists? Mennonites -- both the more conservative and less conservative varieties -- aren't generally known for being involved in these sorts of engagements with the supernatural.

But maybe it's plausible. The Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online, a project of the Mennonite Historical Society of Canada, reports that at least one man was ordained to do exorcisms in the Indiana-Michigan area in the 1970s, so they do exist. According to the encyclopedia, there is also "a growing body of literature worldwide, from biblical, historical, theological and psychiatric perspectives, [which] has brought this agenda into the forefront of the church's theological reflection and evangelistic-pastoral practice." There are at least some Mennonite theologians who believe Mennonites should be "Continuing Jesus' Ministry of Deliverance," as the subtitle of a collection of essays published in 2006 has it. At Eastern Mennonite Seminary, in Virginia, there has been a least one class on exorcism with 15 students, several years ago, though it doesn't appear to be a regular part of the curriculum.

Mennonites aren't exactly homogeneous, either. There are lots of varieties. The largest denomination has more than 110,000 members, and another 240,000 or so in total. If there are 1,300 exorcists in America and Royal's study is representative, so 2.3 percent of those exorcists are Mennonites, that would only mean there is approximately one Mennonite exorcist for every 12,000 Mennonites.

That's not impossible.

All of this is obviously very speculative, and based on some assumptions that can't be supported beyond just determinations they could be true. But it seems at least possible that Royal's study is right and that it could be the case, as deduced from Royal's study and what's known about Catholic exorcists, that there are about 1,300 Christian exorcists in America.

Similar extrapolations, using the same assumptions, would lead to the conclusion there are 37 or so Presbyterians, 84 Baptists, about 14 Episcopalian and 46 Methodist involved in ministries of exorcism.

On the one hand this seems like a lot. On the other, it is possible to find scholars supporting the credibility of such numbers. While Methodists, for example, don't generally seem like they're that involved in battling demons, one can find Methodist scholars such as J. Gordon Melton, a minister who also works for the Institute for the Study of American Religion, reporting that exorcism is "a big phenomenon." Asked by ABC News, Melton said "There is a lot of exorcism going on." So maybe there are more than 40 Methodist exorcists.

The only real conclusion that can be drawn, here, is that more and better studies are needed.

It may well be the case that there are 1,300 or so Christian exorcists and Royal's 170 are representative, so the study can be taken as legitimately making the stronger claim of being about "how Christian exorcism is practiced in America today." It's safer to be tentative at this point, though. The study certainly shows how some Christians practice exorcism today, which seems like a solid starting place for inquiries into contemporary methods of exorcism, as well as interpretations of those cultural practices.

Hopefully Royal's work will encourage others to attempt to ascertain the range and extent of the practices of exorcism in contemporary American Christianity. The one thing that's really known, here, is how much is not yet known. It's just not clear how many Christian exorcists are out there, though it's clear they are out there and there might be lots and lots of them.

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Costs of a scandal

Some statistics:

• In the last 15 years, the American Catholic Church has spent about $48 on lawsuit settlements per US Catholic.

• In California, the Catholic Church has spent about $371 on lawsuit settlements per California Catholic during the same period. 

• Giving to the church is thought to have declined by 20 percent.

• The church has spent about $212,500 on lawsuit settlements per priest who, according to the US bishops' conference, has been "not implausibly" accused of sexually molesting a minor. 

• The amount paid in settlements per "not implausibly" accused priest works out to slightly more than 5 years of a priest's average salary in San Diego, California, to more than 7 years of a priest's salary in Montgomery, Alabama.

• The California Catholic Church has "tens, if not hundreds, of thousands" of volunteers who work with children, according to the church's lobbying group.

• The church was the only group to lobby against a California law requiring background checks on people volunteering to work with children, and extending the statute of limitations of child molestation.

• Estimates of annual amounts the New York bishops spend on lobbying range from $100,000 a year to "well over $1 million."

• Given those estimates, the New York bishops spend between 75 cents and $7.50 on lobbying per year for each recipient of its bi-weekly newspaper, Catholic New York.

• The church spent roughly $4.48 billion more on the poor in 2010 than the median amount spent on lawsuit settlements in the last 15 years.

• 62 percent of the money the Catholic Church spent on the poor came from local, state or federal government coffers.

The Economist reports:

"The sins involved in [the American Catholic Church's] book-keeping are not as vivid or grotesque as those on display in the various sexual-abuse cases that have cost the American church more than $3 billion so far; but the financial mismanagement and questionable business practices would have seen widespread resignations at the top of any other public institution."

Sources: The Economist, 'Earthly Concerns'; California Assembly Bill 1628; Yearly Data on Accused Priests; Pew Landscape Survey on religion in America; Catholic Church in the US demographics; priest's salary in San Diego, California; priest's salary in Montgomery, Alabama; Catholic New York circulation numbers.

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Why do people still not know if Obama is a Christian?

Recent Pew poll results on perceptions of Romney's religion say pretty much exactly what one would expect. More people know he's Mormon than used to, but they're either OK with that or don't care. The poll found "unease with Romney’s religion has little impact on voting preferences."

The more interesting information, here, is that 51 percent of registered voters don't "Identify Obama as Christian."

This isn't because they think he's a Muslim, though. There are some who think he's Muslim, but the number that identify Obama with Islam has been pretty consistent and relatively small, upticking only slightly from 12 percent right before the 2008 election to 17 percent today. 

The big block of registered voters who don't say Obama is a Christian are not saying for sure what his faith is. They're saying they "don't know." Nearly a third say that they don't know, now, a number went as high was 41 percent in 2010. From the looks of the numbers, about 10 percent of voters have, over the course of Obama's first term, gone from thinking he's a Christian to not knowing if he's a Christian to thinking he's a Christian again -- all without ever saying he's Muslim.

It's possible to read this "don't know" as simply the safe version of saying he's Muslim. Some Republican officials have taken this stance of allowing doubt and encouraging distrust without actually saying anything directly. Like, "he says he's a Christian ... (but I don't know)," etc.

There's another way to read this question about Obama's Christianity, though, which has nothing to do with rumors he's a secret Muslim.

It's possible 31 percent of registered voters don't know if Obama's a Christian because they don't know if liberal Christianity is really Christianity.


Consider: a year ago there was an intra-evangelical fight about the doctrine of eternal damnation, after megachurch minister Rob Bell wrote a book questioning some aspects of that idea. The terms of the fight were, to a large extent, could one still be considered a Christian if one did not believe in hell? This is not an exaggeration. Though it was portrayed as a conflict over this doctrine, it was actually about who gets to count as Christian. So John MacArthur wrote, e.g., "Is Rob Bell truly a Christian, or is he one of those dangerous deceivers Scripture warns us about repeatedly (Acts 20:29; 2 Corinthians 11:13-15; Colossians 2:8; 2 Peter 2:1; etc.)? It's a fair—and necessary—question." Kevin DeYoung, who started the extensive attack on Bell, wrote that "At the very heart of this controversy ... is that we really do have two different Gods" and "Bell’s vision of heaven and hell doesn’t work because his vision of God is false."

For people who take this position that Christianity is only Christianity if it includes a strong vision of eternal damnation, Obama's not going to count as Christian.

In one of his more extensive statements on his faith, for example, the then-Illinois state senator said,

"I find it hard to believe that my God would consign four-fifths of the world to hell. 
I can’t imagine that my God would allow some little Hindu kid in India who never interacts with the Christian faith to somehow burn for all eternity.
 That’s just not part of my religious makeup."

DeYoung, and those like him, would not likely conclude from the above that the president is a Muslim, but they wouldn't say he's a Christian, either. Not a "real" Christian, anyway.

Thus: "don't know."

It's a kind of yes and no answer, as in yes he's a Christian in the sense he identifies as such, but no, he's not really a Christian, because he embraces a "phony theology ... not a theology based on Bible." The "yes" is about a descriptivist account of Christianity, which allows that people are as they say they are, and the "no" is a prescriptivist account, which holds there's an essential definition of Christianity, and someone can say they're Christian without meeting the objective theological standards of being Christian.

It's possible that nearly a third of the country's registered voters are just confused and have been tricked by conservative commentators into suspecting the president of the United States is other than what he claims to be. A more reasonable explain, though, it seems to me, is that this 31 percent recognizes Obama is, as he says he is, a liberal Christian, but they don't know that that Christianity is really Christianity.

For them, liberal Christianity is in a confusing neither/nor space that's kind of hard to name, especially when going back and forth between descriptivist and prescriptivist definitions of "Christian," and that's exactly the gray area where Obama and his faith fall.

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Things to think about when interpreting religious statistics

If you study contemporary religion and are interested in religious trends in America, data is not a problem. There's a wealth of data. A surplus. Lots and lots of raw info, which one can only be grateful for.

The problem isn't numbers, but interpretations of numbers.

It could be a full time job, questioning and challenging and correcting interpretations of this data.

Part of this is just because so many of the interpretations are  political, and are essentially hack work. If your mission, in reading the numbers, is to show why your side is right and "winning," whatever winning means or is supposed to mean, you're going to be able to make the numbers say what you want them to say. But that will be a shallow and facile reading. Numbers aren't so simple as to just prove straightforwardly that a certain theology is the right theology, or to allow for easy extrapolations of truth beyond the brute fact of one number or another. Ultimately, it will involve implications you're not actually comfortable with, and will involve accepting premises which, as they say on cop shows, can and will be used against you. 

So be forewarned.

In that spirit, three things to think about when interpreting contemporary statistics for U.S. religious participation:


1. For an explanation to explain one thing, it has to explain many things.

Case in point, if "accommodating the culture" explains why Episcopal numbers declined from the '70s onward, why did "accommodating the culture" apparently have no negative consequences from the gilded age to '66?

Or, if "holding true to orthodoxy" and "maintaining traditional, conservative faith" explains Southern Baptist success from the mid '30s to 2000, what happened then?

Another way to think about this is that explanations all have implications, and if you query some of those implications, making them more explicit, you can get a better sense of whether or not the argument is something more than an ad hoc guess.

So, for example, William M. Briggs, the Cornell University statistician who put the above graphs together follows Douthat's commentary on "liberal Christianity," which is changing and changing and dying for that reason. Worked into a rule, the thesis proposes: when a religion becomes indistinguishable from the surrounding culture, in an environment where religions compete for adherents, said religion will lose adherents.

It's actually a really interesting thesis. What "the surrounding culture" consists of needs clarification, of course, and it would be helpful if the corollary thesis were also considered, that when religious stand out from or oppose the surrounding culture, in an environment where religions compete for adherents, said religions will gain adherents. I can think of a number of religions that seem more oppositional to American culture than, say, Southern Baptists, which have not done so well in gaining adherents. Especially in places where the "surrounding culture" actually is most accurately described as "Southern Baptists."

The point being, if this explanation is going to account for why there are so many Southern Baptists in the American South, it is also going to need to explain why Hare Krishna and Zoroastrianism are not so popular in that same region.

If the explanation can't explain anything except the one particular point, it's not a particularly good explanation. It's likely just hackery, an ad hoc, not-really-serious argument that supports a pre-conclusion, i.e., that one side is right, "winning" because they should be winning, etc., etc.

2. There are internal changes and external changes. Changes in thought and ideas and changes in conditions and contexts. Remember to also consider the later. Many interpretations of graphs like the above emphasize or focus on only changes (or purported changes) in theology. But that's not all that's going on.

While many have, e.g., said things like Briggs says about the above graphs, that,

"those denominations which are roughly 'conservative' are strengthening, while those which are roughly 'liberal' or 'progressive' are weakening. And it doesn’t take a keen eye to see when the trouble started. With your finger, draw a vertical line at 1960 or so on each of these plots, and then allow yourself a slight 'Ah,'"

that only takes changes of ideas into consideration. What other external factors changed in the mid '60s?  It's true that the 1960s saw a leftward lean for many churches, but it was also a time when America's immigration policies changed, which meant that the racial make-up of the country changed. One could plausibly "draw a vertical line at 1960 or so on each of these plots" and then think about the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act and how that has dramatically reshaped the demographics of the US. In the cases of Catholicism and Pentecostalism, here represented by the Assemblies of God, it's quite possible to argue that growth has everything to do with that immigrant influx. Methodists and Episcopalians, on the other hand, are nearly 90 percent white.

I don't know why it's so hard to imagine that culture is not just mental and psychological, but also material, but it is. Changes that happen -- in religion or anything -- are often better explained by charting changes in context and conditions than by accounts of how people have suddenly transformed.

3. Correlation and causation are not the same thing.

Anyone who interprets contemporary religious numbers should have to have this tattooed on the insides of their eyelids.

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The fictitious history of the Episcopal Church

Conservative critiques of the Episcopal Church seem to have come up with a fictitious history of the church. It makes sense -- or enough sense -- on the level of critique, except that it's also always historical, and it's about how Episcopalians used to be but now have changed. And on that level it's very strange nonsense.

Ross Douthat, doing this:

Today, by contrast, the leaders of the Episcopal Church and similar bodies often don’t seem to be offering anything you can’t already get from a purely secular liberalism.

Russel Mead says the church's extreme irrelevance comes from the fact that it followed "the theological path of least resistance as it makes the transition from a church that once spoke to a nation to a sect in communion only with itself."

Philip Jenkins makes the same argument, essentially correlating the decline in church attendance to a change in the Episcopal Church's relationship to American culture. The church began, the implication goes, to just accommodate culture at some point, and then there wasn't any real difference between being in church or not, so what was the point? Thus the decline. Jenkins says what especially worries him, as an Episcopalian, is that the church leaders won't reverse this trend, but instead will be more accommodationist, adapting even more to "secular" "liberal" culture, instead of staking out an oppositional position that would legitimize the church's continued existence.

Except the Episcopal Church's "golden age" was actually more like the "gilded age."

The church's high-water mark came when it was most staunchly on the side of the status quo. Not when it was prophetically standing against the culture, but when it was, in large part, a club for powerful people and an endorser of proper opinion

The Episcopal Church was at it's height in 1966. According to the Historical Statistics of the United States, which is put out by the US Chamber of Commerce, in 1966 the Episcopal Church had 3.6 million members in the US. More than ever before; more than ever since.

The church's reputation at that moment was as the church of the J.P. Morgans and Vanderbilts and Roosevelts and Astors, who dominated America and the Episcopal Church from the 1900s to the 1920s, and made the Episcopal Church into a quasi-national church. In the '50s, according to one report, about three-quarters of New York Times wedding announcements were for weddings in Episcopal churches. It was the church of Wall Street. Church as country club. The "Republican Party at Prayer." One prominent member in the late '60s was Gerald Ford, then the House minority leader. Another was George H.W. Bush, then a congressman from Texas. John Lindsay, the leading liberal Republican from New York, was Episcopalian. As was William Randolph Hearst, as was William Davis Taylor, then the publisher of the Boston Globe, and as were one third of the Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall, Potter Stewart and Byron White. When Dwight D. Eisenhower died in '69, he laid it repose at the Washington National Cathedral.

This was not a counter cultural church. This was not a church offering an alternative to the dominant status quo.

And yet it was really, really popular. So if something changed between the height of the 1960s and the bottom dropping out of attendance today, it wasn't that Episcopalians suddenly started "accommodating" to popular opinion and polite society.

In fact, the decline that conservative critiques are pointing to began about a decade before the changes they'll specifically point to as causes. The Episcopal Church began to make the changes that upset conservatives in the mid 1970s: changing the prayer book in '76, declaring homosexuals to be "children of God" deserving of equal rights in '76, ordaining women in '77, ordaining an open homosexual in '77, and so on.

By that time, though, the church was already in decline, having lost about 800,000 members between '66 and '75.

It's perfectly legitimate to critique the changes in theology in the Episcopal Church over the last four decades. It's legitimate, too, to point out how the power, prestige and numbers of the church have more or less evaporated in recent years. Successfully correlating the two things, though, and claiming, even, that there's a causal relationship between the two things, is going to take more work.

But imagining a fictitious history where the Episcopal Church stood against the trends of its day, taking stands for orthodoxy and the Bible against the elite of the era is just nonsense. The Episcopal Church never occupied the culture space of, say, today's Jehovah's Witnesses. There are definitely some things that have changed with this church and with American culture since the 1960s, but this story about this sudden cultural accommodation to fashionable liberalism is fantasy.

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The ambiguous economics of religious construction

Among the many economic indicators of America's lingering economic troubles, one of particular religious interest is TLRELCONS. That is: total religious construction, as measured in spending by the Department of Commerce. The latest numbers, crunched by the economic research team at the Federal Reserve Bank in St. Louis, show spending on religious construction fell off a cliff with the recession of 2008.

Just crashed.

And not by a little: Spending now is less than half what it was in 2006.

It's a "Bear Market in God."

 

But why? It's not at all clear what's causing this or driving this, or what's behind it. What are the conditions favorable or unfavorable to church, synagogue, temple or mosque construction?

Looking into the numbers, it becomes even less clear what's going on.

There are several curious things -- some unanswered and kind of perplexing questions -- about this sharp decline in religious construction spending.

First, religious construction was already in decline at the time of the economic crisis.

In April 2002, for example, religious institutions in the US spent a total of $8.75 billion on construction. Throughout the summer of 2003, spending on houses of worship continued to regularly pushed close to $9 billion. In June 2003: $8.73 billion. July: $8.79 billion. August: $8.8 billion.

By the beginning of 2006, this was down to $8 billion.

That's still a lot of funds poured into construction projects, of course, but the point is that before the recession, religious construction funding was in decline.

By comparison, 2006 was a peak year for residential construction spending, and for total US construction spending, which also includes public construction, institutional construction, etc. That was the height of the building boom -- and the housing bubble -- but religious construction spending was already on the wane.

As Joe Weisenthal writes at Business Insider, it doesn't seem to be a matter of economic downturn: "It's just a long, secular trend."

This fact counters the dominant narrative that churches were doing fine, building and growing and building again, until they suffered a sudden, surprising setback because donations disappeared in the financial crisis. The news story so popular in the last few years has been that churches are getting foreclosed on because of the crisis. It was a great story. Nice and dramatic. It illustrated the crisis without any detour into subprime mortgages or any of the institutional practices that caused the financial collapse, and generally managed to make the victims of foreclosure seem sympathetic. The thing packaged perfectly for headlines: Banks foreclose even on God!

A good story, but a bit of a farce. In one particularly bad year, according to Reuters, 138 church buildings were sold after defaulting on loans. But there are something like 344,894 congregations in the United States, meaning the repossessed, re-sold buildings accounted for roughly one for every 2,500 religious religious structures.

Perhaps more critically, the story missed the way that the economic crisis was serving as an easy explanation, a ready-made narrative, but was not necessarily the whole story. Just because real estate agents, bankers, pastors, church accountants and everyone else was saying "financial crisis" like it was an explanation, didn't mean it actually was. The numbers show that something had changed in the way money was spent on religious buildings well before the economic crisis.

But what?

Second, spending on religious construction hasn't recovered in the slightest.

There's no hint of a reversal or even a weak, tenative recovery. Other types of construction spending have come back at least a little. Private construction spending dropped from a high of $6.7 billion in March 2006 to a low of $2.2 billion in June 2009, a huge dive, but that was the floor, and it didn't keep declining. The spring of 2012 has seen a slight increase, actually. It's coming back, maybe a little. Not so with religious construction.

At the official end of the recession, spending on religious construction was at about $6 billion. In March 2012, spending dipped to about $4 billion. In April, it down to $3.8. In May, $3.5.

Where's the bottom? At what point will spending on religious construction turn around -- or even just level out?

Presumably that depends on a change in the conditions favorable to building religious buildings, but what conditions are those?

Third, spending on construction by religious institutions actually spiked during the recession.

Not by a lot, relatively speaking, but still, it's a spike. The numbers show that by mid 2008, spending had dropped to about $6.9 billion, but then increased that fall by about $500 million. Spending in September, October and November was at a rate of about $7.4 billion per month, just slightly below 2007 levels.

It's possible there're really easy explanations for this. What they might be, though, I don't know.

Perhaps mosques, meeting houses, etc., spent the extra money to finish up projects they'd delayed because of the crisis. But then why hasn't that repeated itself, and why is no similar late-recession spending spike seen in private or commercial construction? Perhaps something happened towards the end of 2008 that made those responsible for deciding on such spending think things had changed, but again, what sign, and why weren't similar indicators seen by other sectors of construction spending?

The only similar movement I can find, actually, is in public construction spending, which is spending meant to affect the market in accordance with the economics of John Maynard Keynes, not spending that responds to the market. I don't see how the rational for that public spending might be related to religious institution's rational.

On the other hand, maybe it is, in a specifically religious form: A lot of churches, for example, when undertaking big building projects, use the language of "sowing" and "expecting," and a kind of build-it-and-they-will-come philosophy. Maybe, in the middle of the recession, some groups decided to act on faith, and spend and build their way to the recovery, though a specifically religious sort of recovery.

I'm not entirely sure I buy that, nor can I think of any readily available evidence that might show that to be the case. But the odd blip is there still to be explained: Who spent an extra $500 million on a religious building in the middle of the greatest financial disaster in however long, and why?

Fourth, the decline in religious construction spending doesn't correlate to "secularization."

The one explanaiton proffered for this chart has been secularization, or the idea, basically, that religious institutions have stopped spending money on building because they've stopped receiving money in donations and they've stopped receiving money because fewer people are attending religious organizations.

There's not much interpretation of these TLRELCONS numbers -- perhaps because they seem so disconnected with anything else economists or economic reporters might be trying to explain. There's nothing like a real consensus of an account that I can find, or even, actually, much in the way of accounts at all. There are a couple of references to secularization, though.

But, despite being very reasonable sounding, neither aspect of the secularization thesis is supported by facts.

While it's true, for example, that charitable giving dropped off in the recession, it hasn't continued to decline. There was actually an increase in giving in 2011. And then another increase in 2012. According to one widely-accepted group's studies, giving declined by nearly 13 percent in 2008, but has ticked upwards since then. In 2010, Americans gave about $6 billion more than had than the year before. In 2011, they gave $12 billion more than they had in 2010.

That's not nothing.

In fact, on a "relative historical basis," according to the Atlantic, it's a pretty high level of philanthropic giving, and actually "slightly exceeds the inflation-adjusted value in 2000, making it more than in any year prior to 2004." This reportedly corresponds to a long-term pattern, where American's charitable giving increases by about 2.6 percent in the two-year period following a recession.

Not all of that is religious giving, obviously, and religious giving hasn't rebounded in the way that giving more generally has rebounded. Giving to religious institutions decreased by 0.8 percent in 2010, according to the same study. It decreased again by 1.7 percent in 2011. In both years, though, religious giving accounted for the largest portion of charitable giving, so that roughly one out of every three dollars given away was givien to a religious institution.

That's more than $100 billion given to religious institutions in a very bad year.

That amount and the rate of change, critically, bear little to no resemblance to the decline in religious construction spending.

And even if the post-recession decline in charitable giving exactly correlated to the decline in religious construction spending, we still wouldn't know what was going on. Charitable giving increased from 2002 to 2006, and yet religious construction spending declined. There could perhaps be an argument that this kind of giving and that kind of spending are related to each other in some way if only the period after the recession is considered, but what about before?

The same problems persist in attempts to correlate religious attendance and religious construction spending: They just don't relate in any clear way.

There's a very well-known story, now, about the rapid rise of a group sociologist call "nones." That increase in religiously disaffiliated people in America does increase at the same historical moment that this spending on construction by religious affiliations decreases. Disregard first appearances, though. The increase in the "nones" is not going to work to explain the bear market in synagogue and temple, etc., construction.

Why? Because, 1), the change doesn't exactly line up right. And 2), the change is change in identification, not necessarily attendance. Between 1990 and 2010, the percentage of people who say they don't attend religious services of any sort has increased by 8 or 9 percent, according to Robert E. Putnam and David E. Campbell. That's significant, but it's a matter of self report, and not an unambiguous indicator of religious behavior. What we know, from that statistic, is only that the way people describe themselves to strangers on the telephone changed in this particular way by this particular amount during this particular time frame. It may be the case that these 8 or 9 percent of people used to, before the 90s, regularly attend religious services, but we don't know that. It's at least as plausible that they didn't, but felt they needed to say they did because that's what was socially acceptable to say when someone you didn't know asked you this kind of private, kind of loaded question.

To what extent that change in self-identification has meant an actual change in the numbers of people in churches, synagogues, etc., is pretty hard to pin down.

Besides that, the rate of the increase in the number of self-described "nones" seems to have leveled out since the recession, which isn't true at all for the dramatic decrease in TLRELCONS in that same period. Where spending on construction plummets after the recession, attendance at religious services doesn't. If you ask people how often they attend religious services, as Gallup did in 2008, 2009 and 2010, they say more or less exactly the same thing all three years.

This counters the oft-repeated truism that people flock to church during recessions -- if it was once true, it isn't now -- but doesn't explain the decline in construction spending.

Self-reports about religion are not exactly reliable, so one could disregard these self-reported rates of attendance. It would be possible, perhaps, to speculate that a decreasing number of people are attending religious services but a correspondingly increasing number of people are lying to pollsters about religious attendance, the numbers not matching the reality. Except there are a few studies that report actual head counts at actual religious services, and they don't don't show a huge rate of dis-affiliation either. From 2000 to 2007, according to one report that actually errs on the side of thinking churches and Christianity are about to go extinct, church attendance specifically declined by 1.7 percent.

That's not much. That's not really likely enough to be noted in most churches, much less cause the kind of panic that would result in a serious adjustment to spending and long-term plans.


The secularization explanation doesn't really work, then.

Fifth, a good explanation of this decline also has to explain why there's still more than $3 billion per month spent on religious building.

Daniel Shutlz (aka "Pastor Dan"), for instance, suggests that the decline is no surprise, since,

"Church buildings are almost optional by definition to begin with: as long as it was built properly in the first place and hasn't burned to the ground, you can generally make do with what you have rather than add on or tear down and start over."

While this seems right, it still doesn't really help. The core question is not yet answered, the core question being what are the conditions connected to the decisions to build or not build houses of worship? Besides not accounting for the fact this isn't simply connected to the economic crisis of 2008, Shutlz's point that, obviously, it's not necessary to build religious buildings doesn't explain why, then, people still do.

And they do. In May of this year, in America, they did it in fact to the tune of $3.5 billion. Way back in the summer of 2003, they did nearly $9 billion's worth of this by-definition optional construction. Whatever changed between the middle of the year nine years ago and this spring, it wasn't the optional nature of new religious building construction.

As it stands, at the moment, there just doesn't seem to be a good working theory. There's not a good answer, and the question still hangs there: what are the economic conditions of religious construction? When are houses of worship built? And why are they built when they are built? What dictates more religious construction? Or less?

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