How New Atheists are like Victorian-era bishops

The secularization thesis -- the most traditional version, rather crude, which predicted religion would disappear from the modern world -- is dead. I don't know that there's a generally agreed upon moment when that theory died. Certainly by the late 90s it was clear to sociologists that while certain social relationships, such as that between the general population and religious authorities, were changing, and that many religious beliefs and practices were morphing and diversifying, religion itself wasn't going away.

About a decade later, there were the New Atheists. While of course this movement made arguments about the validity of theistic beliefs, a major emphasis was actually on the moral imperative of secularization. The argument was that religion was a destructive, negative force that should disappear from the modern world. The New Atheists didn't rely on secularization as an empirical claim, particularly, saying that religion was, observably, disappearing (though sometimes they said that too), but made, more, a normative moral claim that religion ought to disappear.

Is there a connection between the demise of the sociological theory of secularization and the emergence of New Atheists' arguments for secularization?

Philosopher Charles Taylor, author of A Secular Age, said that there might be during an international, interdisciplinary graduate seminar at the University of Tübingen this last week.

Asked about the New Atheists during a question-and-answer period, Taylor said:

They are people who are really in a position where they’re, where they have a feeling ... of being besieged. I think I understand why they’re so upset. They had this sense that history was on their side and then this didn’t happen. It’s rather like bishops in the Victorian church and then there was Darwin.... That’s a very interesting phenomena. It used to be the picture, where dogmatic views were dying and freethinkers felt they owned the future. I don’t really understand this development. I’m just reporting on it. But it’s very interesting that there’s been this reversal, so that they now feel besieged.

Taylor's suggestion was that the much commented-upon style of the New Atheists -- the "militancy" and aggression -- comes from a sense that history is arcing in the wrong direction. In that way, if not in any other, these public atheists might be compared to American fundamentalists.

For their part, at least some of the New Atheists remain committed to the sociological thesis of secularization that sociologists have now either completely abandoned or dramatically modified (into various neo-secularization theories, including Taylor's own). In an interview to promote their recent documentary, both Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss said they thought theistic beliefs would, eventually, come to an end.

Krauss said, "When I was a kid in the ’60s, I was sure that by now there would be no religion. In a way it’s very surprising that there are these momentary resurgences. I think it’s going to be a long road."

Dawkins was more adamant that religion is vanishing, even if not as evenly and as quickly as was once commonly predicted. He said, "If you look at the broad sweep of history, then clearly we’re on the winning side. I think things are moving in the right direction, probably not as fast as I would like to see."

Only time will tell "who owns the future." There's an interesting question, though, that could be further explored, about how the sense of whether or not historical trends are tending towards or against one's position shape the way that position is articulated and the tenor of the general arguments.

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The North American papabiles

There are only a few North American names floating around in the speculation about the possible next pope, following the sudden resignation of Pope Benedict XVI on Monday. The chances that the next leader of the Roman Catholic Church will be from North America are exceedingly slim. The names that come up in this game of speculation, though, say something about the landscape, about the shape and tendencies and dispositions of the Catholic hierarchy in the United States and Canada, in relationship to the Vatican.

There's little point in speculation, except as a game, but the speculation nevertheless is interesting for what it reveals about the leadership of the Catholic church. It's interesting, for that reason, to look at the three top North American names on the odd-maker's list of papabile cardinals: Marc Ouellet, previously of Quebec, Timothy Dolan, of New York, and Raymond Burke, previously of St. Louis.

There are some differences in style, temperament, and the focuses of their careers, but also some marked similarities, especially with regards to opposition to "secularism" and debates over the correct interpretation of the Second Vatican Council.

The odds on Marc Ouellet becoming the next pope are currently at 7 to 2. That's down a bit from the days before Benedict's announcement, when they were 5 to 2, but still very, very high. Cardinal Ouellet  is actually the very best bet for pope according to those setting the odds, and Vaticanologists do consider him to be a real candidate, though not by any means a sure thing.

In fact, Ouellet himself is on record as  saying it "would be a nightmare" to be made pope, and it's possible that he could decline the papacy.

Ouellet, born in 1944, was elevated to the cardinate in 2003 by Pope John Paul II. He speaks five languages, and has good connections to Latin American cardinals, as well as Italians, who make up about 25 percent of the college of cardinals, and could conceivably draw solid support from both groups when the cardinals gather.

Ouellet's career has been as an academic. He has a doctorate in dogmatic theology, and has been a professor and rector at Catholic seminaries. He is associated with federation of theological journals named Communio, as was Hans Urs von Batlhasar and Pope Benedict XVI.

Looking through his speeches, homilies and public statements, it becomes apparent that the rapid secularization of Quebec in "Quiet Revolution" in the 1960s was significant in his intellectual formation. Ouellet has said, in his public statements, that the first mission of the leaders of the Catholic Church in the 21st century must be to respond to this secularization.

In 2001, he gave a very strong statement about what he looks for in leaders of the church. He said:

Today, especially in the context of our secularized societies, we need bishops who are the first evangelizers, and not mere administrators of dioceses, who are capable of proclaiming the Gospel, who are not only theologically faithful to the magisterium and the pope but are also capable of expounding and, if need be, of defending the faith publicly.

In his time as a primate of Canada, this issue of secularization came up in a conflict over how religion was to be taught in schools. The Supreme Court ruled that religion could only be taught in schools if it was taught neutrally, a decision that Ouellet strongly disagreed with. He argued that the so-called neutrality was actually a "dictatorship of relativism" that was "applied beginning in elementary school."

Ouellet thought that this apparent culture war skirmish was indicative of the "profound crisis shaking the foundations of European culture." He said: "A new raison d'etat imposes its law and tries to relegate the Christian roots of Europe to a secondary plane. It would seem that, in the name of secularism, the Bible must be relativised, to be dissolved in a religious pluralism and disappear as a normative cultural reference."

Ouellet said that many of the teachers in Quebec elementary schools had a "Marxist" approach, which was being masked as neutral.

This wasn't just a matter of clashing worldviews or a debate about the possibility of ideological neutrality in education, though. Ouellet held that Quebec was betraying its religious tradition with this secularization, and that the results were catastrophic. This was the theme of his first homily as archbishop of Quebec City:

Quebec languishes far from the values that gave strength and glory to its forefathers. Its will of cultural survival dramatically clashes with a very low birth rate and catastrophic youth suicides. These incomprehensible suicides tear us to pieces, and alarm us about the family situations and about the values that should give sense to their lives. Are these not the signs of the most serious loss that is striking Quebec society: the forgetfulness of its spiritual heritage, the forgetting of its martyrs and saints? But how much more should we see to the teaching of the virtues and spiritual attitudes that form the soul and the destiny of the people!

Ouellet has expressed concern that the same forces that are work in schools and in undermining European societies have also been felt within the church. Church leaders don't only need to speak the gospel to the secular world, they also need to save the church from that secularism. This is a concern, especially, in how the Second Vatican Council has been interpreted by many.

Ouellet said: "After the council, the sense of mission was replaced by the idea of dialogue. That we should dialogue with other faiths and not attempt to bring them the Gospels, to convert. Since then, relativism has been developing more broadly.”

This is not to say, however, that Ouellet simply dismisses dialogue, or is always strident in his speech, a committed cultural warrior. In one very public act as cardinal, he apologized for Catholic Church's historic failings, specifically towards women, homosexuals and minorities. Last year, in a homily in Ireland, he apologized for the church to the victims of sexual abuse by clerics. He called it a "great shame and enormous scandal," and a "sin against which Jesus himself lashed out."

On the other hand, there were previous instances where it was reported that Ouellet refused to apologize, saying the church was not yet ready for that step.

My sense, though, is that in both the cases where Ouellet engages and dialogue and those in which he opposes it come out of a consistent theological position that can be seen in his interpretation of Vatican II.

In a theological reflection on the council, he said, "Fifty years after the opening of the Second Vatican Council, we have seen that its chief inspiration was the ecclesiology of communion, which a right interpretation of the Council gradually identified and emphasized."

Ouellet said that in the "ecclesiology of communion," the church itself becomes a sacrament, which is to say that it has a very important role in the world, much of which has been secularized, a role as the carrier of grace. He said:

The Church thus becomes a sacrament [...]. As 'sign,'  she is the bearer of a mysterious divine reality that no image or analogy of this world will adequately express. As 'instrument,' she works efficaciously for the salvation of the world through her union with Christ, who associates her to his unique priesthood as his Body and Bride. The Church’s mission thus coincides with the sacramental form of the love that reveals God at work in the world, in an intimate synergy with the witnesses of the New Covenant.

Kathryn Jean Lopez, a conservative American Catholic who writes for National Review, calls Ouellet "brilliant and holy." Considering his chances to become the next pope, she notes: "He’s got a steady hand and is widely respected — and his resemblance to John Paul II in certain — even physical — ways is uncanny."

If Lopez likes any North American leader of the Catholic Church more than Ouellet, it's probably Timothy Dolan, whose chances, as of Benedict's resignation, were set at 25 to 1, though they've now dropped to 40 to 1.

According to Lopez, Dolan, born in 1950, would be a very good choice because "Everyone knows Cardinal Dolan and his media acumen and warm and pastoral heart."

Dolan has only been a cardinal for a year, but already he's the face of American Catholicism. Which means he's  charismatic, camera-ready and conservative.

He's been called a "back slapper," and a professional extrovert who loves to talk sports.

A lot of attention has been paid to Dolan's temperament and style. It can be seen as his greatest strength and weakness, in being considered for pope. Dolan was elevated to the cardinate by Benedict XVI, who, it has been said, tended to look for prelates with a certain sort of style. Benedict wanted "leaders who are basically conservative in both their politics and their theology, but also upbeat, pastoral figures given to dialogue," those who were part of the "center-right" of the American Catholic hierarchy. That means,

Bishops who are temperamentally conservative but who prefer to set a tone rather than impose penalties, who give pride of place to pro-life issues but also devote energy to other social justice concerns, who are often more invested in concrete pastoral concerns rather than political battles, and who are willing to work within the bishops’ conference as an expression of collegial relationships with other bishops.

This has been called "affirmative orthodoxy." The description suits Dolan very well.

His interpretation of the Second Vatican Council, for example, puts an emphasis on the church's "evangelical duty." He has said that Vatican II should be understood as a teaching that "refines the Church’s understanding of her evangelical duty, defining the entire Church as missionary, that all Christians, by reason of baptism, confirmation, and Eucharist, are evangelizers."

Dolan believes that, following Vatican II, because of the secularization of modern societies, evangelism is the mission of the church, "central to the life of every local church, to every believer."

This has led him to be very outspoken, politically. He has regularly made the news for his critiques of Barak Obama. He spoke out to oppose Obama's invitation to speak at Notre Dame, for example, and has been on the forefront of opposition to the Obamacare requirement that employers, including Catholic hospitals and charities, provide coverage of contraception in their employees' insurance plan.

Sometimes, his opposition has not been temperate. On one popular FOX News show, Dolan said the Obama administration was a "force trying to caricature" Catholic bishops as "bullies," and warned of a new religion "called secularism," that wanted to "duct tape" the mouths of religious people when they entered the public square.

The cardinal said that secularists, and specifically the president, were trying to erect a "Berlin wall" between church and state.

Dolan has, at other times, spoken out about what he perceives to be a pervasive anti-Catholic bias that manifests in political opposition to the American bishops. In an interview with the Associated Press, he  said, "Periodically, we Catholics have to stand up and say, 'Enough. The church as a whole still calls out to what is noble in us."

In that same interview, however, he also reached out to alienated Catholics, saying, "Please come back. We miss you. We're sorry if we hurt you. We'll listen to you. It's not the same without you."

He has also been vocal about the abuse scandals that have rocked the church, and alienated many of those Catholics he's now saying he wants back in the church. Dolan has said he is "haunted" by the fact that clerics routinely sexually abused children with impunity, and said"it is impossible to exaggerate the gravity of the situation." He acknowledged that the church cannot yet put the scandal behind her. In 2009, he said: "We're nowhere near to admitting that, thanks be to God, we've got this behind us .... And we should be glad that we can't say that. Because it's the kind of thing that is necessitating the vigilance ... to see that it never happens again."

Some prominent conservative Catholics have said the cause of the abuse was the liberal theology creeping into the church, blaming the factions they have consistently opposed. Dolan, however, has identified the root cause of the scandal as the church's penchant for secrecy. He said, ''Mistakes were made in the past because it was a little closed, a little clandestine, and we've got to be more open, more transparent.''

Dolan has not been entirely separate from the scandal, though. When he was an archbishop, in Milwaukee, he authorized payments of up to $20,000 to priests who'd been abusing children, a severance package of sorts to convince them to not fight laicization. Dolan denied doing this, but subsequent investigation showed he was involved in the pay-outs. The one time he mentioned this money, he referred to one such payment as an "act of charity" when pressed by a reporter.

Dolan's response to the abuse scandals has not defined him, though, as much as his personality and his visibility has. In the last few days, he's been on numerous media outlets discussing Benedict's resignation. He wrote about the pope's empty chair in a column in the New York Daily News in a way that could only be described as "pastoral."

As the Religious News Service notes, "Dolan’s extraordinary visibility and popularity are being cited as factors that could make him the first American with a realistic shot at being elected pope when the College of Cardinals gathers in March," but,

The same everyman exuberance that endears him to the hoi polloi can strike the stodgier College of Cardinals as sophomoric. Asked about his sense of humor, Benedict once said: 'I'm not a man who constantly thinks up jokes.' Compare that to Dolan on '60 Minutes' about arriving in New York: 'They asked me when I got here, 'Are you Cardinals, Mets, Brewers, or Yankees?' And I said, 'When it comes to baseball, I think I can be pro-choice.'

As Dolan himself noted, his papacy is "highly improbable," but it's significant that more than a little attention has been given to that outside chance.

The third cardinal to make the bookies' list of North American papabiles is said to have the same odds as Dolan, but his chances seem to have gotten little to no public attention. Raymond Leo Burke's odds of become pope are also currently at 40 to 1, having dropped from a slightly higher but still improbable 33 to 1 a few days ago.

It's not clear why Burke, born in 1948, the former St. Louis cardinal who heads the Vatican's supreme court, should be less talked about than Dolan in this context, except that he's less gregarious and not as well known to Catholics in the pews (though more well known in the Vatican).

Burke's most public moments have come from his denunciations of pro-choice Catholic politicians. He has regularly made very public pronouncements that Catholic politicians who are pro-choice should be denied communion. He spoke out against John Kerry in 2004, and said Ted Kennedy should be denied a church funeral when Kennedy died in 2009.

His position on this is not without support from conservative Catholics, though there's far from universal agreement on this, even among bishops who would generally ally with Burke on political issues.

The cardinal has gone further, though, and made the very unusual and controversial argument that bishops who do serve the Eucharist to pro-choice politicians should be removed, a statement for his he later apologized.

He has also said that Catholics who voted for pro-choice politicians were committing a mortal sin, a statement which he softened in a clarification, but then, in another context, seemed to reiteration just as strongly.

In 2009, he made the argument this way:

If a Catholic knowingly and deliberately votes for a person who is in favor of the most grievous violations of the natural moral law, then he has formally cooperated in a grave evil and must confess his serious sin. Since President Obama clearly announced, during the election campaign, his anti-life and anti-family agenda, a Catholic who knew his agenda regarding, for example, procured abortion, embryonic-stem-cell research, and same-sex marriage, could not have voted for him with a clear conscience.

Burke has also attracted media attention when he urged that similarly absolutist lines be drawn when people who were associated with Catholic institutions made or were known to have made pro-choice statements. He argued for the discipline of a basketball coach at St. Louis Univeristy, a Catholic school, who made pro-choice statements, and opposed a fundraiser for a Catholic hospital that featured singer Sheryl Crow for the same reason.

According to Burke, he's only insisting that the church remain consistent in its witness. Regarding Crow's performance, for example, he said that it mattered that she was pro-choice even though she wasn't herself Catholic, because, "A Catholic institution featuring a performer who promotes moral evil gives the impression that the church is somehow inconsistent in its teaching."

Though many in the American Catholic hierarchy agree with Burke about these issues of moral evil and the real threat of modern secularization, Burke's tone is significantly harsher. He appears to wholeheartedly embrace the idea of a culture war, warning that Catholicism may soon be illegal, Catholic teaching will likely be outlawed, and that the struggle with secularism is a struggle to the death: "secularism will in fact predominate, and it will destroy us."

If you examine his arguments about denying pro-choice Catholics communion, however, it has less to do with secularism, per se, than with his interpretation of canon law. In fact, though Burke is clearly concerned about American politics and public life, his greater concern is "antinomianism," disregard for the law, within the church itself.

As a canon law expert, he holds that disregard for church law and "indifference toward church discipline" are at the root of the church's problems.

In a speech he gave this past summer, Burke described how he came to the realization of the depth of the problem of this antinomianism. He said:

After I began my studies of Canon Law in September of 1980, I soon learned how much the Church’s discipline was disdained by her priests, in general. When I answered the question of a brother priest regarding my area of study, the fairly consistently reaction was expressed in words like these: 'I thought that the Church had done away with that,' and 'What a waste of your time.' The usual reaction, in fact, reflected a general attitude in the Church toward her canonical discipline, an attitude inspired by the hermeneutic of discontinuity, by that sense that 'a day of sunlight' had arrived in the Church, in contrast to the darkness of what had gone before. Institutes of the Church’s law, which, in her wisdom, she had developed down the Christian centuries, were set aside without consideration of their organic relationship to the life of the Church or of the chaos which would necessarily result from their neglect or abandonment.

The "hermeneutic of discontinuity," in Burke's view, undercuts the church's claims of truth, severely damaging its witness. He believes that this idea that the church can change and does and should change is responsible for the "betrayal" of the interpretation of the Second Vatican Council in the United States. After reflecting on his experience in the 1980s, he continued:

The 'hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture,' which has tried to highjack the renewal mandated by the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, is marked by a pervasively antinomian culture, epitomized by the Paris student riots of 1968, and has had a particularly devastating effect on the Church’s discipline. It is profoundly sad to note, for instance, how the failure of knowledge and application of the canon law, which was indeed still in force, contributed significantly to the scandal of the sexual abuse of minors by the clergy in our some parts of the world.

In some cases, Burke seems to argue that so-called "reforms" were the cause of the sexual abuse and cover-up, though, more often, as above, he says only that it was a significant contributing factor.

Burke himself, it should be noted, has been accused of participating in cover-up of sexual abuse by priests.

Burke's own efforts have, for the most part, been aimed at a restoration restoration of the "disciplinary tradition of the church and respect of the law in the church."

As part of that restoration, he has advocated the church bring back some elements of the Tridentine mass. He doesn't think that the mass should necessarily always be done in Latin, as some traditionalists maintain, but does believe that the current liturgy should be revised, with some of the older rites reintroduced. He also wants strict enforcement of the uniformity of liturgical services, so that they really are "catholic," and do not vary from region to region and parish to parish. He has called for an official crack-down on "liturgical abuses,"which he says destroy or seriously threaten Catholic faith. 

It's no accident that Burke was put in charge of reaching out to traditionalists who have left the church over developments they see as accommodations of modernity, most notably the Society of Saint Pius X.  A number of sustained efforts were made by Benedict XVI to bring the traditionalists back into the church, despite some controversy surrounding the traditionalists, and Burke led those efforts, being both sympathetic to the traditionalists' arguments and critical of their willingness to reject authority they disagreed with. 

The cardinal has been called Benedict's top U.S. advisor, and he has been seen as the hand behind the promotion of like-minded conservatives, such as Cardinal Charles Chaput and Archbishop Salvadore Cordileone, though it's not clear if there's any merit to those speculations. Likewise, some think Burke was the one instigating investigations into the Leadership Conferences of the Women Religious, who are alleged to promote "radical feminism" and teachings contrary to the churches.

Burke's life and ministry have not been solely concerned with canon law and church discipline, though. A major accomplishment of his career has been establishing the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe on 103 acres in La Crosse, Wisc. The shrine promotes "fully authentic Marian devotion," and is a place of pilgrimage, housing hundreds of saint's relics. Burke started this when he was a bishop, in Wisconsin, but has returned as an archbishop and as a cardinal.

There's only a very outside chance that Burke will emerge from the cardinal's conclave next month as the new pope. It's likely, though, that in his role as cardinal, he will want the new pope to be someone who can lead a restoration movement in the church, bringing her back to the disciplinary tradition.

Looking at Burke's life and work, and Dolan's and Ouellet's, helps very little with speculations about the next pope. That these are the names that come up in such speculation, though, says a lot about Catholicism in North America, today. These are the men who are perceived to be close to the Vatican and also connected to and actively leading the churches in America. There are some real differences, especially in personality, temperament, and in the subjects they've devoted their lives to studying. There are also some strong similarities. All three understand "secularism" to be a major threat, and are, in their ministry, committed to opposing and combating that secularism.

Further, all three of the American papabiles have made the correct interpretation of the Second Vatican Council a central part of their ministries, and their ministries are, in some sense, about putting the correct interpretation of the council into practice. The next pope may be the first who is post-conciliar, but he, along with the American hierarchy, will likely continue to be defined by the controversies and competing interpretations of Vatican II. 

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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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Presentation in Chicago

A bit of shameless self-promotion:

Exploratory Sessions (A18-232)
Per Smith, Boston University, Presiding

Theme: Irreligion, Secularism and Social Change
Sunday, Nov. 19 – 1 – 2:30 PM, McCormick Place West, room 178A, Chicago

"Scholars of religion from a variety of disciplines are increasingly focusing their attention on the relationship between the religious and the secular. So what would a sustained discussion of 'the secular' look like within the American Academy of Religion; and moreover, how would such a discussion be relevant to religious studies? This exploratory session seeks to provide modest answers to those questions by example. On the heels of the year of the protestor, the session explores how 'the secular' is implicated in and affected by social transformations. How did social change make the secular possible? How have the demands of 20th century social movements shaped emergent forms of secularism? How do contemporary social movements provide fertile soil for secular theologies of resistance? And how are contemporary irreligious identities evolving within a social context that considers them deviant?

Daniel Silliman, University of Heidelberg
The Possibility of Secularity and the Material History of Fiction 
Petra Klug, University of Leipzig
The Dynamics of Standardisation and Deviance using the Way U.S. Society deals with Atheists as an Example 
Jordan Miller, Salve Regina University
Occupying Absence: Political Resistance and Secular Theology 

Responding: Jonathan VanAntwerpen, Social Science Research Council

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Protecting belief

"Christian theology never expressly identified God and nature; but the point is that natural theology and nature-preaching had implanted within Protestantism an increasingly strong leaning in this direction. Ministers often forgot Calvin's warnings, misunderstood Edwards, ignored Bushnell; natural theologians wanted not just to glorify God in nature but to see Him there ....

In the end, the most influential church leaders tried to protect belief by making peace with modernity, by conceiving God and His purposes in terms as nearly compatible as possible with secular understandings and aims. A minority insisted that a transcendent God must utterly elude human grasp."

-- James Turner, Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America.

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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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