Church Spectrum From Cathotoicism to Born Again Catholic Lutherine Episcopal Prespbetarian Methodist
Unsettled Religious Climate Marks U.S. on Visit of Pope
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September 30, 1979
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The religious climate that awaits Pope John Paul II's arrival in the United States tomorrow is far less settled than it was when Pope Paul VI made the first papal trip to this country 14 years ago.
The Pope's seven‐day tour will take him through the most religiously pluralistic region that he has visited as head of the world's 730 million Roman Catholics.
In other countries he has visited since his election to the papacy last November, including Mexico and Poland, the church has represented overwhelming majorities of the people.
Free Spiritual Marketplace
But the American church, with 49 million members, exists amid an array of religious groups that continue to proliferate in a free marketplace of spiritual experimentation. This pluralism has offered unusual opportunities for interfaith dialogue and coexistence, and thus has posed challenges to Catholicism that have few parallels in other areas the Pope has visited.
Many Christians, Catholic and non
Catholic, will be watching the Pope for clues to his response to the diversity and the ecumenical conditions that characterize American religion. Already, some ecumenical leaders have expressed disappointment that the only interfaith activity on the Pope's schedule is a brief
Papal Journey: A Diverse America prayer service with non‐Catholic leaders in Washington on Oct. 7.
For his part, the Pope, who visited this country twice while a Cardinal in Cracow, has indicated a special interest in the American church's problems and its role in the world church.
In the decade and a half since the last papal visit, the United States has experienced a set of trends that have added complexity and confusion to the tradition of pluralism in religious thought and practice.
The country has not, however, moved very much away from religious belief itself. In the words of Dr. Robert Bellah, a sociologist at the University of California at Berkeley, "We've become differently religious, not less so."
The trends include the following:
q A decline of most of the largest Protestant denominations, which traditionally take a liberal or moderate theological stance, and the corresponding blossoming of such evangelical groups as the Southern Baptist Convention, which preaches a conservative, sometimes fundamentalist message. Some commentators, including Dr. Martin E. Marty of the University of Chicago, a church historian, warn that the losses among moderate Protestants signal an erosion of a key function served by these churches, bridging the ground between secular culture and religion.
9lncreasing evidence that even those who are not church members tend to hold surprisingly orthodox Christian beliefs in such basic tenets as the existence of God and the divinity of Christ, contrary to some predictions a decade ago that Americans would be rapidly swept toward secularist unbelief by a highly scientific and rational age. Doubts arise, however, over the depth of these beliefs.
9An apparent weakening of the link between believing in basic religious convictions and belonging to churches, especially among people 18 to 30 years old, who report high levels of religious belief in surveys but at the same time show growing opposition to joining congregations.
The emergence of Catholicism from severe upheavals over reform efforts started by the Ecumenical Council Vatican II and internal disputes over sexuality. The church now has a more diverse constituency that includes a growing number of people who disagree with many official church views but still consider themselves loyal Catholics. In addi-
tion, 12 million baptized Catholics are so inactive that church evangelism programs classify them as "unchurched."
Church thinkers increasingly say that behind these developments lies a basic confrontation between ancient faith and a modern, "this worldly" outlook. They suggest that loss of confidence in organized religion parallels a much broader national crisis of faith.
"It is my position," says Peter Berger, a sociologist, "that modernity has plunged religion into a very specific crisis, characterized by secularity, to be sure, but characterized more importantly by pluralism. In the pluralistic situation, the authority of all religious traditions tends to be undermined." His views appear in a new book, "The Heretical Imperative," published by Doubleday.
Thedore Roszak, the historian and sa cial analyst, described the present situation in more ominous terms at a conference on new religious movements last year, referring to "an air of terrible finality" that, in his view, "surrounds this confrontation of the new religious awareness and the humanist cultural mainstream."
Mr. Roszak asserted, "We live in the midst of secular consensus that has very nearly reached the point of closure and monopoly. Science, technics and social revolution — all radically divorced from religious tradition — sway the history of our time, and they do so globally, aggressively, militantly."
Opposing Evidence Cited
Other observers, buttressing their argument with a growing body of evidence that conventional faith is still strong, scoff at such diagnoses.
Among them is the Rev. Andrew M. Greeley, director of the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. "To speak of secularization in a country where more than 95 percent of the people believe in God, more than 70 percent believe in life after death, more than 80 percent pray every week (50 percent pray every day) is utter nonsense," Father Greeley, a Catholic priest, writes in his book, "Crisis in the Church."
Father Greeley continues, "Most secularization theory is merely a projection of the agnosticism of the New York‐based mass media and the elite university campus on the rest of society."
Still, there is clear evidence that many religious organizations have suffered stiff setbacks. And for the spectrum of moderate Protestants and large segments of American Catholicism, the adverse circumstances of the recent past arose unexpectedly. The most extensive collection of studies on the subject, issued in a book, "Understanding Church Growth and Decline," published by The Pilgrim Press, generally concludes that sweeping changes in society, often dimly perceived and not yet fully understood, were the principal causes of huge transitions in attitudes toward religion.
Shift Pronounced Among Youth
"It seems that a broad cultural shift has occurred," write Dean Hoge of Catholic University and David A. Roozen of Hartford Theological Seminary, two members of the study group. The shift "has hit the churches from the outside, and it has hit the affluent, educated, individualistic, culture‐affirming denominations hardest," they say. "The shift occurred much more among the youth than the older adults. It was most visible among the affluent young people, especially those on college campuses."
In retrospect, the year 1965, when Pope Paul appealed for "no more war" at the United Nations, marked a distinct turning point in the course of American religion. Over the next 10 years, seven of the 10 largest Christian denominations would lose an average of 10 percent of their members, baptisms would decline and church school enrollment drop drastically. But at the time there were few hints of the currents that were to bring about such fundamental shifts in organized religion in America.
At the start of the decade, the Second Vatican Council was in its final stages, presaging broad revisions in the vigorous American Catholic church, and the major Protestant churches were in the last throes of an unprecedented period of expansion. Signs of health were abundant in membership figures, church attendance and financial support. Religious leaders still spoke almost casually of "Christian America" and foresaw uninterrupted denominatinal growth.
But these apparent strengths were deceiving. Since then, most major assumptions about the direction of American religious life have been severely questioned by cultural and spiritual movements that were largely unforseen at the time of Paul VI's brief journey.
Sexual Attitudes Have Impact
Between papal visits, religious patterns have been shaken, stimulated and molded by the shifts in values and social behavior. Chief among them have been the steady liberalization of attitudes toward sexual morality, placing many people at odds with church teaching, the concentration on self‐fulfillment that contrasts with church calls for self‐restraint, and a lingering distrust of all major institutions that has a negative effect on many religious organizations. One result of these and other influences is that the ties between Americans and the "established" groups such as the Presbyterian, Methodist, Lutheran and Episcopal churches have been undercut.
Meanwhile, since the mid‐1960's, wider trends have been repeatedly mirrored in religion, frequently at the fringes of the older establishment. The "Jesus" movement of the late 1960's, for example, reflected some aspects of the counterculture and later the upsurge of "born again" faith was seen as a spiritual response to the broad search for personal fulfillment. In the 1970's, moreover, conservative swings in theology followed a similar mood in politics and economics.
While some recent conditions have apparently fostered new, often unconventional religious groups, other societal factors noted by church analysts have worked against the large denominations that once dominated the nation's religion and much of its culture. The losses have spurred debate over causes. Some blame such elements as the increase of social mobility that disrupts family life and community stability, both believed crucial to church growth, while conservative critics say the problems resulted from too much social activism by the moderate churches.
Range of Reasons for Slump
Leaders of the declining Protestant denominations, citing opinion polls within their churches, dismiss this claim and point to a broad range of other reasons for the slump, none of which is held accountable for the losses by itself. These leaders stress that churches could do little to stem the tide of demographic, economic and social changes that seem to adversely affect church membership. Alluding to the emergence of a society that is more individualistic, relativistic and transient, Mr. Hoge and Mr. Roozen conclude: "Church commitment is found mainly in a gradually shrinking sector of the culture anchored at the traditional evangelical pole."
Surveys indicate that the Roman Catholic church has recorded sharp declines in mass attendance partly as the result of the same factors and, additionally, because of problems that have been more particular to Catholicism, primarily the dispute over birth control. Though rates of church attendance have shown signs of increasing again in the last two years, most church leaders believe the crisis of authority and confidence have contributed to a lasting decline in Catholic religious observance.
At the same time, a recent Gallup study showed that a growing number of Americans, 41 percent of adult Americans, or 61 million, are "unchurched" but are strikingly conventional in their beliefs. Sixty‐eight percent of the unchurched said they believed in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, compared with 93 percent of the churchgoers, and 76 percent of the unchurched said that they prayed to God, compared with 98 percent of the active church members. Three quarters of the unchurched also favored religious education for their children.
The study, commissioned by 29 religious groups, concluded: "Some two thirds of the unchurched today pray, believe in God, believe in Jesus Christ as the Son of God, believe in an afterlife. We are dealing with a people who have deep religious roots, roots that when watered with kindness and compassion will grow once more."
Church Setting Losing Appeal
Yet more Americans are turning away from churches and the gap between "believing" and "belonging" represents a reversal of a tendency to express faith in a church setting that has been a main feature of religious life since the nation's founding.
"As awkward and scandalous as it may seem to some," says Carl S. Dudley, a Presbyterian expert on religious trends, in a recent book, "Where Have All Our People Gone?," "collected studies show that a great number of people find their religous faith apart from the organized church. Some who believe will join churches; others who believe will not. The simple fact is, religious belief is not synonymous with church membership."
Dr. Robert Wuthnow, a sociologist from Princeton who believes that the counterculture has imparted values that have moved young people farther from the church, has evaluated a study of young Lutherans and concluded that "those who were marginally involved, while still believing in God and Christ, don't have an experiential kind of faith that includes the spriritual presence of love and forgiveness. This supports the idea that their commitments are extrinsic and superficial."
TV and Atomization of Religion
The growth of televison evangelism, which tends to place emphasis on personal faith without involvement in a church community, is widely seen as another factor in the "atomization" of religion.
Dr. David Preus, president of the American Lutheran Church, is critical of the so‐called "electronic church" and sees it as one aspect of a serious erosion of the bond between church and society that has hurt institutions such as his own.
"Personal faith without a commitment to a community of believers is a fraud," he said. "There is no way of caring for ourselves without caring for others."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1979/09/30/archives/unsettled-religious-climate-marks-us-on-visit-of-pope-free.html
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