In a lengthy interview, Richard Madsen talks with Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell about their book American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us. One of the topics are the “nones”, largely made up of people who were once members of a church but remain believers.
Putnam:
Of course, there’s a general tendency for people to choose to move to faiths that are closer to them rather than further away. But saying that and implying that this has always been true obscures the question of what counts as close or different. A generation ago, a person who moved from being a Pentecostal to being a Methodist or being an Episcopalian to being a Baptist would’ve been thought of as having made a big move. Now those kinds of moves between evangelical and mainline Protestants are more common, and similarly among Catholics. It would certainly have been a big jump a generation ago for someone to move from being a Catholic to being an Evangelical, or vice versa, but those moves are much more common now. So while it’s true, as you say, that moves are more common within Christianity than between Christianity and Islam, for example, to say that might be to obscure what’s really most striking about the trend, which is that religious groups that used to be thought of as quite different are now seen as less different.
Madsen: If these “nones,” as you analyze them, were, at least in part, turned off by the politics of the faith tradition they were part of, and they lost their affiliation, why would they become “nones”? For instance, if one did not like the views on homosexuality and gay marriage preached in one’s conservative Evangelical church, why not just join a liberal Protestant church like the Episcopal church that ordains gay bishops? But such liberal churches seem to actually be declining. If people are fed up for various reasons with politically conservative church traditions, they don’t seem to go to a religious alternative, or do they?
Campbell: That’s a good question, and we’ve actually discussed that amongst ourselves quite a bit. The scenario that you describe is certainly one possibility, that the “nones” just end up in mainline Protestant churches. Here are a couple of hypotheses as to why that hasn’t been the case. One is, if what these folks are resistant to is not just conservative politics but actually politics in general at church, they may not find themselves terribly comfortable in a lot of mainline churches, because in another part of the book we show that there’s actually more politics in liberal churches than in conservative churches, or at least politics coming over the pulpit. Another possibility is that the old mainline churches are actually not providing the sort of worship that these folks would find attractive, which we suggest would probably be an evangelical style of religion but without the politics. We describe one genre of that type of church in the book, the “emergent church” as it’s sometimes called. I would speculate that the older mainline churches, just in terms of the actual worship experience that they provide, are not something that your average young person necessarily finds to their liking.
Putnam: I also think that the religious marketplace will respond to this rise of the young “nones,” but we’re still in the early days. It’s important to keep in mind this has been happening fairly recently, less than twenty years, and I don’t think the religious marketplace changes that rapidly.
The Episcopal church or the other churches that might appeal to this group, in marketing terms—these are brands that were forged in the fires of the Reformation five centuries ago. We don’t say it’s impossible for those churches to have a different flavor, but what it means to be an Episcopalian from the point of view of the average Joe who’s decided he doesn’t want to attend his Evangelical church is not so much driven by the controversy about gay bishops as by the general cultural sense of what Episcopalianism is about. That could change, of course, over time, but it doesn’t change instantly.
Read it all at Hedgehog Review.
Rob Bell anyone?
If what these folks are resistant to is not just conservative politics but actually politics in general at church, they may not find themselves terribly comfortable in a lot of mainline churches, because in another part of the book we show that there’s actually more politics in liberal churches than in conservative churches, or at least politics coming over the pulpit. Another possibility is that the old mainline churches are actually not providing the sort of worship that these folks would find attractive, which we suggest would probably be an evangelical style of religion but without the politics.