America’s Epidemic of Empty Churches | Hacker News Reader

America’s Epidemic of Empty Churches

theatlantic.com

53 pointsmitchtbaum88 comments

> Many of our nation’s churches can no longer afford to maintain their structures—6,000 to 10,000 churches die each year in America—and that number will likely grow... Closure and adaptive reuse often seems like the simplest and most responsible path. Many houses of worship sit on prime real estate, often in the center of towns or cities, where inventory is low... A church building is more than just walls and windows; it is also a sacred vessel that stores generations of religious memories... “We wanted to transform the church into a place that would draw people who might not otherwise come, and in Asheville, we’ve seen it break down stereotypes of what the church is,” Duggins said... This relatively small organization can only do so much to turn the tide of congregational death in America. Missional Wisdom has shifted its focus from one-off projects to publishing books, conducting seminars, and consulting with struggling churches.

Sociologists Peter Berger and Grace Davie report that “most sociologists of religion now agree” that the secularization thesis—that religion declines as a society becomes more modern—“ has been empirically shown to be false.” Most striking of all are the demographic studies that predict that it is not religious populations but secular ones that are in long-term decline. The April 2015 Pew study projects that the percentage of atheists, agnostics, and the religiously unaffiliated will slowly but steadily decline, from 16.4 percent of the world’s population today to 13.2 percent forty years from now. University of London professor Eric Kaufmann, in his book Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?, speaks of “the crisis of secularism” and argues that the shrinkage of secularism and liberal religion is inevitable.

That seems at odds to the decline of religion across Europe.

UK is now majority atheist, and Ireland once devoutly catholic is far more secular than it was. A majority voted to end the ban on abortion in Ireland only this year. So I am baffled at what "crisis of secularism" Kaufman is imagining.

I think that the factor for Europe is immigration. A majority of new Europeans are Muslims and that is by far the fastest growing religion.

Yes, fundamentalist Judaism and Islam do a great job at driving reproduction. And keeping women subjugated is a huge part of it.

Please keep religious flamebait and religious flamewar off Hacker News.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Sorry.

At least in America, I wonder how studies like this account for people lying about their religion. Can't tell you how many people I've met that will tell you they are Christian, even though they never go to church or otherwise participate in religious activities. I think a lot of people just like to fit in, because to admit that you are an atheist is to immediately invite condemnation and ridicule.

This is the opposite of all data I have seen. The long term decline of religions is a real thing.

This probably mirrors the concentration of power that’s happening.

makes sense, if you'd consider that atheists probably reproduce at a lower rate. kinda like Idiocracy (the movie).

I put forth that if the premise of that movie were true, why would we have technology advancement today? Why not continuous regression of knowledge. I will also note of the past, great men of both science and faith, like James Clerk Maxwell.

> Sociologists Peter Berger and Grace Davie report that “most sociologists of religion now agree” that the secularization thesis—that religion declines as a society becomes more modern—“ has been empirically shown to be false.”

This statement is directly copied from page 24 of 'Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World' by Timothy Keller [0]. I make no judgement of how true/false this is.

> Most striking of all are the demographic studies that predict that it is not religious populations but secular ones that are in long-term decline. The April 2015 Pew study projects that the percentage of atheists, agnostics, and the religiously unaffiliated will slowly but steadily decline, from 16.4 percent of the world’s population today to 13.2 percent forty years from now.

The citation for this study is [1]. tl;dr on it is that the global population is growing much faster than atheists are growing. But the number of atheists aren't shrinking.

[0]: https://books.google.com/books?id=kzNODwAAQBAJ&lpg=PA24&pg=P... [1]: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/07/why-people-w...

I lived in a church converted to condos in South Boston for a few years. The Catholic Church sold the property to developers to pay for an $85 million sex abuse settlement. When Boston had that one winter where we got 2 feet of snow every other day for a month and a half the ice dams were so bad it basically rained inside every unit for the entire month of February. We all lost everything. It turns out a 100+ year old building with a steeply pitched slate roof is almost impossible to repair in the dead of winter on short notice. Buildings like this seem interesting and like they have character but I would never live in a converted church again.

It's important to note that Americans are far more religious than adults in other wealthy nations [0] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/07/31/americans-ar.... Even with this decline, the US remains a Christian nation. The special flavor of Christianity in the US is quite adaptive, so I have little doubt that the faith itself will endure.

> The special flavor of Christianity in the US is quite adaptive

In fact, a great part of it runs counter to the actual teachings of Christ.

It probably says something about the state of things that from this statement I genuinely can't tell which school of thought you're coming from, since each one says this about the others.

I have a lot of doubt. Sure, in some parts of the country, but in most parts religion is playing a significantly smaller part in people's lives with every generation.

Yes, the US scores much higher in religiosity ... when you use self-reported numbers. But it turns out a lot of Americans lie about church attendance, at least. If you survey how many butts are in the pews on Sunday and compare that to the population of a city and weight it by how often people say they go to church, there is a nearly a 2:1 discrepancy.

This isn't where I first read that statistic, but it is the first Google search that seems credible.

https://churchleaders.com/pastors/pastor-articles/139575-7-s...

But the self-reporting bias isn't unique to America. There are plenty of people in other parts of the world who say they belong to a religion but don't actually participate in religious activities with any regularity. It depends on the religion, of course, but at least with Christianity there's no fundamental contradiction in going to church only once or twice a year and still calling yourself a believer.

If there's a similar bias in other parts of the world, the statistics still leave the U.S. with a higher overall religiosity.

A weird thing happens in Iceland which is that people are born nominally "members of the Church of Iceland". Some portion of their taxes then go to support the church. If they want their taxes to go somewhere else, they have to proactively register as some other faith (and only those who care will bother). So you have a massive discrepancy between how many Icelanders are "statistically Christian" and it's not even Icelanders self-reporting, but the church itself for political/funding reasons.

How massive? As of 2017, statistically 70% of Icelandic citizens belonged to the Lutheran Church. But only ~11% actually attend church (http://www.iamreykjavik.com/religion-in-iceland)

I think something a lot of people tend to look over is that a lot of latin americans are religious and they so happen to be the largest group of people coming into the country.

With adaptive, are you referring to being able to pretend to care about unborn children but not actually caring about them after birth?

When you look at care for the poor, a great many Christians give to charities. The driving force behind many of the social programs was Christians. There are two issues, at least, today. First, there are many people who call themselves Christians that aren't. This isn't surprising. Jesus called it when he said, "Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven." They probably won't actually due the will of the Father. Second, for many actual Christians, Caesar is a poor provider for the poor.

It appears the large denominational churches are closing while nondenominational churches are growing quickly. You can't put new wine in old wine-skins.

https://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2017/september/how-ma...

I'm not sure the trend will hold. This is all anecdotal, but new non-denominational churches in my area seem to start more frequently and then die more frequently than mainline establishments, it seems that since many of them rent instead of own their churches, and leadership isn't necessarily restricted to those with training and education in running a ministry, they're more likely to flounder long-term. Considering that the numbers are for total number congregations, I don't think that the discrepancy between worshippers is actually as harsh as its made out to be, and if it is, I think we'll actually see a trend back towards more community-oriented mainline or even catholicism as worshippers get disillusioned by the drama / lack of structure that a larger portion of non-denoms undeniably struggle with.

But this is based on just infrequent personal experiences with like 4 different non-denoms in the suburban South, ranging from "conference room at 2 star airport hotel" to "megachurch stadium so full we watched the service in an overflow room in the same venue". In all cases the people who invited me did not stay very long as attendees. I may be dramatically underestimating their popularity/longevity in more rural spots though.

The church I attend these days is doing this sort of "invite the community in during the week" approach, and being fairly successful at it, from what I can tell. There are a lot of dynamics going on there; I don't think it'd work everywhere. But definitely there's something to the idea, and worth bringing up in your congregational context if collapse is in the offing.

There's something poignant about the notion that a church, faced with "death", may find new life by welcoming the local community... which seems to me to be the raison d'etre for a church in the first place.

As an atheist I’m sympathetic but that’s not the raison d’être for a Church and never has been. It’s about bringing people to God.

> It’s about bringing people to God.

True enough, but the community ('fellowship') aspect of the faith is essential.

Maybe I'm missing it, but it also seems to be something that's missing in more secular world views.

Book clubs, talk therapy 'support' groups, athletics, travel associations, charities, small crop coops... The secular "world view" is replete with fellowship, collective action, and community. Heck, "community centers"...

Though, lacking a unifying shared habit of proscribed worship at a single place those things tend to be interest, activity, or goal based.

> those things tend to be interest, activity, or goal based.

I think that's a more significant distinction than it might appear, mainly because it seems to imply a narrower and more disjoint view of community than you might expect from an institution like a Church (or Synagogue, Mosque, etc.)

Just to illustrate, the church I attend has the usual Sunday services, and it's explicitly a whole-family affair. This includes the kids, for which there are age appropriate breakouts during the service. There's also a breakout of sorts for people with special concerns around illness, death, and other particular needs.

After the service, there's another community coffee-hour/lunch of sorts where people get together and are just able to hang out a bit. The kids usually wind up on the playground. There's also a deliberate program after the service to physically reach out to people that were unable to attend due to illness or infirmity. This is not to mention the monthly 'everyone invited' community dinners, the quarterly hosting of several homeless families on church grounds, the food pantry run by the church several times a week...

Setting aside the religiosity of it all, the point I'm trying to make is that the organization goes out of its way to be inclusive in a relevant way to a wide spectrum of the community. There's explicitly something for the young, the old, the infirm, people that aren't members of the church...

It's harder to see how the more goal-oriented organizations you mention can really address that broad a definition of 'community'. I get how you can use a portfolio of involvement in those groups to get everybody in a family involved in something, but not necessarily how they'd be involved _together_.... which is important.

For whatever it's worth, I can easily see how something like this _could_ be assembled outside of religion.... I'm just hard pressed to point out examples where's it's actually happening at all (much less in a way that would compensate for the losses in religious institutions.)

Your church sounds like it's at less risk of "death" than the ones turning to community embrace as an act of desperation.

Christianity emphasizes community heavily, and church is one of the last common social events that continues to exist in American society.

I live fairly close to several churches that have been converted to (high end) condos.

From an economic point of view I get the appeal.

In terms of the modern cynicism about religion, I also get the appeal.

But on a personal note, It's hard to get excited about a place that was once home to community events getting turned into a half-dozen or so retreats where people of means can go be alone. (Particularly considering all the other options for housing around here, and the fact I don't exactly see community centers, etc. springing up to fill the gaps left by the churches.)

Bathrooms of adjacent apartments tend to be clustered together. Maybe a little window can be installed with a sliding shutter; the residents can then confess their sins to each other while sitting on the toilet.

There are no replacements, which is the worst part. A healthy community has a gathering place, and without a church, where is it?

A Christian church, theologically, is the embodiment of the community of faith; it has very little to do with a physical building. However, said community of faith has, as an general article of faith, the belief of bringing others to follow Christ, our god. Buildings happen to be extremely useful loci for organizing and arranging the community's business.

As a general part of the outreach mission, it harmonizes that a church building might host sports, arts & social service programs. Or, at least, it does for some.

I personally think the use of old cathedrals as purely secular spaces (condos, breweries, bars) is distasteful, although I acknowledge the theological vacuity of the building itself. I would rather see such buildings repurposed as a place to host offices and events serving others; while the congregation may have gone, the service to others that is part and parcel of the Christian mission can still continue on.

I think there are two things going on:

a) People are becoming less religious b) People are leaving smaller churches for much larger churches that are non-denominational.

Smaller churches are more conservative and more political, people seem to be burned out on politics and don't really want it as something in their face on Sunday. You couple that with natural shifts in demographics and that essentially explains a lot of what is happening. I suspect once the millennial generation has more kids, church going will tick back up.

According to recent studies, neither of those are really happening. "Secularization theory" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secularization#Current_issues_...) is the current sociological term for (a) and it is pretty well established that while there may be regional fluctuation in the numbers of religious people, at a global level, religiosity is not in decline.

As for (b), at least in the US, it is the large mainline denominations that are in steep decline and the smaller, more theologically conservative denominations that are growing most rapidly. Mega-churches are a phenomenon, but not one that falls easily into either of the above categories because they can range all the way from progressive to prosperity gospel to theologically conservative and nearly anything in between.

It's hardly conclusive, but I did an analysis using data from the General Social Survey[1] last year for a stats class, and found a downward trend in "religiosity"[2] in America between 1974 (or so) and 2014 (or so).

Granted, that's only looking at America, not world-wide, but at least here in the US there seems to be some support for a general decline in the importance of religion.

[1]: http://gss.norc.org/

[2]: a synthetic metric based on multiple questions on the survey which related to religion - some like "how frequently do you attend a religious service", "how important do you consider religion to be in your life", etc., etc.

c) "yoloculture" (as I like to call it) greatly emphasis the self as the key virtue, hence the millennial and younger can't be bothered sacrificing "Sunday Funday" to attend an inconvenient service at 9 in the morning.

Simultaneously, The rock concert megachurches with cult of personality pastors and have Starbucks inside them with much later start times and emphasize a message of self empowerment with gospel-y sounding words, however, seem to be thriving.

The only thing more constant than the darned kids is people complaining about the darned kids.

"The world is passing through troublous times. The young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint. They talk as if they knew everything, and what passes for wisdom with us is foolishness with them. As for the girls, they are forward, immodest and unladylike in speech, behavior and dress."

Peter the Hermit.

"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers."

Aristophanes, over a millennium earlier.

Several thousand years ago we invented lawns.

That very same night we invented yelling at damned kids to stay off them :)

Wasn't he long dead by 1274?

In any case, I love the quote. Just goes to show how timeless the generational bashing is.

I certainly agree older folk yelling at younger whippersnappers is a constant, but turn it on it's head for a moment: when it happens the other way around, no one questions it. "It's the Boomer's fault!" Millennial's proclaim, and every culture mag now runs a similar story.

There is something to be said for the wisdom of elders. Yes we should discard the grumpy old complaining because of change, but are we to really say all the complaints are invalid just because "it's always been done?"

I think of other societies, primarily Asian, that have deep respect for the thoughts and opinions of their elders. I think of how almost every faith, including the three major abrahamic religions explicity command followers to honor thy mother and thy father (which is generalized to honor your elders). Yet in this country, and most western countries, the fad is to kick the old out as soon as you can! "Out with the old, in with the new! Pay no mind to old people's grumbling! Their wisdom is invalided! Their opinions on culture and where society is headed is invalid!" -- And one can only wonder, is this why history is doomed to repeat itself over and over again?

We blow off what the "geezers" are telling us "Psh! Get with the times old man, things are different now!"

In my opinion, humanity hasn't changed much in the past couple thousand years. We would do better to listen to some more grumblings of the geezers. Maybe getting off a lawn or two wouldn't be so bad after all.

I wouldn't necessarily say nobody questions it, but I agree that it is more socially acceptable to blame the boomers. But... it's not exactly unpopular to malign millenials, either.

Personally if you gripe to me about boomers too much I will probably tell you to quit bitching and take some responsibility. In particular if you are young, I will remind you that you have more voters in your cohort than boomers do, so not only should you quit bitching, you should direct that energy to getting your fellow young'uns to go out and vote. After all, most of the consequences of today's politics will be borne by the young.

I also think that as much wisdom as their may be in old people, there are lots and lots and lots of ignorant jerks who aren't worth the powder to blow 'em up. Same for young people. Conversely, I've met some teenagers with more innate wisdom than most people ever get in their whole life.

Yep, he was. That's what I get for trusting the Internet!

Edited.

Ironically, this is exactly the opposite path my family (my wife and three kids) have taken. We left a large evangelical church for a small progressive (UCC) church.

I think you're an outlier. Obviously I don't have a dataset, just my observation, but I've seen the "my father went to this church, so I'm going to go there too" die off. Now people will go to a larger church, especially younger people, because they can meet people their age. If you go to a small community church, you'll quickly find there might be one person your age, if at all, if you're in your 20s-30s.

Now bigger churches do singles groups, etc. Zapping youth away from smaller churches effectively makes them unable to grow in the future, and their demographic target begins to die off or drop out. Church is very social, so the less people that go to the church that you know, the less likely you are to stick to it. It's very easy for a larger church to begin killing off smaller ones. It takes time, I believe this non-denominational /big church trend started 10 or so years ago...and is probably just now having a very noticeable statistical impact.

Obviously, this could be regional as well, and we can't dismiss that people have become less religious in the traditional sense.

> I think you're an outlier.

I don't necessarily disagree (or, at least, I don't have the data to disagree). However, I'm definitely not unique in my experience. I can think of at least half a dozen people at my church (out of an active membership of ~150) that fit the description of "got fed up with the conservative politics of the 'Evangelical' church in America and sought out a church that better matches what we believe".

Note, there's a difference here between churches that are happy to just ignore things like LGBT equality (there are certainly plenty of "big" churches that fall in this category) and churches that are actively open and affirming (that is far less common among "big" churches, in my experience).

If a church is too large and non-denominational, it ends up being a YMCA with sermons. In other words, there's no more church there, just vague platitutes and networking.

Jesus himself said: "Do not assume that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law."

Big amphitheatre churches will flourish in the short run but they don't produce real roots, and in the long run they'll have about as much staying power as Javascript frameworks.

Hm, The Mormons have been upsizing for a century with no sign of abating. How long do we wait for 'real roots' to matter?

Same; the church we are at now is an ecumenical affiliate of a Baptist group and a Presbyterian group. Very progressive. Growing fairly rapidly too right now, mostly people without grey hair; lots of toddlers and preschoolers.

> Smaller churches are more conservative and more political,

You sure that generalization holds well enough to be useful?

Personally speaking, I've attended services at small churches of both political alignments. (Ranging from strongly liberal/socialist all the way to the exact opposite. I can think of at least one of each in easy walking distance.)

> People are leaving smaller churches

I think this is undoubtedly true, at least in my neck of the woods. Most of the original development around here was prior to cars being commonplace, when there was a strong motivation to having a church in easy walking distance. (Especially true given that people used to be at church far more often than now.)

These days, easier access to transport (energy) means there's much less need for geographical proximity. And this, in turn, means much less need and ability to support smaller churches. (So we've also seen a number of churches converted to condos, etc.)

I think it would be more accurate to say that small churches are free to express more extreme political alignments, both conservative and liberal.

Large churches have a lot of diversity within the congregation, making it difficult for the senior pastor to steer the whole community in a single direction. This would make them more moderate on average. They also have to worry about legalities such as maintaining a tax-exempt status, so they can't endorse a particular party or candidate too strongly.

I don't think "moderate" is the right word here. The vast majority of large churches are solidly right of center (even in the context of American politics, which has a strong rightward lean to begin with)

Here’s an idea: turn churches, mosques and synagogues into cooperative worship centers and kill two birds.

“God” only knows there’s a lot of work that needs to done to repair the bad rap organized religion is getting lately: from children abuse in the Catholic Church, megachurch scams, subversive terror organizations and states repurposing Islam, Christian white nationalism, Israel’s expanding theocracy ... )

What happens to a society when it loses communal organizations and faith, and becomes increasingly atomized? Is this good or bad?

We don't need faith in God to have a community, only faith in one another. The premise that community cannot exist without a religious basis is a false one.

There was a pretty good podcast[0] (Hidden Brain) a while back that explores one possibility for why religions sprang up all over the world. The idea was that once communities grew too large for folks to know everyone, there needed to be something which two complete strangers in a community could relate to, with sufficient punishment for committing moral, ethical, etc crimes, for those communities to function. They also discuss how modern communities have less of a need for this. It's definitely an interesting topic, and my description didn't really do it justice.

0. https://www.npr.org/2018/07/16/628792048/creating-god

I would argue that this would be a new event in human history. I can't think of a single major civilization that was not religious in some capacity.

I liken this event to the Enlightenment, when societies began to view religion as something which could be separated from science, scholarship and law, as the concept of "secularity" emerged. Religion still exists in some capacity, obviously the US is very much a "christian nation," but generally people are moving away from an explicitly orthodox, rigidly dogmatic, supernaturalist interpretation of religion.

A literate society no longer needs someone standing at a pulpit telling them what the Bible says, nor should an educated society believe that humans were literally molded out of clay in the Garden of Eden. As societies change, religion must also change because religion is an expression of society.

One of my favorite roller skating spots is in a converted church. https://youtu.be/uWSTlDXDNXk

Silicon Valley Season 5 Episode 4

Aside from the religion issue,

This seems like a logical result of increasing land values and the advance of capitalist relations. Owning a building that is used one a day a week and empty otherwise is overall quite wasteful. A more efficient use of capital is to rent a hall for the times one actually uses the space - this is what I see modern "megachurches" doing.

If a church is only used 1 day a week, someone is doing something wrong. The mid-sized church I attended growing up had

- AA meetings hosted daily - choir & music groups meeting on weekdays - after school youth groups - book clubs - A small library for free use - counseling - volunteer events - would bus homeless people in once a week and feed and shelter them

The community charity aspect is honestly the only reason to even let churches exist tax free. Those megachurches renting theaters and collecting mad cash really shouldn't meet the criteria to be tax exempt.

I forget where I read the study, but it was along the lines of our brains being hardwired to believe in a higher power, be it reason or god. I doubt this will change, especially in a country as genetically Christian as the US.

I’ve had nothing great to say about churches and services for a long time now. Part of it is due to my upbringing. Ever since I escaped the stranglehold that is religion and Christianity, I see church as a place where cults hang out.

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