In U.S., Decline of Christianity Continues at Rapid Pace
pewforum.org
pewforum.org
The decline of religiosity is a global trend, strongly correlated with economic development. The US has historically been an outlier and remains unusually religious. The relevant question isn't really why religion is declining in the US, but why it hasn't declined sooner.
Claims that the decline in religiosity are related to increases in crime or social problems are not strongly supported by the evidence; there is not a consistent relationship between religiosity and criminality or wellbeing.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/142727/religiosity-highest-worl...
https://web.archive.org/web/20131021065544/http://www.wingia...
I believe the reason is that religion has been very different in the U.S. than anywhere else in the world. Few countries have the great variety of religious denominations the U.S. has and the relative peace between said religions.
But I agree with your perspective.
It's possible that religion is treating the symptom of another problem. Assuming someone religious attends an organized function related to that religion, it's making them part of a community and might be helping them feel less lonely.
2018 study shows that half of Americans feel lonely. [1], but a similar kind of study on people in europe surveying if people had anyone to ask for help or discuss personal matters has a much smaller amount [2]
The European study indicates that income inequality has an effect on social isolation, with the lowest incomes having twice the amount of isolation.
The income inequality in America is even more pronounced, and geographically, many of the areas with the highest levels of religious beliefs seem (on a map) to line up pretty well with levels of poverty and income inequality.
Usual disclaimer about correlation/causation and everything... But perhaps economic conditions that cause people to tend to be socially isolated are being self-treated by pursuit of religious groups because the community it gathers results in a decrease in the isolation symptom?
[1] https://fortune.com/2018/05/01/americans-lonely-cigna-study/ [2] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/D...
As churches see less membership, at some point congregations merge and one church is shut down.
Many churches do outreach and provide services to the community, the poor, and the homeless. This often includes shelter from the elements, soup kitchens, food pantries, meeting places for groups like AA/NA/etc.
When a church shuts down, the distance that the population has to travel can increase, and there might not be enough room to provide the same resources to those populations.
Additionally, it's not necessarily a problem, but more of a musing... What happens to all those old churches? The impact on the property market has to have local effects...
I wonder how many churches are shut down, but are just maintained by a skeleton crew of maintenance people in the hope that their customer base will increase enough one day to restart their services and reopen the property.
I assume churches don't pay property tax, so as long as the church is in hibernation mode and not actually totally dissolved, could they hold onto the property indefinitely for just the cost of maintenance? Or would them not providing religious services anymore cause them to lose the exemption?
While churches do provide services and outreach to the poor, I've always wondered about what happens when they're serving the opposite effect by not paying property taxes. Property taxes are the public education base in the USA, and quality education is the way out of poverty.
Churches' outreach programs will also discriminate against causes they don't agree with based on their own teachings - i.e., Christian churches might not recommend that someone use contraception or get an abortion even if those options are the best logical course of action.
You know how some people have pointed out that McDonalds wasn't in the food business, it was in the real estate business to franchise owners? They often hold prime real estate locations.
The Post Office also has prime real estate locations.
I think that Churches, collectively, hold some of the most desireable property locations in our communities. Especially older churches in city centers have been there and grown organically since cities were founded so now they're very valuable.
G.K. Chesterton, circa 1924
And really not true.
What is most essentially "home" in the world is the set of rituals you make for yourself and others, things that allow you to dwell more poetically in place. Traditional rituals, like those found in religions, enhance our sense of belonging in the world, or if the world is a rough and scary place, at least within a society. I think we do not have the words for all the good parts of religion and ritual, and because they are not easily articulated, they are easily dismissed as irrational or nonexistent.
People instead will attack any religion, or any set of rituals that are not easily explained with a dollar value, gleefully as things that need to die, in service of a more rational world, by which they only mean a world more easily explainable to them. Since they cannot easily explain what's lost, they assume it must be nothing. I think this is a mistake due to a lack of attention.
People do not think about this, for that matter I fear people hardly think of our sense of dwelling and belonging at all. Culturally, the idea of "belonging" anywhere has been entirely subsumed by "wandering"[note]. This makes for a more consumer-friendly world, but a much less nice one to live in day to day. I fear that until we have the easy words to properly describe what it is we have lost, people will simply continue to cheer its loss, perhaps pausing once in a while to wonder aloud why they feel somewhat lost.
[note] ask people about their aspirational hobbies, they are amost always quick to point to "travel", and "experiences". Weirdly a lot of the "experiences" wording people use comes from a study commissioned by LivingSocial ("millennials prefer experiences over things", as if that's the dichotomy) to hawk the selling of experiences. The pseudostudy seems to be outliving the failed company.
Can you find another Western nation out there with similar levels of religious affiliation?
I think I see this decline as a correction. It's not actually normal to have so many people finding religion important to their lives in a large, connected, developed society. The USA's unique history and geography lent itself to high levels of religious affiliation, but since the Internet has connected us all a little closer, it's been harder for religious institutions and religious parents to prevent younger people from obtaining unfiltered information.
Enjoyable secular rituals are also easy to find if you look right in front of you - the Thanksgiving Day parade, the SuperBowl, Halloween and Trick-or-Treating, Valentine's Day, city-wide marathons, County Fairs, street festivals, etc...the list is nearly endless.
And tradition itself isn't a religion or belief in something. The fact that the Catholic church has you cross yourself, stand and sit at specific times, or eat a cracker are not examples a belief in anything, they are physical ritual and tradition. One can partake in all those activities without having a thought in their mind. There are also secular traditions that have no root in surviving religions, like putting a tree in your house during the holiday season. Plenty of atheists put up "Christmas trees" because it's fun!
> I think I see this decline as a correction. It's not actually normal to have so many people finding religion important to their lives in a ...
Why use that as your normative base? Why not say that everything after, say, Descartes or Jesus or the printing press is abnormal level of religion, and that we are in a lull of divinity? Why do you think anything about the religiosity of anyone in the last 1-30 centuries is normal?
> in a large, connected ... but since the Internet has connected us all ...
Are we in a large, connected society? Has the internet really done as you say?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Importance_of_religion_by_coun...
The United States is one of the most religious countries for being as wealthy and developed as it is. Many of the similarly developed nations that remain religious are the oil theocracies.
As I mentioned, the Internet has allowed people to read opinions beyond their own filtered literature. A religious school or household won’t buy books that question religion. But an entire generation (the millennials shown in the article) grew up with Internet connections that largely took them beyond those filters.
I know that part is speculation on my end, but eliminating the Internet’s role in inter-connectivity as a possibility is an odd hypothesis. I have friends in Japan in shared interest groups for Japanese pop stars, how would that have happened before the Internet? Writing letters?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Importance_of_religion_by_coun...
I suspect your "sense of belonging" is just lazy accommodation or fear of change. Culture, social or personal, can't evolve without changing. You don't become a better person if you don't change your habits, rituals and your deep rooted mental frameworks.
True, a mind too open doesn't hold nothing of value. But a closed mind is stale, stagnant. And, in a world that changes faster each year, stagnation is danger, it is not safe.
I suggest you to embrace change with all its dangers and opportunities.
> You don't become a better person if you don't change your habits, rituals and your deep rooted mental frameworks.
You think, say, monks or rabbis are worse persons, then? Certainly to you they are stale, as you say?
What about Homer, whose rituals you may imagine never changed in his lifetime. Was he a worse person, and lazier, than someone modern, who changes them often?
I don't know any rabbi, only catholic monks. These monks I met are lovely people, in a moral sense. In an intellectual or cultural level not so much. The world and culture has become much bigger than their ancient readings.
However, I suspect their character and good nature is not so much a result of their "belonging". After all they "belong" to the same Catholic church that was, for so long, a shelter for pedophiles.
> What about Homer, whose rituals you may imagine never changed in his lifetime.
With all respect for Homer and classic Greek culture I need to stress that the pace of change today is much more accelerated than in ancient cultures.
Classic Greek culture is indeed the foundation of all western culture and certainly deserves to be studied by anyone seeking enlightment. But the logic, political philosophy and worldview we have today is an huge improvement over them. Every year are adding much more to our knowledge than within Homer's lifetime.
Religion is the most conservative institution ever created. It does not adapt (well, almost..) it doesn't change (also, almost..) and it's no wonder that with developments in science and culture, religion doesn't seem as important as it used to be.
It's been going on for a while, in suburbia the main purpose of religion has nothing to do with religion, it's mostly about community, church is the place when you meet a talk with your neighbors. That's it.
Well, strong economy is also there to "blame", one talks to God only when one needs something, nothing wrong with that just to make a point that when everything is good religion is on decline.
1. The history of actions taken by theocracies is not good. There is a strong modern social justice movement, and even saying something bad 10 years ago is enough to cancel someone. Now imagine a group that committed multiple genocides over the centuries.
2. A growing rise of "spiritual but not religious" has led young people to eschew attending church. These young people grow up and have young people of their own who are now never exposed to Christianity.
3. Relegation of religion to personal matters alone, taboo in public.
4. Christians have allowed the book of Leviticus to overwhelm their message. Because of what is said about LGBTQ, Christian == bigot in many people's minds.
I'm sure there are fellow Christians who visit HN. I think these are the primary obstacles that must be overcome in order to grow the cause. All the mission work and happy Easter messages in the world won't make a lick of difference against these 4 issues.
The larger and more coordinate the group, the more likely. It doesn't need religion. It needs humans, organising, to happen.
From my personal observations, the religious groups that seem to be activists tend to be activists with puritanical and conservative motivations (i.e., yell at people who they perceive are doing ungodly things even though modern society has deemed those things to be acceptable)
The other side is religious groups that are socially progressive (be kind and open, pray for people, provide services to those who need it, etc) but tend to be more of a passive supporter of equality.
Churches have had their "brand" tarnished because a few extremist religious groups wrapped up bigotry and social conservatism in a cloth of "religious freedom" and were really loud about it. The more progressive churches didn't speak up to fight back and counter it, and now the whole religious community is tainted. The "abusive priest" controversies didn't help matters either.
If there were churches that supported and encouraged the social justice that actually resonates with today's population, especially the young population, they would find a far more receptive audience.
I would consider going to a church if it was leading Extinction Rebellion marches, organizing protests against businesses that were bigoted, pushing their members to support the community and vote for new libraries, citizen investigation boards in police departments, fair elections, progressive drug treatment diversions instead of prosecution, etc.
In the U.S. you are likely correct. But in Spain, Portugal, Argentina and many parts of Latin America it was a strong supporter of fascist/authoritarian regimes up until the 70's and 80's. Also, up until the 19th century Catholicism was the foundation of very authoritarian and absolutist monarchies.
Edit: ok you guys, message received. I won't do it this way again.
To be specific about this site: on HN we have a clear mandate—intellectual curiosity—and a set of principles based on what serves that (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Discussion that stays within those guidelines is welcome, and conversely, when it isn't able to stay within those guidelines, we intervene. There are different degrees of intervention depending on how badly the guidelines are being violated. But intervention, or moderation, or whatever you want to call it, is indispensable. The system doesn't reliably stay within the guidelines on its own.
Personally, I'm not religious and I tend to view the tech world through that filter. I forget that some tech people might have other philosophical or religious beliefs.
At some level, I assume that Tech people are smart, and thus don't believe in religious.
This is obviously untrue, so now I'm curious to see if people's religious beliefs, or lack of them, impacts the tech work that they do.
i.e. is there any crossover in the venn diagram of religion and tech, or are they entirely isolated from each other.
Historically, religious groups sometimes funded purely scientific endeavors. Of course, sometimes religious groups went after science that was inconvenient to belief... But both actions indicate a precedent.
The problem is that, just like fires in a city, flamewars aren't cost-free. It only takes so many before users don't want to be here anymore—except users who like flamewars. That's how internet communities destroy themselves, so trying to contain that risk is a big part of what we do.
At the moment, anything related to Richard Stallman seems to bring out the worst in a lot of people. And anything related to a particular gender isn't likely to go well.
And to be fair to HN, what tends to happens is that the initial set of low-value comments gets replaced over time by better ones. Even the worst of threads can have good conversations in them, it's just sometimes difficult to find.
I know you do a lions share of work dang, but I think you were a little to fast here. Good comments were being posted (and pushed below you comment) as you wrote that.
Same for stories: the ranking is determined by votes, flags, software, and moderation. Users are the most important factor, but alas not a sufficient one. Without moderation, the system gets into unstable states and can't stay within its mandate.
You're right that I should have written something longer and not in haste. But I'm a bit surprised by the strong reaction to that one; it's atypical. Perhaps to some readers it felt like a disparagement of their own view on religion—which of course it was not.
Personally I like to avoid such threads. You can't really be understood, whatever you contribute.
2. Or the academic community formed by the Abrahamic faiths? Did you reserve some expectation that secular scholars in academia are about to pop in?
3. And if people cannot discuss these matters, are they to receive the truth from a better source? Which source should we receive it from?
4. If most discussions never reaches into data-driven conversation, does that put them all in the same bin for you? Aspirational speech, perhaps?
To get substantive discussion of religion, you probably need smaller groups that have a certain amount of cohesion. A group can be cohesive even if it disagrees. But a large group with weak cohesion discussing a provocative topic is probably always going to plummet to lowest-common-denominator quickly.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21284379
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21284381
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21284266
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21284355
You're right that there's a sore spot for me, but it isn't religion—it's long experience with how wretched HN threads become as soon as religion is mentioned. But I should have been more careful and not posted hastily and vaguely.
If I hadn't intervened by posting and doing other standard moderation things, though, the thread would likely have become more of a flamewar. These things don't self-correct; would that they did. I made this case more complicated by posting in a way that stirred up additional waves—it was not a splash-free dive, like we usually try for. I was distracted and my irritation managed to grab the steering wheel.
Identity politics seems to be the new religion for many.
and mass killings https://news.wttw.com/2019/08/13/northwestern-research-shows...
and violent crime https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/25/us/violent-crime-murder-c...
and homelessness https://www.cbsnews.com/news/homelessness-on-the-rise-in-som...
What do Christian churches do? (quick Google search random).
https://www.uchristianchurch.org/mission-and-outreach/ https://www.diamondcanyon.org/missions https://www.newhopechristianchurch.com/missions http://northridge.online/about/missions
Or, mayhaps, there are more mundane, economic explanations for them...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Spaghetti_Monster#Pirat...
What people need is a secular community to replace it, and not all find it. Some of the things listed above are exacerbated by feelings of isolation or lack of purpose.
A lie is best concealed between two truths. Churches know how to organize people. It’s a rare set of people management skills that has nothing specific to do with the Divine. They’ve just had more opportunity to hone those skills.
But as humans we often trust people who show expertise in multiple areas to be telling us the truth about other things as well. There are plenty of good things that happen at churches, but they don’t have to happen at a church. And the more they happen in the secular world, the more people figure out they can pick and chose things that make them feel like decent human beings without signing up for the others. That’s either a terrifying or comforting statement, depending on which way you are coming from.
So do volunteer organizations and other secular institutions and groups like book clubs, fitness groups, tabletop game players, Pokemon Go players, etc.
Back to my own speculation, I'd surmise that a lot of people who go to church may go for the community or personal connections, and may not even believe in the dogma. Many times I've been to church enough times to have listened to frequent sermons about maintaining faith, and those sermons always puzzle me - why do these churchgoers have such difficulty maintaining faith to the point where the preacher has to bring it up regularly?
Europe has been though a similar de-religion phase without many of the problems you stated.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Arguably the second blow does more damage to the container.
(I've never been a member of any - I just study - as a hobby - "conversion era" in Europe. Be aware that some of what the church replaced was toxic, and some was not. It's an interesting set of eras to study....)
The churches have failed though, largely. And finding out why can be informative. (this is not a religious failure, this is a social one. Don't blame peoples' beliefs for this, that's not the right target).
Let's (easily) debunk each of your sources to demonstrate their complete irrelevance to this topic:
- The Mass Killings article you post describes mass shootings, which are a specific type of homicide with a narrow definition. Homicides overall are down dramatically since the early 1990s. Mass shootings are aided by poor gun control policies and mass availability of guns in the United States. Mass shootings are not prevalent in developed countries that are not the United States in significant numbers.
- The Violent Crime article you've cited only talks about the past two consecutive years, not the decade-long time period cited by the religious affiliation trends in this article.
- Homeless populations probably aren't sampled in this phone survey, so the homelessness rate can't be correlated with the information given here.
Your weak correlation to religion is entirely debunked by choosing just about any Western/Northern European country, or much of Asia like China, South Korea, and Japan, and noticing that their religious affiliation numbers are far lower than the US has ever been, along with their violent crime rate.
What do Christian churches do? They certainly don't pay property taxes, so they don't fund public schools, police, or mental health services, like a normal business or resident would if they occupied the property.
Homicides are indeed down, and that includes firearm homicides as well. When people mention any recent rise in firearm deaths, what they are are really saying is that firearm suicides are on the rise.
As for prevalence, it's not as uneven as you would think.
https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2019/aug/05...
>In one study by the Crime Prevention Research Center, the United States actually ranked 66th among other world nations when it came to the frequency mass public shootings per capita.
>And when just comparing European countries with the United States and Canada, the U.S. ranked 12th in a comparative study between 2009-2015.
https://crimeresearch.org/2015/06/comparing-death-rates-from...
If you don't think it's a religion, try to speak publicly against it, and observe the kind of protest it's going to evoke. Most of it will not be a calm rational discussion, or even a light-hearted dismissal. For many, you would appear attacking the holy.
The experiment above is dangerous; I'd suggest studying preivous experimental data first.