In the USA, this is quickly becoming an obsolete understanding of religion. Regular church attendance is down from 70% to just over 50% in the last 20 years, according to Gallup.
People are leaving the churches. The real question is what will replace them. If people need community, build community centers. There are other solutions that do not rely on continuing to provide tax exemptions to organizations that more and more people are fleeing.
USA is highly uneven. In some states like Florida you can see churches on every other corner, and they are very active and developing, serving not only as community centers, but also as halls, child day care, hospitals, schools, galleries etc. No freaking "community center" can replace that.
Could you elaborate?
Doesn't your complaint have more to do with the USSR than it has to do with community centers?
For example: https://southperth.wa.gov.au/our-future/projects-and-places/...
I didn't even realise there was a connection to Russia until he brought it up.
The concept was good and they did work. In many towns, it's usually the only place where you could run cultural evens,some more important community gatherings and so on. What did happen once the Soviet occupation ended, was the lack of funding of these places. The town I grew up in, 15k population and the culture center large enough to be suitable for a pretty large city,so the maintenance costs are substantial. That's where people go for theatre,concerts,and so on.
As for the churces, they do a lot of charitable work, however my own experience with churchgoers in many countries is that it's too often ' It's our way or no way at all'.
The.. local municipality funded by the same local community as your churches?
> Churches in USA are not nearly the same as in most other countries. They are funded bottom up and also have to survive by serving their community well.
Where do you think other churches get their funding? Where do you think municipalities get their funding?
I don't recommend going to your church when you need to go to a hospital. Go to a hospital. Doctors spend 12 years in school for a reason. The best outcome is that someone may do some first aid and call you an ambulance. The worst is you may die because you wasted time.
As a child of a relatively poor family, I spent a fair bit of time there because the local government sent us a catalogue a couple times a year detailing all the programs they were running which due to our income level were more or less free (being a whopping $30 or something otherwise).
Based off this and your other comments, it seems a more visceral reaction to the phrasing “community centre” than that you have any real argument against them.
Granted I've always been the last person to know where the party is and still don't know where to buy weed in a state where it's legal if it hit me in the face, but what I do know is that if I ever wanted to meet people the last two places I would go to is the local community center and church like it's 1971. In my experience, joining a hospice social club would be an equally bright experience.
Community centres are an order of magnitude more expensive than providing tax breaks to churches.
The people are paying one way or another, the question is whether public society will fill the gap or leave it to commercial businesses.
That is one part. However, it is naive to assume people would pay the same for community services.
The other is most of the church work is at heavily discounted rates.
My hourly rate is $160/hr in my day job and I do about 10/hrs a week for my church at $20/hr.
Does your typical government worker ever do such heavily discounted work?
From 70% to 50% is such a large change in 20 years. For this to be caused by a change in _parenting only_ would mean that probably every child born 38 years ago until today never attended a church. (this data counts adults, so they would only start counting when they turned 18). That seems very unlikely.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/248837/church-membership-down-s...
(The problem is that the only way to keep the lights on in these churches is to appeal to people in their 60's and 70's, but programs geared for that age bracket will turn away people in their 20's and 30's, and deprive the church of new people, new perspective, and new funding. These kinds of churches are slowly starving to death, victims of simple attrition.)
>just over 50%
k
(I feel like the glib single-character response stands on its own, but more verbosely: yeah, the trend isn't good, but a) there's no reason to assume it's linear, "fair-weather believers" is a thing, and b) I'm not a TIOBE follower, but let's say java use was 70% 20 years ago, and down to just over 50% today. Is "obsolete" the word you'd use?)
Yes, I stand by my words. If you read them again, you'll see you are arguing with something I didn't say.
If 29% of religious people have left the church (50/70=71% still attend church)... then that is a major shift. It would be foolish to continue with previous assumptions about the role of churches going forward without taking into account how religious people are changing their behaviors.
So what if, in order to accommodate the changing role of the church in America, you prevent the other minority religions and minority communities from ever having their centers grow in the same way churches were able to?