The Christian Church has been suffering a steady and rapid decline for a few decades now, a trend noted by many social scientists, and a source of struggle within many churches that are looking for ways to fill newly-emptied pews. You can look at many data sets on the subject. The folks at Pew Research find that there's a stark generational factor; in the Silent Generation and Baby Boomer cohort, those who call themselves Christian are a vast majority (84% and 76% respectively), but only half of Millennials describe themselves as Christian.
It's a complicated phenomenon, and carries a little existential weight in a country that many folks like to think of as a Christian nation.
So what's the answer?
Religion News Service offers ten reasons, including prosperity that distracts people from faith, lack of compelling religious leaders, the end of Sunday as a "protected" church day, and the "wired" world. Many writers point out that US numbers are still higher than European ones. Focus on the Family says it's all okay, because evangelicals are gaining. Ross Douthat at the New York Times kind of agreed, suggesting that it's "lukewarm Christianity" that is declining. Christian Smith, a sociology and religion professor at Notre Dame, pointed at three historical events driving the precipitous post-90s plunge: the end of the Cold War, 9/11, and the political team-up of the GOP and the religious right. Researcher Jean M. Twenge found a sharp drop in religiosity among teens; we might come back to her findings in a moment.
Or maybe we won't bother, because Cameron Hilditch over at the National Review has solved the mystery-- it's those darned public schools.
We have discussed Hilditch's work before; he's the one who is pissed off that people think of teachers as selfless and calling some schools "public" is just a rhetorical dirty trick. He's a William F. Buckley Fellow in Political Journalism at National Review Institute, a Belfast native, and an Oxford guy.
His argument here is built partly on the work of Lyman Stone at the American Enterprise Institute, who cranked out a report about this back in April of 2020, Promise and Peril. I'm guessing a lot of folks missed it because in April of 2020, we were pre-occupied with a few other issues. It's loaded with lots of attempts to find a way to measure how religious folks are.
The title "Why American Children Stopped Believing in God" doesn't telegraph much, but the sub-head does--"The time has come for religious parents to take their children back from the state." Hilditch is here both to solve the mystery and to torch some straw persons, and he's neither subtle nor witty about which side he's backing:
Religious conservatives would probably cite the loosening of the country’s morals that began in the ’60s and ’70s. Secular progressives might mutter something about the onward march of “Science” and “Reason” over time.
Get it? Conservatives "cite" and progressives "mutter something." And there's this:
Here our secular progressive might raise his head again, perhaps feeling a bit smug about this finding. “See!”, he says. “Children used to be deprived of education and the life of the mind! They were stuck in the doldrums of ignorance and squalor before the benevolent hand of the state reached down and lifted them up into the world of literacy and critical thought. All that was needed was a little education to free them from hokey superstitions.”
It’s a simple theory, befitting the minds of those who have historically espoused it.
Lord knows I have thrown my share of snark, but the rules of decent snark include 1) an honest attempt to grasp the other person's point and 2) avoiding a devolution into direct insult.
At any rate, Hilditch wants us to understand that religiosity or the lack thereof doesn't particularly correlate to education attainment level, so "enlightenment" doesn't explain it. Here's the answer he finds in Stone:
But the data seem to show that the main driver of secularization in the United States has been the acceleration of government spending on education and government control over the curricular content taught in schools.
Or, as he quotes Stone:
Childhood religiosity was heavily affected by government spending on education and, to a lesser degree, government spending on old-age pensions. Thus, while more educated people were not less religious, societies that spent more public money on education were less religious. It is not educational attainment per se that reduces religiosity, but government control of education and, to a lesser extent, government support for retirement.
How to explain the linkage? Hilditch is ready to shine a light:
It’s quite simple, really. Children learn more at school than reading, writing, and arithmetic. They imbibe a whole set of implied assumptions about what’s important in life. By excluding religious instruction from public schools, the government-run education system tacitly teaches students that religious commitments are not a first-order priority in life. Faith in God becomes a sort of optional weekend hobby akin to playing tennis or video games. Christ and Moses are treated by teachers and administrators like weapons or drugs — confiscated upon discovery.
So there's his argument. Let's take a look at why he's wrong.
First, despite the use of words like "drives" and "affected," what Stone is pointing at is correlation, not causation. We could just as easily look at the data and conclude that a loss in religious identification causes a society to spend more money on a government-run education system. Or we could ask an even better question--what third factor is driving both of these changes. We could even ask--and probably should--if the correlation is an illusion. Let me direct you, once again, to one of my favorite websites,
Spurious Correlations, where we learn that the US space program causes suicides and Nic Cage movies cause people to drown in pools.
Next, Stone himself is not quite as certain that "it's quite simple." He gives secular education its own heading as one possible cause. He talks about the "club goods" theory of religiosity--the idea that get a certain set of services as a member of a club--and how other competing providers would undercut church, and offers examples of how Sunday football and Sunday liquor sales lower church attendance. Also, if you have sources of safety and security in times of trial, you are less likely to turn to the church. (Note that these are similar to items on the Religion News list above).
Stone also looks at his own charts and reaches a valuable conclusion:
The story of the secularization of America is not mostly the story of lots of people who were raised religious leaving their religious faith as adults. It is the story of fewer people having a religious upbringing at all.
Stone has a thought about that, but his language, which has been so firm up until this point, now gets very waffly. The source of this secular upbringing "may very well be" in schools. More educational spending by the state "may teach not just math and reading." It "may even alter" parental behavior and the "household environment." So it might maybe be the schools, kind of, via methods that a 60 page paper doesn't take time to explain. Because, really--how exactly would greater government spending on school lead teachers to work harder at inculcating a world view or life orientation. Nor does Stone, who rolls out plenty of charts and graphs and data and research, take the time to explain what exactly "more government spending" means. More total? More per pupil? Nor does he venture a guess at how this school spending would affect parental behavior or the household environment. And that's not the weakest part of his argument:
It is striking that religiosity declines so much between age 12 and 18, before children have left the home. Most likely, instead of a religious school supporting and encouraging religious behavior and instruction, high school becomes a season of secularization.
I spent 39 years working with teens. The notion that anyone in a school, religious or not, is going to indoctrinate them into a particular set of beliefs, religious or not, defies reality. If such a t6hing were possible, every one of my students would have emerged from my class loving reading and writing. Sadly, that did not happen. Anyone who thinks a teenager is likely to say, "You know, that's not what I used to believe, but now that I've heard you say it, I've changed my whole view of the world," has never met a teenager.
But Hilditch sees schools as irresistible juggernauts of indoctrination, run by--well, let him say it:
College, career, and popularity become the existential targets toward which the arrow of each student’s soul is aimed by bow-wielding commissars across the country. In a context such as this, secularization becomes ineluctable.
My colleagues and I were just bow-wielding commissars (because, you know, evil socialists), and students were just helpless putty in our hands. And this is important too--how did we jump from the idea that more government spending hurts religion to the idea that it's these "commissars." Did we use the money to hire more commissars? Did we spend it on more commissar training? Where is the connection to taxpayer money here?
Anyway, this brings up another problem with Hilditch's vision. It would require a vast conspiracy among millions of compliant teachers. But the figures say that at least
65% of American adults identify as Christian; would that not suggest that at least 65% of school faculty members also identify as Christian, or does he assume that some mechanism in either policy or conspiracy weeds out all the Christian teachers and keeps them out of public schools? A good-sized chunk of teachers
voted for Donald Trump in 2016; is that just a cover, or are teachers really not a very homogenous group? Or is his theory that teachers are all locked in place by government policy? Because that's nuts--the government tried really hard to lock everyone into Common Core, and they failed. Is there a super-secret Secular Core that they've successfully implanted?
His conclusion was there at the start--religious families should get their children out of public school. How will this be financed? He admits it will not be cheap and will require "the establishment of charitable private education co-operatives," which could mean tax credit scholarships or it could mean privately funded schools or it could mean that not everybody will get a part of this.
Whatever the case, Hilditch should direct his attention to the Netherlands. Betsy DeVos is a fan of the Netherlands because after decades and decades of political conflict on the issue, the
Netherlands basically went full voucher--they fund public secular schools and private religious schools, so there is no country where it's any easier to get your child out of the public schools and into a private religious school with the faith of your preference.
But here's the thing. The Netherlands appear in Stone's report in Figure 2-- Religious Affiliation over Time in Different Countries. It shows the drop in religiosity in thirteen different countries. All have had precipitous drops, but no country fell farther, faster, sooner than the Netherlands.
So maybe it's not actually the public schools causing all this.
I said we'd come back to Jean Twenge. She and her co-authors looked at teen religious convictions in
a paper published in PLOS ONE, a journal that involved actual peer review. They found that the drop is real, and that it's not a shift (in other words, "religious like in church" didn't change to "Just spiritual, man.")
The paper offers some "possible explanations" that open with this magical sentence-- "This analysis cannot show causation, only correlation..." because that's how real scientists talk. But the authors lean toward individualism as an explanation. First, real commitment to the church means commitment to a larger organization ahead of your own preferences. You also have to go along with what the group believes, and in general submit to a higher authority. In particular, religion "often focuses on concerns outside the self." All of these, they suggest, run counter to individualism.
It makes a certain sense, and points at what could be a large irony lurking in the midst of Hilditch's article. The rising love of Ayn Rand among conservatives has always been, well, odd, given that Rand believed that religion is for weak suckers and that selfishness is the greatest virtue.
Christianity and Randian objectivism are hugely incompatible, but the post-Reagan conservative world loves it some rugged libertarian-flavored individualism. So it would be a special kind of irony if one of the factors dragging down religion in the US is, in fact, exactly the kinds of philosophy regularly promoted in the pages of the National Review.
In the meantime, opponents of public ed are running out of ills to blame on teachers. Stay tuned for the next installment.
It's not only the Netherlands. Surveys of religious belief show the same decline of religion we've seen also happening across western Europe (running one or two generations ahead of the US) and in Latin America and even the Middle East (about one generation behind the US). Whatever cause one posits has to be something that applies across all those regions, or it doesn't fit the data. Given the huge differences in school systems across all those societies, they're not very likely to be the cause, or at least not the main cause.
ReplyDeleteAs someone raised in the churchiest of evangelical Protestant churches, who is a product of public schools, who is the child of an educator and a teacher / principal of 25 years, I have thoughts:
ReplyDelete1. I don't need some elite think-tanker to explain this phenomenon -- my own experience is that schools and churches both produce in their followers / students a set of values. If one engages you produces in you a view of the world that lasts moreso than the other, then it wins out on its own merits. Blaming the one that works for the failure of the one that doesn't, just doesn't make sense.
2. I would love to see better data on specific beliefs and the correlation between them and church-going. We know younger people hold beliefs that put them in conflict with what they inevitably hear in church (LGBTQ rights, reproductive rights). What might that tell us?
3. Nobody wants schools to "support and encourage religious behavior." Many with feelings like Stone, however, want schools to support and encourage the religious behavior WITH WHICH THEY AGREE.
There's a difference.
Sorry....Over zealous Religious leaders have caused the fall of religion in the US. Religion has become cult like, power hungry and greedy.....very unlike the teachings of a Socialist,"turn the other cheek" Jesus. It's good to have moral and ethical principles to help us be better human beings, but allegiance to "our way (name of religion)is the only way" at the exclusion of "others" is not religion at all.....even while quoting the Bible. People have realized that the only guiding principle in life should be "Do unto others as you would want others to do unto you". Sin-sin-sin, pray-pray-pray, repent$$$-repent$$$-repent$$$ just doesn't cut it anymore.
ReplyDeleteOne troubling fact left out of your analysis is that governments have used their schools quite deliberately in attempts to destroy particular religions and cultures--particularly Native Americans and Catholic immigrants. The accusation is made that today the Chinese government is doing the same thing to some of its Muslim citizens. Those facts seem to legitimize concerns from religious and cultural groups that feel underrepresented in academia that they might, intentionally or otherwise, lose out to the forces of homogenization.
ReplyDeleteAmerica is a godless secular nation and I love it.
ReplyDeleteThe Netherlands' story is very interesting and one I hadn't heard before. Thanks for your detailed post. For some comic relief, see Andy Borowitz: https://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/betsy-devos-warns-that-biden-will-pick-education-secretary-with-background-in-education
ReplyDelete