A couple of weeks ago I ended up making two comments on an opinion article at World Magazine on Populism. I may end up making a post at Aleksandreia.com on the political aspects of that discussion. But I want to go into some issues related to that discussion that affect the church in the US.
In recent weeks I have seen reports about a study showing that membership in religious organizations in the US has dropped below 50% for the first time since such things were recorded. And in recent years, my own adult children have noted that the gap between blue-collar workers and white-collar workers has widened over the years, compared to when I was growing up. And I strongly suspect that what the churches are experiencing is mostly the loss of the blue-collar people. I also suspect strongly that the loss is the fault of the church leadership. Let's look into that.
In 1962 my parents bought a brand-new house in a rapidly-growing suburb on the north side of Cincinnati Ohio. I was 12 years old at the time. We moved there from a rural area east of the city--my older sister had married a boy there and remained out there. My parents bought that house for $16,000. It wasn't a mansion; it would be considered small by today's standards--probably in the 1000-1200 square foot range, with a one-car attached garage. My father was an hourly employee at a Ford Motor Co. factory less than ten miles away.
In those days, blue-collar workers and white-collar workers still largely lived in the same neighborhoods, mostly shopped at the same stores, sent their children to the same schools, and often attended the same churches. At the Church of Christ we attended, there were both blue-collar and white-collar workers among the elders and deacons. Even among my schoolmates and the boys in my Scout troop, if their fathers were white-collar workers, they were usually the first in their families to attend college (many of them through the GI Bill after WWII).
And those veterans and GI college grads, along with their blue-collar neighbors, had mostly grown up in a society where college was not common--in most places, the only people around them with a college education were doctors, lawyers, preachers and school teachers. College just was not that big a thing for most people before WWII. It was an upper-class thing, not for ordinary folks.
Even in the '70s, as I was becoming an adult, marrying, starting a family and starting a business, the gap was not that big. In 1977, we bought our first house, a run-down place in an older Cincinnati neighborhood, for $17,000. Two years later we had it fixed up, sold it for $25,000, and bought another run-down house in another neighborhood. And at that time, you could still buy a brand-new house for $30,000 or less.
The inflation of the late 1970s and early '80s hit the cost of housing hard, and started a spiral of costs that continues to this day. Mortgage rates rose. Expectations rose, too. Where once families mostly had one car, now they had two, and expected a two-car garage for their house--until they wanted a three-car. One bathroom in a house was no longer enough--there had to be one bathroom for the kids, and a "master-suite" with its own bath and walk-in closet for the parents. There was also an increase in local regulations on housing, also--both government building codes and homeowners' associations added rules that added to the cost of housing.
In 1990 and '91 I built a house for my family. We found a plan we liked--but I had to alter it because of the rules of the homeowner's association. It was a two-story, 1500 square foot house, and would have a full basement. But to get it approved we had to enlarge it--because the HOA insisted all houses had to have at least 900 square feet on the ground floor. They would approve a 950 sq ft ranch, but not a 1500 sq ft two-story! So I revised the plans to get it up to 928 square feet per floor. Eight years later we sold it--for $125,000. (Our second rehab had sold for $60,000.)
The rise in housing costs did a lot to separate the working populations. The higher-paid people could afford the higher costs; the lower-paid, not so much. They were stuck in the run-down sections. Over time, that separated the blue-collar and white-collar people more and more. Now their kids didn't go to the same schools, and often the parents did not shop at the same stores.
There was another factor in this that affected the churches. And I have seen this even with some pastors that I knew in college. There had always been some problems with pastors showing favoritism to the wealthier members of their congregations. But as more and more of their congregants were college grads, that became more pronounced. Some of the older pastors I have known were not like that. They treated all their members the same. But the younger pastors, of my generation and later, seemed to have more trouble relating to people who were blue-collar--and less inclination to try.
If someone was to try to analyze the decline in church membership, I suspect that they would find a large part of it is the loss of the blue-collar demographic. I am not saying that is the only cause; but I do think it is part. If a leader of the church is not welcoming to people he perceives as being socially inferior, sooner or later, those people will get the idea, and quit showing up.
I know there are some churches that are not so uppity. Chris Arnade, in his book "Dignity" was impressed by the churches he saw in the run-down neighborhoods that tried to minister to the poor around them--so impressed with them, and the results he saw of their work, that during the time he wrote the book he shifted from atheist to agnostic (and since then he has returned to the Catholic church he grew up in). But many of the churches in this country do little to reach the less affluent.
The best church I was ever part of, a Vineyard in Cincinnati, (on the north side, just a few miles east of where I grew up), made an official policy to be welcome to all. They also spent a lot of money to minister to all, including the poorer neighborhoods. They had the largest outreach to the poor I have ever seen in any church--not only a food pantry (a big one) but also clothing, basic medical care, some job training, and more. But they were rare among churches. And people flocked to their services--in twenty years they went from 35 people to 6,000, and planted more than three dozen other churches besides.
But sadly, they are an exception among modern churches. The mainline Protestant denominatons--the so-called "Seven Sisters" (Episcopals, Methodists, Evangelical Lutherans, United Church of Christ, American Baptists, Presbyterian Church USA, and Disciples of Christ) have been in decline for over 60 years. The Episcopalians, for instance, have half the number of members they had in the 1960s--while the US population has doubled. The rest of the Seven are not much better off. The Methodists are looking at a liberal-conservative split in the next year or so.
But conservative denominations are mostly not much better off--their growth has slowed or even stopped. The Southern Baptists are having to deal with the problem of sexual abuse by their pastors and other prominent members; some of the top brass are resisting, but the members are getting fed up. Others are having problems, too.
I think the religious scene in this country is changing. What will take shape is to be seen, and whether it will be good or bad in the long term.
I mentioned a discussion I was in on World Magazine's website in the start of this post. In my second comment I ended with a question to the others (a question I once posed to the founder of the magazine in an email a few years ago). Here's the question: At the congregation you attend, on any given Sunday, are there any blue-collar people in the group? And do you ever talk to any of them?
The truth is, there are more people in this country without college degrees than with them. When the chips are down, there are more blue-collar workers than white-collar. And the executives and management people are a minority, not a majority. But if the local church leadership mostly writes off the majority of the people, it is no wonder that church attendance declines.
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