In which evidence is presented that white America as a whole became more secular between 1960 and 2010, especially from the beginning of the 1990s. Despite the common belief that the working class is the most religious group in white American society, the drift from religiosity was far greater in Fishtown than in Belmont.
THE IMPORTANCE THAT the founders attached to religion bordered on hypocrisy. They went to church, but few of them were devout. Today, there is less hypocrisy, but also little reflection on the issue. Was George Washington correct when he said, “Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle”? It is not a philosophical question, but a political question with concrete consequences.
The jury is still out on the metaquestion of whether secular democracies can long survive. But the last few decades have brought forth a large technical literature about the role of religion in maintaining civic life and the effects of religion on human functioning.
Religion’s role as a source of social capital is huge. “As a rough rule of thumb,” Robert Putnam wrote in Bowling Alone, “our evidence shows [that] nearly half of all associational memberships are church-related, half of all personal philanthropy is religious in character, and half of all volunteering occurs in a religious context.”1 But it’s not just the contributions of Americans in religious settings that make religion so important to social capital. People who are religious also account for a large proportion of the secular forms of social capital. Robert Putnam again:
Religious worshippers and people who say religion is very important to them are much more likely than other persons to visit friends, to entertain at home, to attend club meetings, and to belong to sports groups; professional and academic societies; school service groups; youth groups; service clubs; hobby or garden clubs; literary, art, discussion, and study groups; school fraternities and sororities; farm organizations; political clubs; nationality groups; and other miscellaneous groups.2
Apart from augmenting social capital in general, churches serve specifically as a resource for sustaining a democratic citizenry. Various studies have found that active involvement in church serves as a kind of training center for important civic skills.3 All of these relationships hold true even after controlling for demographic and socioeconomic variables.
Beyond these benefits for the civic culture, claims began surfacing in the 1970s and 1980s that religious faith is empirically associated with good things such as better physical health, mental health, and longevity. Many of the early claims were advanced by religiously committed people, and were regarded suspiciously. But over the last few decades, social scientists who have no personal interest in vindicating religion have been building a rigorous literature on these issues, and it turns out that most of the claims are true.4 People who attend church regularly and report that religion is an important part of their lives have longer life expectancies,5 less disability in old age,6 and more stable marriages.7 A review of the literature as of 2001 concluded there is strong evidence for the relationship of religiosity to happiness and satisfaction with life, self-esteem, less depression, and less substance abuse.8 The list goes on, including many positive outcomes for children raised by religious parents.9
All of these effects of religion make it important to inquire, as we do in this chapter, about the trajectory of American religiosity from 1960 to 2010.
The central fact about American whites and religion since 1960 is that whites have become more secular across the board, in every socioeconomic class. But the whole story is more complicated and interesting than that.
From the beginning of the twentieth century through the eve of World War II, American church membership and attendance did no more than keep pace with population growth. Maybe not even that. After piecing together the elusive data on such questions for the first decades of the century, historian William Hutchinson concluded that attendance actually eroded over that period.10 Nominal membership remained high, with three-quarters of Americans claiming membership in a church or synagogue when asked by pollsters, but weekly attendance was much lower. In the prewar Gallup polls, the low point occurred in 1940, when only 37 percent of the respondents said they attended worship services in the preceding week.11
Then, suddenly and for no obvious reason, membership and attendance both started to rise and continued to rise during the 1950s, reaching historic highs. The membership apogee occurred in the mid-1960s.12 The attendance apogee occurred around 1963, according to the Gallup data.13 So when the General Social Survey (GSS) took its first reading of religiosity in 1972, America was already several years into a decline. With that in mind, here’s the story that the GSS documents.
The hard-core definition of secular is represented by people who, when asked about their religious preference, forthrightly answer “none.” Among whites ages 30–49 in 1972, when the GSS first asked the question, only 4 percent met that definition. It was so low that it couldn’t have been much lower in the 1960s. But it rose rapidly thereafter. By 1980, 10 percent of GSS subjects were willing to say they had no religious preference. The trend flattened and even dipped a bit through the 1980s. Then the trendline shot upward, and by 2010 stood at 21 percent of all whites ages 30–49. That figure represents a quintupling of the hard-core secular white population since 1972 and a doubling since the early 1990s. Figure 11.1 shows how the hard-core secularization broke out by neighborhood.
FIGURE 11.1. NONBELIEVERS
Source: GSS. Sample limited to whites ages 30–49. Data smoothed using locally estimated regression (LOESS).
Figure 11.1 shows a rare instance of convergence between Fishtown and Belmont. But the main message of the graph is not the difference between the two neighborhoods; it is the steep rise in the percentage of whites in both neighborhoods who said they had no religion. The increase was especially pronounced from the mid-1980s onward.
Many Americans still feel that they are supposed to be religious, and so they tend to tell interviewers that they profess a religion even if they haven’t attended a worship service for years. They also tend to tell interviewers that they attend worship services more often than they actually do.14 In the GSS, about a third of all whites who say they profess a religion also acknowledge that they attend no more than once a year. It seems reasonable to assume that, for practical purposes, these people are as little involved in religious activity as those who profess no religion. Let us look at the trends using a broader definition of secular, adding everyone who professes a religion but attends worship services no more than once a year to those who say they profess no religion. Figure 11.2 shows how the neighborhoods break out under the broader definition.
FIGURE 11.2. THE DE FACTO SECULARS
Source: GSS. Sample limited to whites ages 30–49. Data smoothed using locally estimated regression (LOESS).
Changing the definition transforms the picture. If we think in terms of disengagement from religion, Fishtown led the way, and the divergence was significant. In the first half of the 1970s, about 10 percentage points separated Belmont from Fishtown. Over the next three decades, disengagement increased in Belmont to 41 percent in the last half of the 2000s. In Fishtown, the religiously disengaged became a majority amounting to 59 percent.
Before leaving the topic of secularization, I should point out that, even after the decline, the percentage of white Americans who are actively religious is still higher in both neighborhoods than in other advanced countries. In an international survey of religious attendance conducted in 1998–99, the percentages attending church regularly in Scandinavia, Germany, the Netherlands, France, and Great Britain ranged from 2 percent in Denmark to 14 percent in Great Britain, compared to 32 percent for the United States.15 America is still exceptional in this regard; it is just less religious than it used to be.
Among whites who do profess a religion, how strong is their religious affiliation? How observant are they? Now I am limiting the sample to those who profess a religion and attend a worship service more than once a year—believers is the label I will use for this group.
Little changed from the 1970s to the 2000s in strength of affiliation. About half of the believers in the GSS said their affiliation was strong throughout the surveys, and Belmont and Fishtown were within a few percentage points of each other throughout. But observance did change. Figure 11.3 shows the percentages who said they attended a worship service nearly every week, every week, or more than once a week.
FIGURE 11.3. REGULAR ATTENDANCE AT WORSHIP SERVICES BY BELIEVERS
Source: Author’s analysis of the GSS. Sample limited to whites ages 30–49 who profess a religion and attend worship services more than once a year. “Attends church regularly” includes all who respond “Nearly every week” or more. Data smoothed using locally estimated regression (LOESS).
Religious attendance among believers has dropped in both neighborhoods. The reduction is not huge—note that the scale on the graph goes only from 40 percent to 65 percent.
None of the graphs I have just shown you fit the conventional wisdom that working-class white America is still staunchly religious while white American elites are dominated by secular humanists. There are two explanations for the discrepancy between those popular images and the data from the GSS.
The first is that Belmont is not synonymous with either the broad or narrow elite. It represents the upper-middle class, but that takes in a far wider range of neighborhoods than the SuperZips and a far wider range of people than make it to the top 5 percent of people in Belmont occupations—the definition of the broad elite. Consider, for example, academics and scientists, who according to popular impressions are overwhelmingly secular. There is indeed evidence that the most prominent scientists and academics are secular. When academics who were members of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences were polled in 1996, 65 percent responded that they did not believe in God.16 But Belmont is not filled with members of the National Academy of Sciences. Of the academics and scientists in the GSS sample, only 16 percent said they had no religion. It should not be surprising that lots of people in Belmont still go to church.
The second reason for the discrepancy between conventional wisdom and reality is the conflation of the increasing percentage of fundamentalists among working-class Americans who are believers with an increase in the percentage of fundamentalists in working-class America as a whole. The believers in Fishtown who said they were fundamentalist grew from 34 percent in the 1970s to 46 percent in the 2000s. The political fallout of that fundamentalism—for example, opposition to the teaching of evolution in the public schools—gives the impression of growing fundamentalism in working-class and middle-class America. But that is mostly an illusion. When we include all of the population in the calculation (not just believers), 32 percent of Fishtown was fundamentalist in the 1970s, and 34 percent was in the 2000s—in effect, no change. Two-thirds of Fishtown is not fundamentalist, and it has apparently been that way for almost forty years.
Even the rise in fundamentalism among believers does not necessarily mean that fundamentalism is becoming more popular in Fishtown. Winnowing out is the simpler explanation. As people in Fishtown dropped away from religion, the ones who were least susceptible to secularizing influences were the most deeply religious, and it seems plausible that they in turn were often fundamentalists.
To pull these strands together, consider religion as one of the key sources of social capital in a community. The people who generate that social capital through their churches and synagogues are not necessarily people who believe fervently in every theological doctrine of their faith. They may or may not. But the people who, when asked by the GSS interviewer, report that they attend worship services regularly and have a strong affiliation with their religion are the people who teach in the Sunday school, staff the booths at the charity fund drives, take the synagogue’s youth group on outings, arrange help for bereaved families, and serve as deacons. Figure 11.4 shows the prevalence of these people in Belmont and Fishtown.
FIGURE 11.4. THE RELIGIOUS CORE
Source: GSS. Sample limited to whites ages 30–49. Data smoothed using locally estimated regression (LOESS).
What is the critical mass for generating the social capital that religion has historically contributed to American communities? On the face of it, having 25 to 30 percent of the entire population actively engaged in their church or synagogue plus most of the rest of the community paying lip service—the situation that existed in the first half of the 1970s—would seem to be plenty. I cannot judge whether the reduction in Belmont to 23 percent in the last half of the 2000s made a big difference. But Fishtown’s reduction from 22 percent in the first half of the 1970s to 12 percent in the last half of the 2000s does seem significant from any perspective. Such a small figure leaves the religious core not as a substantial minority that is still large enough to be a major force in the community, but as a one-out-of-eight group of people who are increasingly seen as oddballs.