(Century illustration)
It’s widely rumored that organized religion is going down the drain. While the secularization thesis has been debated for decades, its main components are hardly controversial. Religion has reduced social power: its chief officers have less influence on political ideas and social norms, its language and habits no longer permeate the discourse of public life, and fewer people make collective worship and fellowship the rhythm of their week. Death no longer has a compelling hold on the public imagination: people still die, but usually not in the home or in their youth, and few people are terrified of the prospect of eternal hell. Meanwhile, with the possible exception of minority faiths among recent immigrants, it’s become increasingly difficult to socialize young people into a religion. It’s not that religion adheres to egregious ideas so much as that the whole notion of being habituated into a committed community of ritual and tradition seems incongruous.
There’s little that’s specifically Christian about all this. Real as the church’s failures are, most of its challenges it shares with other institutions associated with the pretechnological era. But in any case, in most congregations in the US mainline and the UK equivalent, a disproportionate number of the people are over age 65. The prospects for self-replication in 30 years’ time aren’t promising.
What are we to do about this? I see three main options.
