Religion and Prosperity

I don't buy his argument but it is an informative argument none-the-less. From Why Social Justice Is Killing Synagogues and Churches by Joel Kotkin. It is from The Tablet so the argument is in the context of Judaism but Kotkin tackles worship at large as well.

Some items:

Overall, the American Jewish population—unlike that of demographically robust Israel—is on the decline, with a loss of 300,000 members over the past decade, a number expected to drop further by 2050. The median age of members of Reform congregations is 54, and only 17 percent of members say they attend religious services even once a month. Four-fifths of the movement’s youth are gone by the time they graduate high school. The conservative movement is, if anything, in even worse shape: At its height, in 1965, the Conservative movement had 800 affiliated synagogues throughout the United States and Canada; by 2015 that number had fallen to 594.

If true, that is startlingly significant. The number of self-identifying Jews in America is about 4 million. A decline of 300,000 in a decade is striking. Is it possible that this is a blip arising from the dying off of the post-WWII influx of Holocaust survivors? I know from some research I read ten or fifteen years ago that there is an exceptionally high assimilation rate in America. Is perhaps the decline a function of the success of assimilation leading to out-marriage and loss of identity? Don't know.

But Jews, and their religious institutions, should not feel singled out. The share of Americans who belong to the Catholic Church has declined from 24 percent in 2007 to 21 percent in 2014, a more rapid decline according to Pew, then any other religious organization in memory. There are 6.5 former Catholics in the U.S. for every new convert to the faith, not a number suggesting a very sunny future.

I don't find this especially surprising. I suspect that religious identification associated with large Catholic influxes in the 1980s have weakened with assimilation and that that is probably compounded by the three decade long global crisis of legitimacy arising from priestly sexual misconduct.

The mainstream Protestant churches are not exactly filling the sanctuaries either. Some, like the internally conflicted Methodists have seen their number of North American congregants drop from 15 million in 1970 to barely half that today. Since 2007 alone, America’s mainstream churches have lost 5 million members, and even the once vibrant evangelical movement is losing adherents outside of the developing world. Ever more churches, particularly in urban areas, are being abandoned, turned into bars, restaurants, and luxury condos. And nothing augurs worse for the future than the fact that American millennials are leaving religious institutions at a rate four times that of their counterparts three decades ago; almost 40 percent of people 18 to 29 are not unaffiliated.

Mainstream liberal Protestant churches have indeed been seeing a longterm decline in attendance.

But all of this is largely attributable to the trends of secularization we see in all prosperous countries. America has long stood out as exceptional in having both an immensely productive economy with widespread prosperity AND having an exceptionally high proportion of the population self-identifying as religious and matching that self-identification with church attendance.

This is the heart of Kotkin's argument.

Why, then, the decline in religion? For one thing, young Americans have different habits. Rather than join institutions, millennials, argued Wade Clark Roof, author of the book Spiritual Marketplace, are indulging in a kind of “grazing,” finding their spiritual fixes in various different places rather than any one organized church. As sociologists Robert Putnam and David Campbell explained, those in this age group “reject conventional religious affiliation, while not entirely giving up their religious feelings.”

But the consumption habits of the young aren’t the only reason for America’s religious drought. Religious institutions and ideas are currently under political attack, predominantly from the left, with some progressives, such as California’s Dianne Feinstein or New Jersey’s Cory Booker, appearing to see embrace of Christian dogma, or even membership in such anodyne organizations as the Knights of Columbus, as cause for exclusion from high judicial office.

This trend is reinforced by the media , which is often dismissive of traditional faith. There has been a powerful tendency to demonize and suggest the worst of motives among the faithful, which was evident in the rush to judgment about the alleged racism of the Covington, Kentucky, religious students. Before the facts proved claims of racism to be false, newspaper accounts and tweets from journalists endorsed actions against the students, sometime including violence, in ways more reminiscent of Joseph Goebbels than Joseph Pulitzer.

As in many cases, this bias reflects the groupthink nurtured at our leading universities. Evangelicals and religious conservatives barely exist in the country’s leading theological seminaries, where they are outnumbered, by some estimates, 70 to 1 by liberals, and evidence suggests that those espousing traditional religious views are widely discriminated against in academic departments.

In this difficult environment, many religious movements—Reform Judaism, mainstream Protestantism, and increasingly the Catholic Church under Pope Francis—have sought to redefine themselves largely as instruments of social justice. Although doing good deeds, or mitzvot, long has constituted a strong element in most religions, the primary motivation of the faith community traditionally focused on heritage, spirituality, and family. In their haste to be politically correct, even Catholic private schools such as Notre Dame are rushing to cover up murals of Columbus, and, in one California case, a private Catholic grammar school has gone as far as hiding statues of saints.

I am sympathetic to his argument. As an Episcopalian, I have seen our church attendance nationwide plummet as the priesthood skews left towards social justice, diversity and inclusion. This seems to be an echo of the dynamic of the Quakers in the 1700s in the American colonies - so accommodating and tolerant that they disappeared as a religious movement.

Kotkin shifts to point out an irony.

Deep blue cities and the progressive feeding lots of the academy—strongholds of progressivism—are precisely where support for such anti-Jewish measures as the BDS movement is strongest. Anti-Semitism is particularly rife not in conservative Southern schools but in progressive places like San Francisco State; in that city, the ultimate progressive stronghold, a leftist gay Jewish café owner recently has been subject to repeated protests for being a “Zionist gentrifier.”

This alliance with anti-Semites and those opposing the existence of the state of Israel pushes the limits of cognitive dissonance. Jews in the U.K. are confronted with Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who defends not only anti-Zionist but also traditional anti-Semitic tropes. Recently progressive heartthrob Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, herself an adopter of anti-Israel memes about Gaza and other occupied areas, gushed over her recent “lovely and wide-reaching” conversation with Corbyn, the West’s most politically prominent Judeophobe.

Indeed, despite the impression left by some progressive Jews, the largest threat to Jews in America stems not from the isolated and pathetically small lunatic fringe of white supremacists. The most anti-Israel members of Congress, as well as on the local level, come primarily not from the right wing of the GOP but the burgeoning left wing of the Democratic Party. Democratic voters—as well as key constituencies like minorities and millennials—poll consistently less sympathetic to both Jews and Israel than older, generally white Republicans.

Solutions?

To survive, less traditionalist faiths need less “virtue signaling” and more emphasis on serving the needs of congregants. Marshall Toplansky, who advises Church World Services, a major Protestant aid group, suggested that groups like Mormons and evangelicals who focus on providing services for families and their local communities fare far better than those more tied to strictly a social gospel. Toplansky said that many mainstream churches “have overlooked the value of building grassroots relationships with their donors,” who sometimes do not share the progressive ideology of the clerical class. Without engaging the faithful and addressing their needs, he noted, “people stop identifying with their local institution and stop participating in the local activities that defined them to begin with.”

No, I think this is directionally right - serve the faithful, but smacks of trying to impose brand management of a service provider onto a human need that isn't really met through the tools of the market.

I think the last paragraph is closer to home.

Ultimately, as Lemus suggested, religions, including Judaism, can only hope to thrive if they serve a purpose that is not met elsewhere in society. It is all well and good to perform good deeds, but if religions do not make themselves indispensable to families, their future could be bleak. As we already see in Europe, churches and synagogues could become ever more like pagan temples, vestiges of the past and attractions for the curious, profoundly clueless about the passion and commitment that created them.

Making themselves indispensable to families - there you go. Yes, serve all. But helping families establish norms and weather inevitable crises, this is a role which needs to be served and no other institution has done it well. Focusing on helping families grow into a godly future, that is the path towards institutional survival. Not indulging every faddish academic ideology which serves no purpose other than cultivating personal self-regard.

I also suspect that this gets at a more fundamental issue. I am entirely supportive of freedom for individuals. I do suspect, however, that part of the issue may follow along these lines.

As a nation becomes more prosperous, it enables individuals to take greater risks. As long as those are educational or career or business, it can actually serve to enhance innovation.

But to the extent that people begin experimenting with freeing themselves from past norms and traditions, it can have markedly deleterious affects. Most of us suffer from a surfeit of opportunities, a capacity to take short term risks which did not exist in the past, and a profound unknowing of the importance of those norms and traditions. Everything does need to be questioned. Just not by everyone at the same time - that is the path towards anarchy.

In this reading, the villain is not postmodernism (and social justice theory, etc.) per se.

Postmodernism is just the manifestation.

People have the prosperity, the national safety nets, and the private social safety nets which allow them to experiment with freeing themselves from strictures and burdens of past norms and traditions. But once abandoned, especially if abandoned en masse, there is a real risk that all those safety nets disappear in the following generation.

Without the norms and traditions which enabled the achievement of such astonishing prosperity, and the associated safety nets, there is a real risk of reversion to low prosperity. The Gods of the Copybook Headings return.

Perhaps.