[Sundaycommunity] Article in today's Atlantic

[John MacMillan]

The Misunderstood Reason Millions of Americans Stopped Going to Church

The defining problem driving people out is ... just how American life works
in the 21st century.
By Jake Meador <https://www.theatlantic.com/author/jake-meador/>
[image: A bible on a pew.]
Spencer Platt / Getty
JULY 29, 2023
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Nearly everyone I grew up with in my childhood church in Lincoln, Nebraska,
is no longer Christian. That’s not unusual. Forty million Americans have
stopped attending church in the past 25 years. That’s something like 12
percent of the population, and it represents the largest concentrated
change in church attendance in American history. As a Christian, I feel
this shift acutely. My wife and I wonder whether the institutions and
communities that have helped preserve us in our own faith will still exist
for our four children, let alone whatever grandkids we might one day have.

This change is also bad news for America as a whole: Participation in a
religious community generally correlates with better health outcomes and
longer life
<https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2016/10/28/religion-church-attendance-mortality-column/92676964/>
, higher financial generosity
<https://www.philanthropyroundtable.org/magazine/less-god-less-giving/>,
and more stable families
<https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2018/03/20935/>—all
of which are desperately needed in a nation with rising rates of
loneliness, mental illness, and alcohol and drug dependency.

A new book, written by Jim Davis, a pastor at an evangelical church in
Orlando, and Michael Graham, a writer with the Gospel Coalition, draws on
surveys of more than 7,000 Americans by the political scientists Ryan Burge
and Paul Djupe, attempting to explain why people have left churches—or
“dechurched,” in the book’s lingo—and what, if anything, can be done to get
some people to come back. The book raises an intriguing possibility: What
if the problem isn’t that churches are asking too much of their members,
but that they aren’t asking nearly enough?

*The Great Dechurching *finds that religious abuse and more general moral
corruption in churches have driven people away. This is, of course, an
indictment of the failures of many leaders who did not address abuse in
their church. But Davis and Graham also find that a much larger share of
those who have left church have done so for more banal reasons. The book
suggests that the defining problem driving out most people who leave is …
just how American life works in the 21st century. Contemporary America
simply isn’t set up to promote mutuality, care, or common life. Rather, it
is designed to maximize individual accomplishment as defined by
professional and financial success. Such a system leaves precious little
time or energy for forms of community that don’t contribute to one’s own
professional life or, as one ages, the professional prospects of one’s
children. Workism
<https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/02/religion-workism-making-americans-miserable/583441/>
reigns
in America, and because of it, community in America
<https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2023/05/03/new-surgeon-general-advisory-raises-alarm-about-devastating-impact-epidemic-loneliness-isolation-united-states.html>,
religious community included, is a math problem that doesn’t add up.

Numerous victims of abuse in church environments can identify a moment when
they lost the ability to believe, when they almost felt their faith
draining out of them. The book shows, though, that for most Americans who
were once a part of churches but have since left, the process of leaving
was gradual, and in many cases they didn’t realize it was even happening
until it already had. It’s less like jumping off a cliff and more like
driving down a slope, eventually realizing that you can no longer see the
place you started from.
Consider one of the composite characters that Graham and Davis use in the
book to describe a typical evangelical dechurcher: a 30-something woman who
grew up in a suburban megachurch, was heavily invested in a campus ministry
while in college, then after graduating moved into a full-time job and
began attending a young-adults group in a local church. In her 20s, she
meets a guy who is less religiously engaged, they get married, and, at some
point early in their marriage, after their first or second child is born,
they stop going to church. Maybe the baby isn’t sleeping well and when
Sunday morning comes around, it is simply easier to stay home and catch
whatever sleep is available as the baby (finally) falls asleep.


   -
   -

   <https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2021/06/revenge-bedtime-procrastination/619156/>

   -

   <https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2021/09/john-dickerson-goodbye-my-familys-beloved-dog/620010/>


In other cases, a person might be entering mid-career, working a
high-stress job requiring a 60- or 70-hour workweek. Add to that 15 hours
of commute time, and suddenly something like two-thirds of their waking
hours in the week are already accounted for. And so when a friend invites
them to a Sunday-morning brunch, they probably want to go to church, but
they also want to see that friend, because they haven’t been able to see
them for months. The friend wins out.

After a few weeks of either scenario, the thought of going to church on
Sunday carries a certain mental burden with it—you might *want* to go, but
you also dread the inevitable questions about where you have been. “I
skipped church to go to brunch with a friend” or “I was just too tired to
come” don’t sound like convincing excuses as you rehearse the conversation
in your mind. Soon it actually sounds like it’d be harder to attend than to
skip, even if some part of you still wants to go. The underlying challenge
for many is that their lives are stretched like a rubber band about to
snap—and church attendance ends up feeling like an item on a checklist
that’s already too long.

What can churches do in such a context? In theory, the Christian Church
could be an antidote to all that. What is more needed in our time than a
community marked by sincere love, sharing what they have from each
according to their ability and to each according to their need, eating
together regularly, generously serving neighbors, and living lives of quiet
virtue and prayer? A healthy church can be a safety net in the harsh
American economy by offering its members material assistance in times of
need: meals after a baby is born, money for rent after a layoff. Perhaps
more important, it reminds people that their identity is not in their job
or how much money they make; they are children of God, loved and protected
and infinitely valuable.
But a vibrant, life-giving church requires more, not less, time and energy
from its members. It asks people to prioritize one another over our career,
to prioritize prayer and time reading scripture over accomplishment. This
may seem like a tough sell in an era of dechurching. If people are already
leaving—especially if they are leaving because they feel too busy and
burned out to attend church regularly—why would they want to be part of a
church that asks so much of them?

Although understandable, that isn’t quite the right question. The problem
in front of us is not that we have a healthy, sustainable society that
doesn’t have room for church. The problem is that many Americans have
adopted a way of life that has left us lonely, anxious, and uncertain of
how to live in community with other people.

The tragedy of American churches is that they have been so caught up in
this same world that we now find they have nothing to offer these suffering
people that can’t be more easily found somewhere else. American churches
have too often been content to function as a kind of vaguely spiritual NGO,
an organization of detached individuals who meet together for religious
services that inspire them, provide practical life advice, or offer
positive emotional experiences. Too often it has not been a community that
through its preaching and living bears witness to another way to live.

The theologian Stanley Hauerwas captured the problem well
<https://www.christiancentury.org/article/interview/dangers-providing-pastoral-care>
when
he said that “pastoral care has become obsessed with the personal wounds of
people in advanced industrial societies who have discovered that their
lives lack meaning.” The difficulty is that many of the wounds and aches
provoked by our current order aren’t of a sort that can be managed or
life-hacked away. They are resolved only by changing one’s life, by
becoming a radically different sort of person belonging to a radically
different sort of community.
Last fall, I spent several days in New York City, during which time I
visited a home owned by a group of pacifist Christians
<https://www.bruderhof.com/> that lives from a common purse—meaning the
members do not have privately held property but share their property and
money. Their simple life and shared finances allow their schedules to be
more flexible, making for a thicker immediate community and greater
generosity to neighbors, as well as a richer life of prayer and private
devotion to God, all supported by a deep commitment to their church.

This is, admittedly, an extreme example. But this community was thriving
not because it found ways to scale down what it asked of its members but
because it found a way to scale up what they provided to one another. Their
way of living frees them from the treadmill of workism. Work, in this
community, is judged not by the money it generates but by the people it
serves. In a workist culture that believes dignity is grounded in
accomplishment <https://mereorthodoxy.com/dignity-beyond-accomplishment>,
simply reclaiming this alternative form of dignity becomes a radical act.

In the Gospels, Jesus tells his first disciples to leave their old way of
life behind, going so far as abandoning their plow or fishing nets where
they are and, if necessary, even leaving behind their parents. A church
that doesn’t expect at least this much from one another isn’t really a
church in the way Jesus spoke about it. If Graham and Davis are right, it
also is likely a church that won’t survive the challenges facing us today.

The great dechurching could be the beginning of a new moment for churches,
a moment marked less by aspiration to respectability and success, with less
focus on individuals aligning themselves with American values and
assumptions. We could be a witness to another way of life outside
conventionally American measures of success. Churches could model better,
truer sorts of communities, ones in which the hungry are fed, the weak are
lifted up, and the proud are cast down. Such communities might not have the
money, success, and influence that many American churches have so often
pursued in recent years. But if such communities look less like those
churches, they might also look more like the sorts of communities Jesus
expected his followers to create.

Jake Meador <https://www.theatlantic.com/author/jake-meador/> is the editor
in chief of Mere Orthodoxy. He is the author of *What Are Christians For?:
Life Together at the End of the World*
<https://tertulia.com/book/what-are-christians-for-life-together-at-the-end-of-the-world-jake-meador/9780830847365?affiliate_id=atl-347>
.
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