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Church Attendance Has Declined in Most U.S. Religious Groups
(news.gallup.com)
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this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2024
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I'm not religious now, but I was raised in a Methodist household and know the dogma and culture.
Church membership and attendance is kind of an interesting phenomenon to me. It's a form of community that I think has ancient roots and satisfies a social need that we don't have many other good structures for. A church is a tribe. You don't have to like everyone in your tribe but they're your tribe and people enjoy a psychological benefit from clearly distinguishing their 'us' and 'them'. This structure has some modern analogies- sports teams, clubs, professional groups, etc, but a church also has a larger connection to a denomination and a religion. This extends the 'tribe' out such that even if you leave your city and have to find an entirely new tribe- you can find a church that will more-or-less treat you as a local member of the tribe.
That's pretty comforting and helps a lot of people define their life- having a group of people they know will accept you as 'one of them'. Other modern social structures don't really have this assumed tribal acceptance feature. Coming into a new team or club from the outside doesn't share the connection that churches have with other denominations. Granted a lot of that is ceremonial and not reality- churches have in\out groups and even the most polite congregations will quietly ostracize people, but it's all within the framework of the church\tribe. Not many people ever really get tossed out of the tribe.
I wish we could recapture some of the positive aspects for community building without the dogma, but I'm afraid it's two sides of the same coin and you really can't separate the positive community aspects from the dangers of dogma.
There have been a lot of community groups that have dwindled in popularity as work hours and commute times increased just to cover the cost of living. Rotary clubs, Shriners, 4H, and a bunch of others were all over the place when I was a kid, but nobody from my generation kept them going because we were too busy just trying to make ends meet.
It is hard to get something like that going again when scheduling is difficult. Plus finding out on social media that other members have horrible opinions they never brought up at the club doesn't help....
Social places away from home and work are known as "third spaces" and their decline in the US is becoming more widely-known.
Tin-foil hat time: are religious groups subtly pushing this to try and make churches the only third spaces available to people?
It's just capitalism. Longer work hours. So-called "news" agencies that profit off of fearmongering and division make us mistrust our neighbors and strangers. Streaming, TV, and gaming companies make money from us spending time at home looking at a screen. Our modern economy forces many people to leave their he towns to find employment. No support network for parents so parents become incredibly isolated and burnt out by having to do everything themselves whereas preindustrial people had a whole tribe to raise the youth.
I too wish we could recapture some of the positive aspects for community building without the dogma. Maybe it takes dogma to trigger the bonding of the tribe? Something about shared viewpoint/perspective of the world that speaks to our ancient instincts? I dunno.
There are completely secular community centers in many municipalities. But most of the ones I've been to are generally empty.
The thing with third-places is that you need something to do. Even if its getting a pint with friends at a regular time, pick-up games of some flavor of sportsball, or, throwing dice at nerds over little toy armies, you have to plan something.
As much as I dont want to give religion any credit... They got that part right. The part that I take issue with is how they keep people coming back, fear of being thrown out of the community.
Community centers like what your describing require coordinators or someone to plan things, and they dont exactly get the same benifits that religous organizations do.
Part of the problem though is that out-group exclusion is baked in, and if you wrap that up in anything important, it gets toxic even if the dogma is kinda loose. I mean, why aren't UU churches absolutely bursting at the seams? In part, it's because they refuse to reject anyone.
Yeah and weirdly that's about the only thing I respect about Catholics- they actually can and do tell mofos "you aint Catholic, those aint Catholic beliefs" so they can kind of 'police their own'. Whereas I can say I'm a Baptist Zoroastrian that believes Jesus was actually Zeus and nobody can tell me that's not a Baptist belief. Not that I think Catholic dogma makes an sense on its own but at least they don't allow any old shmuck to fork it.
But yeah I don't think there's a way to keep the secular community and drop the religious tribalism, at least not without a Moonhaven style guided cultural reboot but to me that's less plausible than Jesus actually being Zeus.
You and I know VERY different Baptists, LOL.
I'm not saying there aren't Baptists that wouldn't deck me for saying it out loud, but there's no global Baptist authority to tell me my ideas aren't Baptist ideas.
The baptist magisterium is a mob unlike the Catholic magisterium which is much closer to the mob
Church of England has entered the Chat
Fair, though it did take an actual King to make that happen.
Catholic dogma is usually quite sensical if you accept their frame of thinking. It’s just a big if. They’ve been refining it for millennia
Citizenship. You're literally a citizen of the entire country.
Sorry my country is a religion too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_civil_religion?wprov=sfti1
Yeah... lol
I was raised Lutheran, I went to Sunday School pretty much every Sunday for about 15 years, and church at least once or twice a month. I never believed in any of it but I liked a lot of the people I met in my youth group, some of them didn't even live in my city or go to my school so that was the only time I got to see them. We went on trips all over the east coast US.
I stopped going when I was 19 and moved away for college. I lost touch with most of those people, which kinda sucks. I'm 38 now and used to go to church with my mom on the "big" holidays, but since I've been living in another state the past 5 years, my brother goes with her. I'm actually leaving tomorrow to go home for Easter for a week.
Interesting observation. I've noticed men I know that go to church found relationships and marriage, but they probably would have failed in the tinder-verse. More anecdotal, not a scientific study, so take it with a grain of salt.
Probably because they can find stupid women who believe in god and said man’s lies. Think about all of the morons at church, and you realize how much sense your statement makes. That kind of dude is gonna flop in real life dating because that’s the real world, without god.