For the purposes of this book, I’m going to assume that overstatement rates regarding church attendance remain mostly stable over time, and so we can observe whether attendance rates are going up or down over time, even if we don’t know the exact rates in any given year.[13] Let’s start by comparing Evangelicals to other denominations and religions. According to the research, among Christian groups, Evangelicals and Black Protestants have similarly high weekly attendance rates, just below 60%, which is substantially higher than other Protestants, Catholics, or Orthodox Christians. Among other religious groups, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons have very high attendance rates, with three out of four members or more attending religious services each week. The lowest attendance rates, fewer than 1 in 4 attending weekly, are among the unaffiliated, Jews, Buddhists, and Hindus.[14]
If we look at how this has changed over time, there is little evidence that church attendance rates among Evangelicals are decreasing; in fact, they may even be increasing. The General Social Survey asks: “How often do you attend religious services?” Respondents’ answers are coded into nine categories, ranging from “never” to “several times a week.” For ease of presentation, I’ve collapsed respondents into 1 of 4 groups: Those who attend nearly every week, those who attend at least once a month, those who attend at least once a year, and those who attend less often (including never). Figure 5.6 plots the percentage of Evangelicals who have fit into each of these categories since the early 1970s, and as shown, Evangelicals’ rates of church attendance remained mostly stable into the 1990s. At that point, however, they trended upward, with an increased percentage of Evangelicals attending church on a weekly basis. Similarly, the percentage of Evangelicals who attended church on only a yearly basis declined during that time period.
Figure 5.6 How Often Do Evangelicals Attend Church?
How might we explain this apparent increase in church attendance among Evangelicals? One possibility is that it mirrors the increased number of religiously unaffiliated during the same period. As you might remember, way back in chapter 2, the number of religiously unaffiliated Americans increased substantially in the 1990s. Those most likely to leave Christianity included those who were not strongly attached to the church in the first place. This being the case, it seems reasonable to assume that the departure of less-committed Evangelicals would leave behind a higher percentage of more-committed Evangelicals, who would evidence more frequent rates of attending church.
Commitment to Mission
In addition to whether Christians attend church, we can also examine how involved they are in the mission of the church. This has various manifestations and one of them—obviously relevant to Evangelicals—is evangelism. A criticism of today’s Evangelicals is that they don’t evangelize. Author Christine Wicker writes of Evangelical Christians: “There’s one thing they’re not doing. They’re not evangelizing, and nobody, not even Jesus, seems able to make them do it.”[15]
The 2008 Pew Religious Landscape Survey asked its respondents how often they shared their faith with non-believers or people from other religious backgrounds. (If the respondent was religiously unaffiliated, the question was changed to ask how often they shared their views on God and religion with religious people.) Figure 5.7 plots how many respondents shared their faith on a regular basis, which, for the sake of this graph, means doing it at least monthly if not weekly. Over half, 52%, of Evangelicals report that they share their faith with others at least monthly, as do 55% of Black Protestants. Far fewer Catholics, Mainline Protestants, and Orthodox Christians regularly share their faith, with between 21 and 26% reporting that they do. Among other religious groups, Jehovah’s Witnesses are the champion faith-sharers, with a full 84% of them sharing at least monthly. Conversely, relatively few Jews and Hindus—less than 20%—share their faith with others.
Another aspect of commitment to mission is financial giving. Presumably, people who give more money to their church, temple, synagogue, or mosque are, on average, more committed to their religion than those who give less. Unfortunately, this is a difficult subject to research because people are reticent to discuss their finances with others—even researchers. Perhaps the most meaningful measure of charitable donations is in terms of the percentage of one’s income that is given to others. In other words, someone who gives 10% of their income can be seen as more committed than someone who gives 1%, even if they both give the same dollar amount. The Empty Tomb is a research organization that studies giving levels among Christian churches. They have calculated per-member giving as a percentage of income. For various Protestant denominations, they take the amount of money given to that denomination and divide it by the number of members in that denomination and the members’ income. Figure 5.8 plots the results since 1968. As shown, giving levels dropped from over 3% to about 2.5% through the mid-1980s, but they remained mostly stable over the subsequent twenty years.
Figure 5.7: Do You Regularly Share Your Faith with Non-Believers?
Figure 5.8: Protestant Giving Rates
Sociologists Christian Smith and Michael Emerson, in their book Passing the Plate, take an in-depth look at Christians’ financial generosity.[16] Rather than starting with a fear message, they seek to motivate Christians to give more by describing the “almost unimaginable potential for good” if American Christians gave more generously. According to Smith and Emerson, generous giving would “transform the world”—bringing about massive and unprecedented social, cultural, and even spiritual change that reflects Christian values.[17] Given all the potential benefits of increased giving, the authors ask why Christians don’t give more. Using data from various sources, they test numerous explanations, and they find the most evidence for the following: American Christians are unduly influenced by our society’s consumerist culture; clergy do not boldly ask for money; Christians do not make their giving structured and routine; and Christians are suspicious of waste and abuse by the administrators of nonprofit organizations.[18]
Religious Experiences
Another facet of religion for Christians is with regard to experiences that aren’t easily explained by day-to-day life. In other words, we consider them supernatural. My own exposure to supernatural experiences got off to a funny start. When I was in college, some friends got involved with a charismatic church, a Vineyard Christian Fellowship, and they invited me to come along to a healing meeting. At the prompting of the speaker, I put my hands out, turned my palms up, and invited God to fill me with his Holy Spirit. Soon after I did so, I felt a warm tingling on my left arm. The speaker hadn’t mentioned this as something that commonly happens, but I thought it was a good sign that the whole thing worked as it was supposed to. I then noticed that if I moved the position of my arms, the tingling would increase or decrease in intensity. This, I figured, was some sort of object lesson about obedience that I would want to tell my friends about. This went on for about five minutes until I noticed that I was standing next to a heating vent that was shooting warm air up. Oops. (I’ve since had other supernatural experiences that were more difficult to explain away.)
Perhaps the most commonly referenced religious experience is having a sense of joy and peace; in fact, this experience is often used to promote the value of a religion to non-believers. A Pew Survey question asked respondents how often they “feel a deep sense of spiritual peace and well-being.” About two-thirds of Evangelicals and Black Protestants report feeling these positive emotions on a weekly if not daily basis. In contrast, slightly less than half of Catholics, Mainline Protestants, and Orthodox Christians report them. Among other religious groups, about three-fourths of Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses report spiritual peace and well-being while only about one-third of Jews and the religiously unaffiliated do.
Another supernatural outcome is healing. Here the survey question asks if the respondent has ever “experienced or witnessed a divine healing of an illness or an injury,” and Figure 5.9 shows that there is a lot of variation in how members of different religi
ons answer. Half or more of Evangelicals and Black Protestants report having experienced such a healing, whereas only about a quarter of Catholics and Mainline Protestants have. A full 69% of Mormons report healings, compared to only 15% of Jews and 7% of Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Figure 5.9: Have You Experienced or Witnessed a Divine Healing?
We’re Losing the Young, Part II
The general fear of a watered-down Christianity is even more pronounced when Christians talk about young people. Josh McDowell, for example, laments that “the obvious shocking truth is that we are not seeing the majority of churched youth transformed by the power of God.”[19] The problem is so bad, according to McDowell, that the church faces “a generation of young people who no longer hold to what most evangelicals consider to be the true foundations of the Christian faith.”[20] To highlight this fear even more (and to make it more believable by using statistics), McDowell cites a study attributed to The Barna Group: “Research showed that 98% of professed born-again young people do ‘believe in Christ,’ but they do not reflect Christlike attitudes or actions.”[21] The fear message here is that even if young people stay in the church, they certainly are not acting like good Christians, at least not compared to how young people used to be. There’s an element of cranky nostalgia here. Kids today are no good, not compared to how it was in the old days. The question that I pose is whether there’s any evidence that supports this type of nostalgia.
It’s reasonably straightforward to test this claim; we simply need to compare today’s Christian young people with those of the past, and Figure 5.10 does this with Christian beliefs. Using data from the General Social Survey, it plots how many young Evangelicals (defined as ages eighteen to twenty-nine) are certain in their belief in God, have a literal interpretation of the Bible, believe in life after death, and view themselves as strong Evangelicals.
What may surprise many if not most Christians is that the beliefs of young Evangelicals over the past several decades have either remained stable or have become more in line with the church’s teachings. In the late 1980s, about 75% of young Evangelicals were certain in their belief in God. Now the number has increased slightly, approaching 80%. Back then, about 55% of young Evangelicals believed that the Bible is the literal Word of God (as opposed to the inspired Word or simply a book of fables). This number has stayed about the same over time. In the 1970s, about 80% of young Evangelicals believed in life after death. Now the percentage is getting closer to 90%. Finally, in the 1970s, only about one-third of young Evangelicals viewed themselves as “strong evangelicals.” Now the number is about 50%.
Figure 5.10: Beliefs of Young Evangelicals
But once again we must ask the question of whether beliefs translate into actions. Let’s look at religious activities, including prayer, church attendance, and evangelism. As shown in Figure 5.11, the percentage of young Evangelicals who pray daily has steadily increased, from about half in the 1980s to over two-thirds currently. Church attendance has likewise trended upward, with about 35% of evangelical youth attending church weekly in the 1970s and 1980s and over 40% now. The data for sharing their faith is based on only three data points, so conclusions are tentative, but it appears that the number of young Evangelicals who share their faith has remained steady if not increased since the late 1980s.
Figure 5.11: Religious Activities of Young Evangelicals
While it’s entirely natural for us old folks to worry about the young, there isn’t a lot of evidence to back up our fears. If anything, today’s evangelical youth are even more committed to their Christian beliefs and more active in expressing their faith than we were back in the day. Not only that, but today’s youth don’t wear the ugly disco clothes and wacky hairstyles of the 1970s.
Does Church Attendance Make a Difference? Some Thoughts About Barna’s Revolution
In the context of talking about Evangelicals’ beliefs and practices, let’s turn to an argument made by George Barna in his 2005 book, Revolution. In it he identifies a “new breed of disciple of Jesus Christ.”[22] Termed “Revolutionaries,” these new Christians aren’t interested in merely playing church. Instead, they want to aggressively advance God’s kingdom. They are like super-spiritual, Christian commandos. They are “constantly worshiping and interacting with God.” They demonstrate “complete dedication to being thoroughly Christian by viewing every moment of life through a spiritual lens and making every decision in light of biblical principles.” They are “determined to glorify God every day through every thought, word, and deed in their lives.”[23] According to Barna, there are about 20 million of these super-Christians.[24]
A key feature of Revolutionaries, Barna tells us, is their ambivalence toward church. For Revolutionaries, there is nothing wrong, per se, with most churches, but they have no interest in playing “religious games.” He claims that the church is somewhat tangential in the formation of Revolutionaries, and so they are not involved in churches any more than non-Revolutionaries are. He writes: “Our research indicates that Revolutionaries fill all points on the continuum of church involvement.”
From Barna’s perspective, if Christian churches did their job properly, people who attended church more often would live their lives more in line with biblical principles. In his own words:
If the local church were the answer to our deep spiritual need, we would see two things. First, people who were most heavily involved in a Christian congregation would be more spiritually developed than others. Second, churched Christians would increasingly reflect the principles and characteristics Scripture tells us are the marks of Jesus’ true disciples.[25]
Unfortunately, Barna concludes, Christian churches are not doing their job; hence the need to identify and cultivate Revolutionaries.
In statistical language, Barna claims that there is no correlation between church attendance and Christian beliefs and practices, and this is a simple claim to test. Previously in this chapter, I examined various Christian beliefs and activities, so let’s see if they are more prevalent among the people who attend church more often.
Figure 5.12: Evangelicals’ Beliefs by Attendance
Figure 5.12 looks at the relationship between religious beliefs and church attendance among Evangelical Christians. The measure of church attendance goes from zero, never attending, to eight, attending several times a week. If Barna is correct, we would see horizontal lines across this figure, indicating that Christian beliefs do not vary with church attendance. What we see, however, is very different. Among the Evangelicals who never attend church, only 60% have a certain belief in God; in contrast, nearly all of the most frequent attendees do. Likewise, only 40% of the less-frequent attendees believe in the Bible as the literal Word of God, whereas 80% of the most frequent attendees do. Seventy-five percent of the less-attendees believe in life after death, compared to 90% of the more frequent attendees, and only 20% or so of those who do not attend view themselves as strong Evangelicals, compared to 80% of those who attend most frequently.
We see a similar pattern with Christian activities. As shown in Figure 5.13, only about half of Evangelical Christians who never or rarely attend church also pray on a daily basis, but over 90% of the most regular attendees pray daily. An almost identical pattern holds for sharing one’s faith with others.
Figure 5.13: Evangelicals’ Activities by Attendance
The strong relationship between church attendance and Christian practice is well-established. Sociologist Robert Wuthnow, also examining data from the General Social Survey, concludes that “the differences between regular church attendees and those who attend less regularly . . . are dramatic.” Specifically, he found that regular attendees are more likely to look to God for strength, believe that God is watching over them, carry their religious beliefs into other dealings, feel God’s presence every day, find comfort in religion, desire closeness to God, consider themselves to be very religious and spiritual, and have had a life-changing religious experience.[26]
From
these analyses, it appears that Barna’s Revolution has it wrong. Not just a little wrong, but a lot wrong. You will find the most devoted, most active Christians in church on Sunday mornings. That is not to say that there aren’t fine Christians who do not attend church, but the best Christians usually do, and they do so regularly.
CHAPTER 6
Have Christians Gone Wild?
Conventional religion is not an effective force for moral behavior or against criminal activity.
—Bernard Spilka, Ralph Hood, and Richard Gorsuch, Psychologists
Scandalous behavior is rapidly destroying American Christianity.
—Ron Sider, Professor, Eastern Theological Seminary
Evangelical Christians are as likely to embrace lifestyles as hedonistic, materialist, self-centered, and sexually immoral as the world in general.
—Michael Horton, Theologian
Several years ago, I started a blog about Christianity and sociology (www.brewright.blogspot), and one of the first issues I examined was Christian divorce rates. For years I had heard that Christians had divorce rates higher than anyone else, but this didn’t make sense to me because I know how much churches value and encourage marriage. In fact, I don’t know if my own marriage would have survived its early years without the considerable support that we received from our church. I examined data from several sources, and I found that much of the prevailing wisdom on the matter was wrong. I posted my findings in a thirteen-part series on the topic,[1] and it stirred a lot of interest. I received many e-mails that expressed appreciation that someone was taking an in-depth, careful look at this issue. (I also got an e-mail asking for marital advice . . . um-m-m-m, don’t have much to offer there.) This whole process got me interested in testing the conventional wisdom about American Christianity, and one thing led to another, and now I’m writing this book.
Christians Are Hate-Filled Hypocrites...and Other Lies You've Been Told Page 9