• Home
  • About the book
  • About the author

MADE IN AMERICA

Notes on American life from American history.

Feeds:
Posts
Comments
« American Exceptionalism
Protected Class »

Faith Endures

April 27, 2011 by Claude Fischer

In 1907, a delegation of ministers from the New York City Federation of Churches visited President Theodore Roosevelt to ask his assistance in halting an alarming decline in the churches’ “hold on the people.” Roosevelt promised “to aid the cause in every way possible.” Ministers in the early 20th century frequently raised such alarms. They blamed scientists who taught evolution, congregants who spent Sunday mornings in their tin lizzies, and popular culture. “The modern novel . . . is responsible for our empty pews. . . . [It] has taken the place of the pulpit,” complained one priest – and that was before movies, radio, television, and the internet.

1943 (LC-USW3-024720-D)

Less than 50 years later, the popular reaction was quite different. The Methodist Council of Bishops proclaimed in 1954: “Our people are attending public worship in larger numbers than we have ever known . . . . A new spirit has fallen upon our people.” Commentators remarked on the boom in church building, the flocking of families to churches, the fascination with religion.

If we went by the common wisdom, the story should have been told in reverse, as a decline in religiosity from the 1900s to the 1950s, rather than an increase.  What happened then? What is happening now?

Theory and History

Since time immemorial, it seems, people have described – some have decried – the loss of that “old time religion.” Modern scholars call it secularization. With the coming of science, industry, and urbanization, faith had to crumble, they argued. There must have been a time when everyone believed deeply and that time has presumably passed.

The actual history of church adherence and of religious faith in America is much more complex. As I described in an earlier post, in the era of the Founding Fathers most Americans were “unchurched,” not members of any congregation; average Americans’ familiarity with various occult folk beliefs was probably greater than their knowledge of the Gospels; and many among the elite, who were knowledgeable, adhered to a fashionable, semi-scientific deism rather than to theologically approved versions of Christianity. Then, over the 19th century and into the 20th, religion spread and thrived. Americans became overwhelmingly “churched” in a Christian fashion. (See, for example, this.)

Americans’ religious engagement did not follow a simple trajectory up or down. There were periods of more intense religious activity and of less; faith movements have come and gone. In the early 19th century, some sects spread in part by loosening their doctrines, moving away from strict Calvinism. About a century later, Protestant fundamentalism emerged. It grew partly as a reaction to mainstream denominations’ concessions to science and to “modern” interpretations of the Bible. A decade or so after the New York ministers visited Teddy Roosevelt, organized religion entered what historians have termed a “religious depression,” with declining involvement. Yet, by mid-century, the Methodists – and others – were celebrating a religious expansion. There is no simple story of religious decline.

What historians of religion know about 400 years of Americans’ religiosity is largely based the record of ministers, revivals, church establishments, buildings, membership, and attendance. It is hard to track the faith, the beliefs, and the religious sentiments of average Americans because very few people left any written accounts. Still, by at least the middle of the 19th century the general impression, among, for example, European visitors, was that Americans were an unusually religious people. (Why they were – and they still are – will be the subject of a later post.)

Recent History

With the advent of public opinion surveying in the early 20th century, we get a better grasp of average Americans’ religiosity – to the extent that people actually know and tell researchers what they believe. To be sure, some survey respondents bend their answers in the direction they think is more appealing; and some do not decide what they believe until asked by the survey researcher. Still, this is the best tool we have for measuring the faith of most Americans.

Since the 1960s, some indicators show declines in religious involvement; church membership and attendance may be off a bit – especially among Catholics. (For more, see Ch. 8 here.) My Berkeley colleague, Michael Hout, and I published research about 10 years ago on the jump since about 1990 in the percentage of Americans who answer the question “what religion are you?” by choosing the answer option “none.” We have an explanation of the increase in “nones” – it has a lot to do with politics – and plan to revisit the topic soon. But the point here is that whether someone is attached to or disaffected from organized religion does not itself tell us much about his or her faith. It turns out that few of these “nones” are atheists or agnostics; many claim to believe what church-goers believe. What are those beliefs?

Below is a graph that shows trends since 1972 in what adult Americans said when asked about their beliefs. At the top is the percentage of Americans 18 and older who said that they believed in life after death; below that, the percentage who, when given six options to describe their beliefs about God chose the one saying that they believed in God with “no doubts”; next, the percentage who said that religion was “very important” in their own lives; then, the percentage who, when asked whether they thought the Bible was the literal word of God, a human document inspired by God, or a book of fables, picked the first option, literalism; and finally, the figure shows the percentage who reported being members of fundamentalist denominations.

Even with small fluctuations, Americans in 2010 displayed, based on the three longest-term indicators, about the same level of faith as they did in 1972 – despite the social changes of the last 30-plus years. (A couple of the indicators hint at very recent dips; we will need to check back in several years to see if they presage deeper changes or just temporary fluctuations.) Importantly, we see this consistency in expressions of faith even though the early surveys include many respondents who had been born around the end of the 19th century and in the later surveys these elderly folks are replaced by respondents who had been born in the 1970s and ‘80s. Swapping the World War I generation for Gen X’ers hardly changed average levels of faith.

Faith among Americans endures, surprisingly so to many casual observers — even to professional observers. When I once pointed out to my Berkeley colleagues that over one-third of American respondents since 1988 (with no change through 2010) report having had a “born again” experience in which they committed themselves to Christ, many among the learned were taken aback.

Had the ministers who visited Teddy Roosevelt in 1907 known that a century later this would be the level of American faith, would they have been less alarmed? I suspect not.  Except when the evidence is too overwhelming — for instance, during the Great Awakenings around 1800 or during the 1950s — people just assume that faith is one of those things we are always in the process of losing.

(This column was cross-posted on The Berkeley Blog on April 27, 2011.)

Share

Share this:

  • Share
  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Reddit
  • Tumblr
  • LinkedIn

Like this:

Like Loading...

Related

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged church, faith, religion | 1 Comment

One Response

  1. on February 6, 2020 at 9:15 am AG Barr says attacks on religion are loosening the hounds of hell. Are they? | MADE IN AMERICA

    […] See earlier posts: “Faith Endures” ; “Declaring You’re a “None’”; “Latest News on “No Religion””; “Spiritual […]



Comments are closed.

  • Made in America: Now available in Paperback, on Kindle, and via Google eBook

  • Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

    Join 448 other subscribers
  • Comment Back to:

    madeinamericathebook @ gmail.com
  • * 2010 winner, PROSE Award for U.S. History, American Association of Publishers.
    * "A shrewd, generous, convincing interpretation of American life" -- Publishers Weekly
    * "Masterful and rewarding . . . exactly the sort of grand and controversial narrative, exactly the bold test of old assumptions, that is needed to keep the study of American history alive and honest" -- Molly Worthen, New Republic Online
    * "... brave and ambitious new book ...." "Made in America sheds abundant light on the American past and helps us to understand how we arrived at our own historical moment, and who we are today." -- David M. Kennedy, Boston Review
    * "... this book ... already belongs to the prestigious line of works which decipher the singular character of America. It is in itself a mine of definitive information for all those who are interested in American society and its fate in modernity" [trans. from the French] -- Nicolas Duvoux, Sociologie

  • Pages

    • About the book
      • Corrections & Updates
    • About the author
  • Previous Posts

    • How Red v. Blue Became Me v. You: Polarization, Part I
    • The Covid Experience Reveals How Weird America Is
    • Americans Continue to Associate. For What Cause?
    • Slavery, Capitalism, and Reparations
    • Opening Day, 2022: Still Unresolved
    • No Peace, No Justice
    • The Right’s Reaction to Americans’ Leftward Shift: A Supreme Example
    • The Culture Has Moved Left… So the Right has Mobilized
    • Overcoming Distance and Embracing Place: Personal Ties in the Age of Persistent and Pervasive Communication
    • The Death Surge Before Covid-19: Who, What, and Why.
    • Women Rising: Life Stories from the Last Century
    • Whither Big Tech, or When Novelties Become (Regulated) Necessities
    • Opening Day, 2021: Baseball’s Crises
    • First Takes on the Election #2: What About the Polls?
    • The Political Census
    • First Takes on the Election: #1, What Happened?
    • Now for Something Different: Is Sex Wilting?
    • Explaining Trump: The Next-to-Last Time (I Hope)
    • Covid-19: Exceptionalism with a Vengeance
    • Is Left Cancel Culture Cancelling Left Culture?
    • BLM Protests: Surprisingly Successful… So Far. Why?
    • White Liberals’ Political Correctness Could Help Trump Get Re-Elected
    • Asteroidal Change or Glacial Change? Peering Over the Covid-19 Horizon
    • Opening Day Under Covid-19: Do Fans Matter?
    • COVID-19: Balancing Short-Term Solutions and Long-Term Effects. Are There Lessons from 1918?
    • Bernie: The Left is Still Waiting for the Proletariat Vote
    • AG Barr says attacks on religion are loosening the hounds of hell. Are they?
    • One Year Down, One to Go: Still Explaining Trump
    • Lead, Brains, and Behavior: Sociology Meets Biology
    • The Year’s Racial Flare-Ups: Signs of the Future or Signs of a Last Gasp?
    • [Bracket] Political Commentary [End Bracket]
    • Parental Love, Opportunity Markets, and Inequality
    • Brain Twisting, or How We Evolved
    • Opening Day, 2019: Data-Crunching, Inequality, and Baseball
    • Fixing Inequality: More Opportunity is Not the Answer
    • A Christian America? The Talk and the Walk
    • Shareholder Value: Law, Inequality, and the Doubting Justice
    • After the Election: More Polarization or Less?
    • Searching for the Authentic Self (… and Finding Trump)
    • The Politics-Religion Vortex Spins
    • Loneliness Epidemic: An End to the Story?
    • Get by with a Little Help from…
    • Feel-Good or Do-Good Politics
    • Do Americans Tolerate Zero Tolerance?
    • How Can Size of Community Still Matter?
    • Sending a Message by Pollster
    • Loneliness Scare Again… and Again… and…
    • Where Have You Gone, “Alienation”?
    • Opening Day, 2018: Politics, Race, and Baseball
    • Local Cultures
    • Chain Migration
    • Explaining Trump Some More
    • “Okie from Muskogee” a Half-Century On
    • Reversing American Voluntarism
    • National Character? A Reply to Stearns
    • Do We (Still) Value Family?
    • Is Marriage Over? For Whom?
    • Bannon, Brown, and the Identity Debate
    • The Great “American” (or is it New York?) Songbook
    • Is Health Care a Right?
    • Church Social
    • Inequality is about Security and Opportunity
    • Democracy in America, France, and “Hamilton”
    • Opening Day, 2017: Inequality on the Field, in the Stands
    • Voting for the Five Percent
    • More (on) Polarization
    • Americans and the Unassimilables
    • Explaining Trump
    • ***** Hiatus *****
    • The Great Settling Down
    • Election Reflection
    • Is the U.S. No Longer Religiously Exceptional?
    • Technology and Housework: Other Tasks for Mother?
    • Can Sociability Blunt Political Polarization?
    • The End of Good Work?
    • RFD, Media, and Democracy
    • Long Tails, Big Cities, Critical Masses
    • A Woman President?
    • Magazines: 19th Century Internet
    • Friends and “FB Friends”
    • Reversal of Fortune: American Cities
    • Does Education Work?
    • A Tony by Any Other Name…
    • Bernie, Hillary, and Historical Memory
    • Driving Cattle, Driving Exceptionalism
    • Build Bigger Wall? Get More Undocumented.
    • Opening Day 2016
    • Great Again
    • A Celebrity Strong Man
    • Survey Says . . .
    • Veterans and Suicides?
    • Odd Man In
    • The Pace, the Pace
    • A Street Divided
    • A History of Health and Health Inequalities
    • Why Diversity
    • Family Wages
    • What Happened When They Came?
    • The Grandma (and pa) Effect
    • Turkle, Times, Technology, Trauma–Yet Again
    • Just Deserts
    • Cell Phone Etiquette
    • Changing Hearts, Changing Matters, 2011-2015
    • American Self-Creation
    • The Immigrant-Crime Connection
    • Black by Choice?
    • The Marriage Contract
    • Attaining Adulthood
    • Left Out: Working-Class Kids
    • Life is a Stage, or Several
    • Family Farms vs. Americanism
    • Censor This, Political Correctness
    • Opening Day 2015
    • Science vs. Religion… or Science and Religion?
    • Building the Natural Market
    • Dressing Down
    • Untangling the Race Gap
    • Finding Public Relief
    • Surveying Change
    • Snap Decisions and Race
    • Holy-Day Exceptionalism
    • Where Does the “Don’t Shoot” Movement Go?
    • Reporting from America’s “Slums”
    • Racism as Mental Illness?
    • Which University?
    • The “Shared” Economy
    • Of Places Past
    • Long Story of the “Long Tail”
    • The Blameless Only
    • When Epidemic Hysteria Made Sense
    • Latest News on “No Religion”
    • Vocabulary Retrogression
    • American Way-Differentism: More a Club than a Family
    • Do Ideas Matter?
    • Alternative to Empathy
    • Women Dining
    • Too Much Social Science?
    • Ferguson and Social Media
    • Blame Who or What
    • “Libertarianism is Strange” Revisited
    • All Tech Is Social
    • How Ideas Make Themselves Matter
    • Women in Politics 1780-2014
    • Government Works
    • Telling Stories vs. Telling Data
    • Persistence of Race, 2014
    • Selfishness or Self-Awareness?
    • Virtuous Debt
    • Work Hours and the Pay Gap
    • Life in Public, Then and Now
    • Mourning 9/11 Victorian Style
    • A “Friends” Gripe
    • Bible Readings
    • Old Days, Fast Times
    • De-Democratizing?
    • Eco-Puritanism
    • Bring Me Your….
    • Thinking Inequality
    • Which Radical Ideas Come True?
    • Pastime – Opening Day 2014
    • Where Did “Hispanics” Come From?
    • Kitty Genovese: The Emblematic Story
    • Public Health
    • Exceptionalism Ending?
    • Risk-Sharing
    • Folktales of the Policy Elites
    • Male (Job) Insecurity
    • Libertarianism is Very Strange
    • Art and the Machined World
    • The Public Housing Experiment
    • The S-Curve of Cultural Change
    • Artful History
    • Inventing the Social Network
    • American Dream, Twisting
    • Deservingness
    • Place Matters More
    • Squirrely History
    • Atheist Evangelism: “Nothing New Under the Sun”
    • The Giving Season… and Era
    • Cell Phone Science
    • Boo! Americans and the Occult
    • You Call That a Shutdown?
    • More Inequality Updates
    • Political Responses to the Crash
    • Child Labors
    • Word Counts and What Counts
    • Loss of Economic Exceptionalism
    • Learning Sympathy
    • Respecting the Science
    • Economic Equality, 1774 and Beyond
    • Declaring You’re a “None”
    • Extremely Local
    • Robert Bellah
    • Inequality Hits Home
    • The Supreme Court Ducks Immutability
    • Postcard from Paris
    • America’s Religious Market
    • American-Made Ethnic-Americans
    • New Media and Old Manifestations
    • Novel Data: Promise and Perils
    • Immigrants and Historical Amnesia
    • Inequality Update
    • Psychologically Damaged
    • Race in the Eye of the Beholder
    • Getting Smarter
    • Suicide Boom?
    • Tweedledee-Tweedledum Nostalgia
    • Sexual License, Sexual Limits
    • Markets, Prices, and Justice
    • Immigration and Political Clout
    • Is the Gender Revolution Over?
    • Writerly Baseball – Opening Day 2013
    • Back Home
    • Catholic Schism
    • How Material Are We?
    • Unholy Alliance: Laissez Faire and the Church
    • The ’60s Turn 50
    • The Left’s Religion Problem
    • Paying Attention to the Kids
    • We’re # Last!
    • Risk Taking
    • The Elderly and Their Children
    • Guns
    • A Modern “Antebellum Puzzle”?
    • Makes One Anxious
    • Psychological Labeling … and Enabling?
    • The Giving Nation? Philanthropy’s Problems
    • Religion, Politics, and the Sunday Mail
    • The Happiness Boom
    • What Americans Have Been Thinking
    • The Verdict on Class and Voting
    • Panderocracy
    • 9/11 Reaction and Resilience
    • A Cost of Inequality: Growth
    • Obama’s Racial Penalty
    • Choose Your Choice
    • To the Poorhouse
    • The Polarizing Political Paradox Redux
    • The 47% Charge in U.S. History
    • The Survey Crisis
    • Competitive Intelligence
    • Execution Songs
    • Spiritual and/or Religious
    • “Who Built That?”: Chance and History
    • Meeting, Mating, and the Web
    • Live Long and Prosper — and Plan
    • Voting Violence
    • Sex and the American Car
    • The Assets Gap
    • Differences Under the Differences
    • Why Americans Don’t Vacation
    • Virtuous Voting
    • Clothes Make the Common Man
    • Driving Blind
    • Geography of Inequality
    • Slavery’s Heavy Hand
    • Gay Vows
    • Explaining Poverty (Again)
    • Out- and Insourcing
    • Still Under God
    • The Loneliness Scare is Back
    • Sunday Pleasures, Private Faith
    • Between Dole and Market
    • Opening Day 2012 – Worldwide
    • Tolerating Americans
    • What’s the Common in the Common Good?
    • End Times and Presidents
    • The Abortion Puzzle
    • The Army of Black Liberation
    • The South Has Risen
    • Can’t Believe It
    • Marrying — Up, Down, Sideways
    • Occupy 2012: Another 1968?
    • Over-Impacted
    • How Bad is “European”?
    • Unique, Sovereign, American
    • The Working Class’s Party
    • Reconstructing Memory
    • Make-Your-Own Religion
    • Consume This
    • Self-Absorbed: Emerson & Thoreau
    • What Works? Votes.
    • Stumbling in the Dark
    • More on Occupy
    • Occupy! Now What?
    • Lost Children
    • Cheerful Yanks?
    • Tolerating Ambiguity
    • New News, Old News
    • Unequal Denial
    • Timing is (Not?) Everything
    • Breastfeeding History
    • What’s a Life Worth?
    • Homesick Blues
    • Summer Break
    • Spinsters No More
    • Missing Tramps
    • City Crime; Country Crime
    • Living Togetherness
    • Naturally Clean
    • Women Graduating
    • Home Owning Dreams
    • Technology and Fundamentals
    • Protected Class
    • Faith Endures
    • American Exceptionalism
    • Buying a Head Start
    • A. Lincoln, Socialist?
    • Opening Day 2011
    • Shaken but Secure
    • Jobs Go and Come
    • Heavy Hand
    • The Big Change
    • American Ties (III)
    • Money and Character
    • Going Out–or Home?
    • Degree Inequality
    • American Ties (II)
    • Ugly or Needy
    • 18th-Century Twitterfeed
    • American Ties (I)
    • Grammar Rules
    • Christmas Struggle
    • Ancestor Worship
    • Was Slavery, Is Slavery
    • Hanukkah or Vanish?
    • Pilgrims, Puritans, Americans?
    • Return on Investment
    • Solidarity, Soldiers, and Baseball
    • Win Stay, Lose Change
    • Why Vote?
    • We’re All Geniuses
    • Caring More or Less
    • Life Begins
    • Equal Visions
    • No Dinner Invitations?
    • Depressing Comparisons
    • Labor’s Laboring Efforts
    • Multiculturalism Lite and Right
    • Who Has Your Back
    • A Natural Romance
    • Alone or Lonely?
    • Sentimental Journey
    • LeBron & the 10th
    • We’re #1 !
    • A Fragmenting America? – Pt. 2
    • A Fragmenting America? – Pt. 1
    • Fighting for the 4th
    • Gentrified Memories
    • Juneteenth: Race? Slavery?
    • Boomer Blues
    • No Longer the Tall American
    • A Crime Puzzle
    • Memorial-izing Day
    • Angry Old White Men
    • Sisters Take the Streets
    • Brooks, Policy, and History
    • Tongue-Tied to America
    • Happiness Happy
    • Inventing Friendship
    • American Individualism – Really?
    • Tax Day: The Government-Enterprise System
    • Opening Day 2010
    • Did “Consumerism” Blow Up the Economy?
    • A Christian America? What History Shows
    • The Myth that Never Moves
    • Good Health, Long Life, and Big Government
    • Announcing the “Made in America” Site

Blog at WordPress.com.

WPThemes.


  • Follow Following
    • MADE IN AMERICA
    • Join 448 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • MADE IN AMERICA
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Copy shortlink
    • Report this content
    • View post in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...
 

    %d bloggers like this: