Periodically, stories appear describing non-religious Americans trying to form secular versions of churches, even with Sunday ceremonies. Anthropologist T. M. Luhrmann asks, “How do we understand this impulse to hold a ‘church’ service despite a hesitant or even nonexistent faith? Part of the answer is surely the quest for community.” I think she’s right and it serves to remind us that the role of the church in America–especially in its earliest days–was at least as much social as spiritual.
Churches serve many functions: They answer profound existential questions; tell human history; explain tragedy and injustice; instill morality and sometimes discipline immorality; define identity; organize collective action, including caring for the needy, mobilizing political partisans, and mounting missions to save souls; baptize and bury members; guide family life and sometimes commercial life; and–not the least of these–offer places for sociability.
While most discussion about the role of churches in modern life focuses on how well they sustain the first few of these functions, those involving faith, how well they provide the last, sociability, may be at least as important. Indeed, research suggests that churchgoers do better than church-avoiders precisely because of the social connections people find in church. Early in America, churches were one of the few public places that provided such social bonding. From then on they had to face considerable competition from other places.
It is amazing that American churches survived that competition so well.
Facing the Competition
In rural America, which is where most Americans lived for most of our history, there were few places to get together with neighbors. Most lived scattered in small households across distant farmsteads. Crossroads taverns were probably the most common spots, although not for children or reputable women. Men often loitered together at country stores and post offices. However, as soon as a frontier settlement had the numbers to needed to sustain a permanent congregation (not just a passing camp revival), it had a meeting place not only for worship but, critically, for family social life.
Those early Americans who went to church–most did not–went to see, be seen, meet the opposite sex, hear the latest news, share the latest gossip, and chew over community issues, as well as to pray, sing, and take in a stirring sermon. We exaggerate how pious our ancestors were; the social function was critical. In 17th Century Virginia, for example, many white colonists would swarm to the nearby Anglican church on Sundays, but relatively few actually took communion; sociability was the main attraction.
As villages grew into small towns, many migrants from different parts of the country found fellowship in their own churches–“Yankees” in Midwestern Congregational and Presbyterian churches, for example, and Southerners in Midwestern Baptist and fundamentalist ones. Much the same happened during the 19th century in the expanding immigrant quarters of large cities where ethnic churches and synagogues provided familiar conviviality in an urban wilderness of strangers.
Alternative sites of sociability, however, always challenged the churches. I’ve mentioned taverns, country stores, and post offices. (One reason churches campaigned against Sunday mail delivery was the men who would hang out at the Post Office instead of church.) Over time, population growth and faster transportation extended the list of alternative places: lecture societies, fraternal orders like the Moose and Odd Fellows, women’s clubs, sports clubs, commercial entertainment like theater, concerts, dance clubs, and movies, and more. Churches also competed with one another, as members of small country churches went off to hear sermons by more glamorous city ministers. By the turn of the early 20th century, faith leaders had accumulated a long list of distractions that lured parishioners out of church, including family outings by trolley (which once extended from American cities far into the hinterlands) and then by car.
In 1912, a minister-sociologist who was an early member of the movement to save rural churches complained that “Sunday becomes for country people a day of visiting the town and in great numbers they gather at the inter-urban stations. The city and town on Sunday is filled with careless, hurrying groups of visitors, sight-seers and callers, who have no such fixed interest as that to be expressed in churchgoing or in substantial social processes.”
In the 1940s, a set of anthropologists conducted several parallel studies of rural communities around the United States. They generally found that the country churches were in a precarious state, that only small numbers of residents belonged, and that competition from outside was to blame. About 50 years later, other researchers revisited the same communities and reported even more outside competition undermining the rural church.
And all this before television (watching tv was originally a family and even neighborhood activity), shopping malls, interstate highways, national camping sites, Disneyland, Starbucks, and health clubs.
Survive, Thrive?
But here is the striking thing: Given the proliferation of all these alternatives to what the the churches were offering in sociability–to Sunday worship, bible classes, sisterhood meetings, luncheons and potlucks, chaste dances, and the like–American churches and church membership nonetheless expanded over the centuries. The decline of country churches was not typical. In the 1950s and 1960s era of mass suburbanization, churches and membership boomed. Best estimates are that a higher percentage of Americans were going to church in the 1960s than ever before.
While churches have lost much of their competitive edge as places for social life–although sociability certainly remains their central attraction for many Americans–their other, specifically religious and spiritual functions may have become more important, not less important, in sustaining the relatively high level of American participation.
