America the Pious—and Impious

American Religion is a useful little book. Duke sociologist Mark Chaves provides a concise summary of religious trends in America over the last four decades. His main conclusion: Things haven’t changed very much. Fair enough, but his book shows that one thing has changed significantly.

For most of the past three hundred years, he observes, something like 35 to 40 percent of the population have been regular churchgoers. Today, according to a 2008 survey, 37 percent say that they attend services at least weekly. People tend to overestimate their religious observance, so the percent actually in church on any given Sunday is lower. But the main social fact remains. For a very long time, over a third of Americans have strongly identified with religious institutions.

There have been some shifts. Since 1972 people have become more likely to switch churches and denominations. Catholics and Protestants intermarry a lot more, and for the most part people give less ardent answers to questions about who will be saved, and so forth. In other words, like so much else in American society, church life is more fluid and less sharply defined.

Without doubt, however, the biggest change in recent years has been the dramatic increase in the number of people who aren’t religious at all. The statistics are striking. In 1957 a government survey reported that only 3 percent of Americans said they had no religious affiliation; but in a 2008 survey 17 percent said so.

As Chaves observes, this may not indicate very much change in practice. A half century ago a quarter of the population probably never (or hardly ever) went to church. But in those days nearly everyone felt a degree of social pressure to see himself (or perhaps be seen) as religious. That’s no longer the case. Today a significant percentage of Americans are quite willing to say that they have no religion.

This is a difference that makes a difference. “A society in which the least religious people still claim a religious identity for themselves,” writes Chaves, “is importantly different than a society in which the least religious people tell others, and perhaps admit to themselves, that they in fact have no religion.” It’s not hard to understand how this change came to pass. From the professoriate to the New York Times and on to Hollywood, elite opinion has adopted a secularist mentality. This shift in elite culture, which was already underway in the 1950s, has altered the social imagination of middle-class America, making it possible for a school teacher in Des Moines, for example, to live confidently and unapologetically with no religion at all.

The rise of this secularist mentality is directly correlated to the decline of mainline Protestantism, a social change in America the importance of which cannot be overestimated. These churches once served as important institutions for American progressives, drawing liberal elites into the circle of faith. It’s hard for anyone under fifty to imagine, but places like Union Seminary in New York were once very influential. This is no longer the case, and as a result many of the leaders and activists who provide the agenda for contemporary American liberalism lack any living contact with religion.

The current lack of contact was driven home to me recently when I was searching for an article by Claude Welch, a theologian of sorts whose academic career largely corresponded to the declining influence of religion on elite culture. Instead of the article I was looking for, I found a short editorial in the Harvard Crimson from 1959. In it, Welch expressed the anxious concern that Harvard was no longer a recognizably Protestant university.

Today such concerns bring laughter—or more likely incomprehension. It is a simple fact that places like Harvard, which is to say most of the powerful, establishment institutions in America, are dominated by the 17 percent who are confident secularists.

By my reckoning, the emergence of this new mentality in America—the secularist mentality—helps explain our cultural and political conflicts today. Put simply, the rise of a confident and unapologetic secularism over the last half century has polarized society by disrupting a relatively moderate range of social opinion that once held sway. For the first half of the twentieth century, the great national conflict was between labor and capital. But union organizers (or at least the workers they organized) and factory owners by and large shared what might be called loosely a Judeo-Christian mentality.

The old conflict between labor and capital has become less stark, in part because economic interests have become more deeply intertwined in our postindustrial age. A new conflict has taken its place. Sex, marriage, family—a confident and often aggressive secularist mentality frequently challenges the presumptive authority of the older Judeo-Christian consensus, redefining a great deal of American political life in terms of cultural and moral questions.

This change is evident in the polling data Chaves presents. He observes that in the 1970s, churchgoers were a bit more conservative than non-churchgoers. Today, he says, they are significantly more conservative, and that difference is largely defined in terms of attitudes toward moral issues such as abortion and homosexuality.

Pundits like to blame the rise of the religious right for today’s polarized public life. Mark Chaves’ conclusion that churchgoers have become “more conservative” supports this conventional way of thinking. But “more” is a comparative term, and it’s important to clarify that churchgoers are “more conservative” almost entirely in the sense of becoming more and more self-conscious of their need to resist the moral and cultural revolutions launched by the secularists, who over the last half-century have been battering away at the social consensus in America—in the universities, media, and courts. Religious conservatives are only “polarizing” in a quite limited sense: We don’t sheepishly obey the dictates of the secular and self-appointed vanguard.