Fatal Revival?

A half century ago, a little book, titled “Kyrosed och secularisering” (Church Customs and Secularization) appeared in Sweden, crowded with demographic statistics about the Church of Sweden, authored by a theologian named Carl Henrik Martling. As far as I know, it has never been translated into English. That such an obscure work, limited to Sweden, is highly relevant for twenty-first-century American Christianity seems unlikely. Yet the explanation of the causes of the current decline in American church life may be partly explained by similar experiences in nineteenth-century Sweden.

That most American churches are in demographic decline or at best static while the population in general is increasing, is obvious. The decline, and concomitant “graying” of church attendees, is particularly clear in established “mainline” churches.

In the first half of nineteenth-century Sweden, membership in the Church of Sweden was universal and almost everyone attended services frequently. It was not until the last decade of that century that a sharp decline began in attendance and participation in the Eucharist, a drop which continued through the twentieth century until today only a tiny percentage of Swedes are regular communicants and churchgoers.

Martling’s book traces the decline and seeks to find the reasons for it. His research benefits from the Swedish precision in keeping statistics, so that it is possible to examine past church activity more accurately than is possible in America. At the time he wrote around 1960, the drastic changes in the beliefs and practices of the current Church of Sweden had not yet had a major impact, so that can be ruled out as the cause for the decline.

The biggest drop in church attendance and participation in the Eucharist came in the 1890’s, and has drifted ever lower since. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the virtually universal participation of earlier days had dropped to around 40 percent annually among communicants in Sweden’s northern dioceses and on Gotland, to 80 percent in the southern and western dioceses and about 15 percent in the middle dioceses. By 1960, communicant numbers were 14–21 percent in the north, south and west and 4–8 percent in the middle. Thus, although numbers fell everywhere, the regional variations continued. Church practices not involving ongoing commitment showed a much higher response (in 1960, 86 percent were baptized, 91 percent wed, and 97 percent buried by the Church). These numbers reflected the same regional differences.

Martling examines various theories promulgated to explain the decline. Many new towns were established in the industrial development at the end of the nineteenth century, usually some distance from church. This caused significant mobility, many left their old environment, including the familiar church. Isolation was broken by railroads, autos, telephones, and communications media. The rise of the social democratic movement meant the quite conservative Church lost contact with common people.

All of these are sociologically significant. But none correlate to the way the church decline happened. Martling analyses the statistics by diocese and often individual parishes for mobility, loss of traditional farmsteads, urbanization, new towns, the rise of the nuclear family instead of the extended one, all the possible explanations. He found some high-mobility, strong social democratic areas with aggressive industrialization had a vibrant church life and some very stable rural conservative places with a drastic drop in church life. All the theories had the same lack of consistency when the actual demographics were analyzed. In other words, none of the theories correlated to the actual facts of church participation.

One theory, however, did correlate. Where the revivals which swept rural Sweden in the later nineteenth century were strongest is where church participation dropped the most in the 1890’s, and continued to decline the fastest into modern times. Even within dioceses, individual parishes could show marked differences, because in some areas one parish was hit by the revivals but not others. At the time Martling wrote, the most degenerated dioceses had a free church (i.e. conservative Protestant) population of 4–6 percent, whereas the more intact dioceses ranged from almost nothing to 2 percent.

Obviously, even a 6 percent free church population doesn’t explain why only 15 percent of the rest went to church, leaving 79 percent unchurched except for being “hatched, matched, and dispatched.” What Martling demonstrates is that in those dioceses and parishes where the revivals were strongest, a generation left the Church of Sweden for the free churches, or alternately took control of the parish church and drove out the “unsaved” majority. In another generation or two, their children or grandchildren rejected the revival, but did not return to a sacramental or regular church life. The revivals, according to Martling, spawned an individualism which could not relate to the unity of the old Church’s culture. Once that unity was broken in the parish community (which had been identical to the village community in general), it could not be put back together again. Where the revivals did not impact, the old unity remained much longer and declined much more slowly. Middle Sweden was hit hardest by the revivals, and thus shows the greatest decline. Exceptions in other areas show parishes where the revival was strongest also dropped the most in attendance.

Of course, even a study as thorough as this has limits that should caution anyone seeking to draw strong conclusions. And revival seems a much more stable aspect of American religious life than of Sweden’s. Still, it might serve as a warning to any movement that neglects sacramental and communal aspects of faith with too exclusive a focus on the salvation of the individual’s soul. Rugged religious individualism cannot, in any nation, long sustain Christian practice. 

Winfield Mott is bishop of the Reformed Episcopal Diocese of the West.

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