When You've Lost 10% . . .
10% of all Americans are EX-Catholics.
Did that get your attention? Where did I get this? Is it true? What does it mean?
Via Time:
"The report, released today by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, is the first selection of data from a 35,000- person poll called the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey. Says Pew Forum director Luis Lugo, Americans "not only change jobs, change where they live, and change spouses, but they change religions too. We totally knew it was happening, but this survey enabled us to document it clearly."
According to Pew, 28% of American adults have left the faith of their childhood for another one. And that does not even include those who switched from one Protestant denomination to another; if it did, the number would jump to 44%. Says Greg Smith, one of the main researchers for the "Landscape" data, churn applies across the board. "There's no group that is simply winning or simply losing," he says. "Nothing is static. Every group is simultaneously winning and losing."
The percentage of the American population that is Catholic has remained fairly constant but that stability hides a lot of change:
"The Pew report shows that of all those raised Catholic, a third have left the church. (That means that roughly one out of every 10 people in America is a former Catholic, and that ex-Catholics are almost as numerous as the America's second biggest religious group, Southern Baptists.) But Catholicism has made up for the losses by adding converts (2.6% of the population) and, more significantly, enjoying an influx of new immigrants, mostly Hispanic."
Of those Catholics who leave, almost half joined Protestant groups. About half of ex-Catholics have no affiliation with organized religion, the Pew survey found, while a small percentage chose other faiths.
No wonder practically every cradle Catholic in American has a long list of family and friends who no longer practice. (I've been keeping count of those cradle Catholics I met who have never left the Church and all of whose siblings never left. After asking thousands of people about this, I think I have found 20.)
For more on this see my post: The 8:1 ratio.
Other fascinating results:
1) There have been many complaints about the "feminization" of Catholicism in recent years about St. Blog's and often the Orthodox are held up as a more masculine alternative:
According the the Pew poll - ALL forms of Christianity in the US are majority female.
Both the Catholic, Orthodox, and mainline Protestant communities are 54% female, Evangelical Protestants are 53% female, and Mormons (stunningly) are 56% women. Traditional black churches top out at 60% female.
If you want a majority male religion in the US, you need to look at Judaism (48% women), Buddhism (47%) Islam (46%) and Hinduism - the ultimate testosterone zone at 39% female membership.
2) Catholicism is dramatically less "white" that any other form of US Christianity at 65% Anglo.
Evangelicalism is 81% white, mainline Protestantism is 91% white (!!!!), and the Orthodox are 87% white.
3) Overall percentages:
Evangelical Protestants are the largest single group in the country at 26.3%
Catholics are second at 23.9%
Mainline Protestants are third at 18%
Historically black churches at 6.9%
Nearly 50% of Americans have left the faith tradition of their childhood. No wonder stories of conversion from X to Y are so common in our culture.
Because in the US, the classic Catholic working assumption that "inculturating" a child into the faith of its parents will ensure that it will follow that faith in adulthood is clearly not taking into account an enormously powerful cultural tide.
Notice that 2.6% of US Catholics are converts - an amazing figure compared to the rest of the world. To hold our own, we must evangelize.
Because in the US, God has no grandchildren.
posted by Sherry W @ 3:50 PM
16 Comments
Links to this post
16 Comments:
Sherry: The study says it doesn't include Protestants who changed Protestant denominations in its numbers, but I'm curious as to whether the ex-Catholic number includes both those who left the Catholic Church for something else and those who just no longer practice the faith?
Jack:
As far as I can tell, it's Catholics who go anywhere else. Because of the sheer numbers involved, no wonder that evangelicalism is 1/3 former Catholics, that former Catholics form huge number of the converts to Mormonism, Jehovah's Witnesses, Buddhism, nothingism, etc.
In the US, the norm for a huge number is personal spiritual seeking as an adult rather than simply abiding in and by the traditions you were raised in.
As an evangelical Anglican with close ties to the Roman Catholic Church this makes me sad, but it is not surprising.
The one thing I always hear from ex-Catholics who are now evangelical is this, "I never heard the Gospel there." No one ever presented them to a clear and simple message regarding repentance and the power of God to transform sinful lives into holy lives.
There's a book by D.G. Hart, Deconstructing Evangelicalism, which claims that "evangelicalism" is nothing but a construction by academics and pollsters. It means nothing because it has no doctrines or ecclesial life. It's a parachurch organization or organizations. It's easy to belong to because it has no requirements.
And why don't you consider Protestants who switch denominations on a whim?
Carole
Carole:
The premise of the Hart book, as you describe it, is so absurd (especially to someone like me who moved both broadly and deeply in the evangelical world) that it just deserves to be hooted at.
Created by pollsters? Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! Only an academic with no lived experience of the movement could write something like that.
It is a hugely complex global movement of fellow travelers who do, in fact, hold a lot of common basic doctrinal assumptions in common but who do not fit into tight, exclusive, and centralized centralized denominational framework. They are too busy re-shaping our world to worry about whether or not they fit D. G. Hart's definition of a real church.
They tend to have a very strong sense of identity as evangelicals (and see other kinds of Christians as clearly non-evangelical). They are deeply linked through a common faith and evangelistic orientation, and a huge network (many thousands) of interlinked global institutions, organizations, and networks.
Meanwhile, this non-existent movement that means nothing is swallowing nearly half of all Catholics who leave the faith in the US. Not to mention evangelizing huge portions of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
Imagine. All those millions of lay evangelists who don't realize that they are the creation of academics and pollsters and so just keep on growing!
The Pew study was just looking at who is leaving and for what. That includes Protestants who switch denominations for any reason.
But Sherry, don't evangelicals have trouble keeping their adherents over the long haul? And what exactly is their identity if there is no church to ground it?
Carole
Also, it seems like many evangelicals themselves are calling for more emphasis on liturgy and tradition and ecclesiology.
Carole
HI Janice "Carole":
While there is alot of movement within the evangelical world, they apparently do a better job of "keeping" their adherents than we do. Certainly, everything I have seen to date indicates that they do a much better job than we do of helping children raised as evangelicals personally commit to the faith (as they understand it) as an adult.
From within the movement, their Christian identity is rooted in 1) a personal commitment to Christ and 2) Scripture - not through a relationship with the Church as Catholics would understand her.
While I know it makes no sense to traditionalist Catholics, this can and has formed a very powerful, life-long sense of Christian identity for many millions. At some point, you are just going to have to accept that they are the bumblebee that flies - even when they aren't supposed to do so.
Since I know from other encounters with you online that you don't consider evangelicals to be true Christians - even though the Church does - I have to wonder what the point of posing these questions under yet another alias might be?
Just a reminder: if you intend to keep posting here - remember our ground rules. You may not say or imply that another baptized person is not a Christian.
I raise these questions because other evangelicals are raising them. Certainly, they are not original with me. D.G. Hart and Mark Noll are only two authors who have seriously questioned evangelicalism as amorphous and lacking the centering that serious faith requires. Hart does go farther than Noll. Just because someone raises questions about your former faith doesn't mean they are questioning you. And these questions aren't being raised by traditionalist Catholics, who, by and large, don't care one way or another about evangelicals. But Hart's book does trace the evolution of the term "evangelical" from one that contained both "liberal" and "conservative" Protestants," who descended from Luther's revolution as "evangelicals," to a particular sort of Protestant, one unfettered by denomination, who subscribed only to a minimal orthodoxy, whose main characteristic was zeal (however that is interpreted), and who aligned themselves with social/political endeavors.
What is mysterious to me is why members of any religious body would forsake that for membership in something that has no definable boundaries.
Carole
Yes, a significant minority of historically and intellectually minded evangelicals are exploring liturgy and tradition.
But we must remember most aren't doing it while sharing our assumptions about communion or the magisterium at all. It's very piecemeal - an intriquing Lenten tradition here, a Father or saint there. (If and when they accept our assumptions, they usually become Catholic or Orthodox.)
For instance, Ted Haggard's 20's something son offered what he called "Christmas Eve Mass" at his little church plant-emergent congregation in downtown Colorado Springs two years ago. He did so without any apparent awareness that there would be a number of real Christmas Eve Masses at the Cathedral which is only blocks away.
It was all very post-modern and emergent Church, not Catholic.
"What is mysterious to me is why members of any religious body would forsake that for membership in something that has no definable boundaries."
Because in a world shaped by globalization, the internet, and post-modernism, boundaries of all kinds are increasingly regarded as arbitrary, imposed by a power elite from above, and basically meaningless. Most Protestants won't be stopped by the boundary that was once labelled "Catholic. Do No Trespass." and many Catholics are equally unimpressed by boundaries labelled "Warning. Non-Catholic territory ahead."
Huge number of Catholics are voting with their feet. Instead of insisting that they *can't* do that, we would be better to spend out time asking then why they are voting the way they did.
Noll, famously, asked some very penetrating questions about the lack of a solid intellectual tradition within evangelicalism but he never asserted that evangelicalism didn't exist or was the creation of pollsters.
Evangelicalism is no less a reality and a powerhouse today because it's genetic code includes Pietism, Methodism, the evangelical Anglican revival of the 19th century and various great awakening in the US.
They are a movement that transcends denominations and pretty actively minimizes denominationalism these days. It is not only possible, it is happening right in front of us.
It appears to me that the pollsters have not distinguished between evangelicals (i.e. the cross-denominational Christian movement that began as a reaction to fundamentalism in the '40s and reached its peak in about 1987, IIRC) and the post-evangelical movement, which in many places actively repudiates evangelicalism in much the same way that evangelicals repudiated denominationalism.
I would say in response to Carole that while many post-evangelicals (i.e. "Emerging Church" folk) are the ones exploring liturgy, feast days, and other aspect of Catholic tradition (small t). Pre-1980s evangelicals were never interested in such things... and, because of our human spiritual need for them, their children began to get hungry for them. They tend to cherry-pick both Tradition and tradition for "cool old stuff", like shopping at a flea market, and they appropriate the things they discover without really knowing or understanding their history, context, or meaning, like the "Christmas Eve Mass" that Sherry described.
I just wanted to touch on a different point Sherry made, regarding the "feminization" of the Church. I wonder whether those statistics are actually related or not. I get the feeling that what is being complained about has nothing to do with statistics and everything to do with trajectory. Let me give a simple example.
My first "real" job was working at a college. At this college there was a significant male majority in the faculty and staff. In the leadership, however, (Deans, Directors and above) almost every position was held by a woman. So, despite the greater number of men the overall "feel" one got from being around the place was decidedly "feminine". (I think we've all gotten to the point now where we can acknowledge that on a macro scale men and women handle, construct, manage, organize and present similar scenarios in dissimilar fashions. Not better or worse - just different.)
I think, if you can reduce the mumbling from St. Blogs on this topic to a rational discourse that it would in fact be a complaint that the "femininization" of the Church has gone too far, rather than that it has gone at all. Properly understood, the Church has always been a very delicate balance between opposing weights on a scale - too much to either side and it threatens to tip out of control. This has been the case with a wide variety of forces over pretty much the entire course of the history of the Church, probably even back to the Council of Jerusalem.
I just want to be very clear - I'm not taking sides on the issue, I'm simply trying to better understand it fully. To be at her fullest flower the Church needs all her members to work together, from traditionalists to Charismatics, men and women, those in monastic seclusion and those in evangelical exposure to the world.
Hopefully at least some part of what I've written has made some modicum of sense...
This is upsetting to read, but I do wonder about something... In my experience, being an ex-Catholic--no matter how virulently so--is still, in a weird way, being a Catholic. That is, no one gets away clean. And many people's lives take such turns that they are compelled to seek the comfort or security of the Church later in life. (Obviously, I think it would be better to not depend upon tragedies or late in life existential crises to bring people back--that is, the Church should be able to sustain them throughout their lives.)
My sense, based upon--ummm, well, my sense--is that a Catholic who is "ex-" is different than "ex-'s" in other Christian denominations. Of course, I suppose that much of that is due to the "cultural Catholic" component which seems to have been flattened out much over recent decades, especially as for many of us lose the ethnic identity markers that reinforced Catholic identity. But I'm in my late 20's and growing up on the East Coast, I still saw Catholicism as something that generations before me as well as my own could not quite escape and often found themselves returned right back into it at some point.
Of course, that does not in anyway mitigate the need to be concerned with a statistic like this one.
My two brothers and I have never left Catholicism, and neither have my set of two younger cousins on my mom's side. I don't think any of my older cousins have, either. My mom's always been Catholic, and my dad's always been United Methodist. So there's a few more for you. :)
OTOH, my cousins from Rochester have gone through a good amount of faith turmoil, and my sister-in-law was non-practicing for quite a while. So I'm not belittling the problem.
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home