This completely matches a lot of what I’ve heard from other American Christians; one of them commented that they’ve cut down the services and the requirements to the point that they’re basically playing a numbers game in terms of “warm bodies in seats”. My question is pretty much “do you feel that this is a more recent shift or a more historic shift that’s been accelerating over time?” Because a lot of my knowledge on these cultural shifts is focused more on historical eras.
I am a Lutheran minister, and I have some thoughts on this.
(Also, on an unrelated note, I laughed out loud at the Wesleyan calling themselves “the closest you can get to Catholic without being Catholic” because no. That would be the Anglicans/Episcopalians or the Lutherans. Wesleyans, being descended from Anglicans/Episcopalians, are closer than say the Baptists or Pentecostals, but got rid of the Catholic elements that Anglicans and Lutherans kept. While there are theological differences, the structure of worship is the same in Lutheran and Catholic churches.)
First, the “ritual vs. intellectual” divide when Catholicism and Protestantism first split apart was very real. Martin Luther, the one who kicked open the process of the Reformation, was a university professor; for the first few centuries, most of the major Protestant leaders were very highly educated (many of them being university professors themselves). This is not to say that there weren’t a lot of deeply intellectual and smart Catholic theologians and leaders; but that was largely in support of the existing ritual/mystical/theological edifice, not seeing if they could work Christian theology out from first principles, the Bible, and their (very wrong) understanding of the Bible’s formation and the history and culture surrounding it.
A lot of Catholic ritual and mysticism was good and awesome; some of it was predatory. Consider indulgences, the thing that Martin Luther first broke with Catholicism over: they were basically selling the hope of heaven in order to raise money to pay back a loan that was taken out so that a church official could bribe the Pope to give him a better job. What started as “this specific practice is a problem, and also is not in the Bible so you can’t defend it that way” became “anything not directly commanded in the Bible is unnecessary.” And through schismogenesis (where people define themselves as Different From Those Other Guys and react by making themselves as different as possible) most Protestant groups got rid of everything. (Anglicans and Lutherans took a middle way of only getting rid of stuff we specifically had objections to instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.)
Which left intellectual study as the thing Protestants rallied around. It’s all about having the right understanding, being able to correctly interpret the Bible. There are two main problems with this. One is that humans need ritual on the deepest level, and (aside from Lutheran and Anglican churches) there wasn’t much left (and even most Lutherans and Anglicans had a lot less than Catholics had).
The other problem is that it’s inherently exclusionary. Anyone can have a mystical experience; any member of the church can participate in the Sacraments. Anyone can take comfort in beautiful art and music in the worship service. But not everyone can go to seminary and get a theological degree! Most people can’t!
So starting in the 17th Century you get all these Protestant lay (i.e. not led by clergy) movements that are all about piety and emotion, because they need something. The academic debates of the great scholars at the universities, while interesting on an intellectual level, don’t really fill the spiritual hole that’s been left. There’s a lot of mutual antipathy between the clergy and the lay movements because the clergy are offended at not being in control, and also there are lots of theological “problems” in many of these lay movements (i.e. stuff that contradicts the doctrines being promulgated by the university theologians). The lay people who are members of these movements are offended by the clergy trying to control them and denigrating their heartfelt spirituality. There’s a lot of class conflict involved, because the vast majority of university-trained ministers aren’t peasants, let’s just say. And in most places, the clergy (professional, upper-middle-class, agents of the social hierarchy and sometimes actual government employees) can call on the local social and governmental forces to try and clamp down on and harass these lay movements.
So then you add the American colonies into the mix. Some of the people most likely to go are these lay movements that are being harassed, and they’re hostile to the university-trained theology for very good reasons. One, they find it spiritually sterile, and two, the educated clergy have been using their education as a club to beat them with. You did get a lot of people who were loyal to the standard religious hierarchy and doctrine coming over to settle “America,” too! They were the majority, in fact! … what you didn’t get were many of the university-trained professional clergy who knew the intellectual underpinnings of their brand of Christianity. Because the university-trained professional clergy were middle class people with good jobs, why should they want to move to a foreign place? It took until the late-19th-Century for denominations that wanted educated clergy in the United States to be able to train all their own clergy without needing to import them from Europe.
Meanwhile, those lay movements have spawned and grown and provided an alternative to the traditional intellectual Protestantism that was so hard to do in the United States because there simply weren’t enough universities. Meanwhile, all those European immigrants are getting presented with the Faustian bargain of White Supremacy: you can have all the benefits of whiteness, but only if you get rid of most of your cultural and religious distinctiveness (and are willing to help oppress people of color).
Meanwhile, in intellectual circles in the US and Europe, starting in the 19th Century you get a lot of snobbery about “superstition” and how the difference between Catholics and Protestants is that Catholic religion (and all folk practices of any religion) are just “superstition” and nobody sensible could possibly believe in miracles or nonsense like that. And the Protestant groups that want educated clergy, those are the circles many of the clergy are coming from! Those are the people they want to impress! You get a lot of Biblical interpretation focused on finding alternate “scientific” explanations for miracles and stuff like that. The non-education-centered American Christians see this and are horrified and are confirmed in all their beliefs about how education is the enemy of religion.
Also, the late 18th Century is when literalism started taking hold in European and American thought at all levels. And it got applied to everything (and it still is), including the Bible. By the early 19th Century, Biblical scholars and theologians in universities are noticing that if you take the Bible literally, it’s got a lot of internal contradictions. And also, it contradicts all the things science was beginning to tell us about the world. (And also, then you have to take miracles seriously which is embarrassing when you talk with other people in your intellectual circles.) So they start asking questions like “how would people at the time have understood and interpreted these stories?” (i.e. historical criticism) and other ways of understanding the texts which still take them seriously, but without needing to believe that creation LITERALLY took 6 24-hour days. (This all actually gives space for a rebirth of spirituality that is congruent with intellectual studies, but that took a while to develop.)
Anyway, the anti-clerical American Christian groups took a look at that and hit the roof. It was proof, it was the nail in the coffin that all those over-educated types were absolutely not Christian any longer (if they ever had been) and only the true Christians like themselves (who were now calling themselves Evangelicals) knew how to interpret Scripture, and education could only lead you away from Jesus. And after a lot of debate, that led to the publishing of the Fundamentals starting in 1910 and the birth of Fundamentalism.
And then World War II happened, and by the time it was over, White Christians started flocking to the new suburbs. But crucially, their churches and communities didn’t come with them. They formed new churches and communities, based on nothing more than bland white-bread conformity. And church attendance was at an all-time high! A higher percentage of Americans attended Christian worship during the 50s than during any other decade in American history! Not because the War Generation was any more faithful than their forebears, but because after the labor movements of the 30s and the war in the 40s, they were joiners. They joined everything. Clubs and associations of every kind blossomed in the 50s and 60s! Bowling leagues! Fraternal organizations! Churches! You name it.
Then came the Baby Boomers, who weren’t going to join anything they couldn’t see immediate personal benefits to. And there wasn’t much benefit to those bland suburban churches because there wasn’t any “there” there. No mystic ritual. No deep intellectual discussions of Life, the Universe, and Everything. There wasn’t anything deep there, and there wasn’t anything cool/groovy/fashionable, either. The culture started changing. Alternatives to being Christian sprung up as people looked for a spirituality that was actually … spiritual. It was normal for kids to leave home at age 18 and create new social groups, which made it a hell of a lot easier for them to leave the church if they wanted to.
Evangelicals and Fundamentalists responded by cracking down on controlling their members and indoctrinating them that the world is evil, leading to a rise in religious abuse in Christian communities. Mainline denominations stuck their head in the sand and basically ignored it. (”They’ll come back to church when they have kids!”) The Evangelical/Fundamentalist option was effective in the short run but backfires in the long run; the mainline option wasn’t effective in either the short run or the long run.
And now both groups are panicking because the writing is on the wall. They have no idea what to do that might actually work. And they have no sense of how to create authentic ritual or express the deep theological convictions they have to anyone who doesn’t already share those beliefs.
Rachel Held Evans, a former Evangelical who wrote a lot of books about her experience with Christianity, used to talk about how she’d get asked to speak at these church conferences about how to appeal to Millennials, and she’d talk about the need for authenticity and spirituality and being willing to ask deep questions that there aren’t easy answers to and form communities based on compassion instead of judgment. She’d finish her talk and ask if there were any questions and inevitably there would be a bit of silence and a Baby Boomer would raise his hand and say, “so what you mean is, we need a praise band in worship?”
