Surveys & polls

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Media revelation: Two-parent homes are good for children. Religion questions, anyone?

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Media revelation: Two-parent homes are good for children. Religion questions, anyone?

The past two weeks have produced a boomlet in scholarly and journalistic revelations of facts that establish heavy disadvantages afflicting children not raised by two parents, who are more prevalent in the United States than any other nation.

This is a controversial topic and has all kinds of links to debates about religion, morality and culture.

Consider this from a lengthy New York Times op-ed Sept. 20, with this explosive headline: “The Explosive Rise of Single-Parent Families Is Not a Good Thing.”

The evidence is overwhelming: Children from single-parent homes have more behavioral problems, are more likely to get in trouble in school or with the law, achieve lower levels of education and tend to earn lower incomes in adulthood. Boys from homes without dads present are particularly prone to getting in trouble. …

This article, by University of Maryland economist Melissa S. Kearney, was based on her new book “The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind” (University of Chicago Press). The Religion Guy has yet to read this book, which has won media praise as “important,” “compelling” and “a great service,” with a “top scholar” offering “reams of evidence.”

By coincidence, the same day the book was released, University of Virginia sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox and three Institute for Family Studies colleagues posted a piece (.pdf here) headlined “Do Two Parents Matter More Than Ever?” Their answer: Yes. It’s the latest such documentation from the Institute and the university’s National Marriage Project, which Wilcox directs. (Note: these social scientists are not saying spouses should remain in physically or emotionally dangerous marriages.)

These writings do not center on religious arguments or sources, but Christian, Jewish, Muslim and other clergy, and members of their congregations, will respond: “Duh!”


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Trouble in nondenominational land: ‘Supply chain crisis' is creating empty pulpits

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Trouble in nondenominational land: ‘Supply chain crisis' is creating empty pulpits

Long ago, the Rt. Rev. C. FitzSimons Allison was a bishop in good standing in the Episcopal Church.

A year ago, however, he resigned — at the age of 95 — to serve in the Anglican Church in North America, which is an ecclesiastical body that is recognized as valid by many Anglican bishops in Africa, Asia and the Global South, but not by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Needless to say, he has witnessed more than his share of Anglican debates about the future of the Anglican Communion, a communion in which national churches are in rapid decline in rich, powerful lands like the United States, Canada and England, but exploding with growth in the Global South.

During one global meeting, Allison watched a symbolic collision between these two worlds. Bishops from North America and their allies were talking about moving forward, making doctrinal changes in order to embrace the cultural revolutions in their lands. They were sure that Anglicans needed to evolve, or die.

Finally, a frustrated African bishop asked three questions: “Where are your children? Where are your converts? Where are your priests?” These questions are highly relevant, amid stark demographic changes in First World churches.

I thought of this Anglican parable when reading a Frank Lockwood feature in the Arkansas Democrat Gazette that ran with this double-decker headline: “Churches of Christ grappling with preacher shortage.” I don’t want to critique this story for two obvious reasons: (1) Lockwood has been a friend of mine for several decades and (2) one of the major voices in the story is veteran GetReligionista Bobby Ross, Jr.

But the trends noted in this report are serious and proof that it’s simplistic to say that these kinds of problems exist in doctrinally “progressive” denominations, and that’s that. Thus, I think this is a story that many journalists and religion-beat readers need to see. Here’s the overture:

Churches of Christ have a supply and demand problem — thousands of houses of worship and not enough preachers to fill the pulpits.

During Harding University's 100th annual Lectureship in Searcy …, roughly 100 people gathered for a session titled "Minister Shortages in Today's Church."


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This is still news? Mainline Protestantism, once central in U.S. culture, keeps collapsing

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This is still news? Mainline Protestantism, once central in U.S. culture, keeps collapsing

Until the 1960s, more than half of Americans identified with the “Mainline” Protestant churches that “have played an outsized role in America’s history,” says a Sept. 13 report from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI).

No longer, as is well known among clergy and parishioners who pay attention, scholars and religion journalists.

Is this news? Throughout America’s history, no religious community has suffered anything remotely like the Mainliners’ unremitting collapse (click here for waves of Ryan Burge ink) over the past six decades — even as the national population grew.

Several recent reports indicate that this remarkable situation is continuing, and well worth updating.

Definition: “Mainline” denominations, the most prominent of which are known to sociologists as the “Seven Sisters,” have roots in the Colonial or Early Republic eras, memberships that are mostly white and relatively affluent and well-educated, affiliated with the National Council of Churches and World Council and share a doctrinal commitment to pluralism or liberalism that contrasts sharply with conservative and “evangelical” Protestant groups (including many believers in their own pews).

Last week, bishops of the Episcopal Church discussed the latest statistics during an online meeting. Though offering income has held steady, there was a 6% drop in membership from 2021 to 2022, the worst ever, and that total is down 23% over the past decade to the current 1,584,685. Average worship attendance nationwide rose a bit to 373,000, a slight bump as the COVID-19 crisis waned, but down 43% over the decade. The median local congregation now has 111 members and Sunday attendance of 35.

This denomination maintains and issues good statistics, and The Guy suggests a more thorough look would cover tell-tale indexes of vitality such as trends in infant and adult baptisms, weddings, Sunday School enrollment, ordinations and foreign mission staffs and spending. For additional info on this, see this new post from Burge: “The State of the Episcopal Church in 2022.”


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Podcast: Another sexy version of the old New Age arrives, with the 'Secular Sabbath'

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Podcast: Another sexy version of the old New Age arrives, with the 'Secular Sabbath'

This podcast post really needs a soundtrack. So, please click on this Secular Sabbath video and leave it running. Then open the GetReligion post in a second browser window and start reading. This will help with the content — I promise.

This week’s “Crossroads” discussion (CLICK HERE to tune that in) focused on a timely, solid feature at The Free Press with this catchy headline: “Can You Find God in a Bikini?” The story was timely because, in many ways, this is a news story that has been with us for decades (if not for centuries, viewed from a theological, pre-electronic-trance-music point of view).

To understand my thinking here, it helps to follow a timeline linking a few books on this topic.

Let’s start here, with “Understanding the New Age,” which was researched in the late 1980s by the great religion-beat pro Russell Chandler. The key to this vague New Age thing, he said, is the movement’s “view of the nature of reality, which admits to no absolutes” and, thus, all “standards of morality” are “relative.”

In the mid-1990s, linked to another burst of New Age media buzz, I interviewed Chandler and the resulting “On Religion” column included this thesis:

A few years ago, most generic bookstores had a "New Age" section. Today, this is rare. But this doesn't mean that the wave of religious trends that crested in the 1980s simply vanished. Truth is, it soaked in.

"You don't see New Age shelves anymore because you can find New Age books in almost every part of the store," said Russell Chandler, an award-winning religion writer best known for his 18 years at the Los Angeles Times. "They're in the psychology section and over on the women's shelf. You'll find them under self-help, stress, holistic health and the environmental, too."

The day of New Age cover stories in news magazines may have passed, but that's beside the point. New Age faith, said Chandler, has "become so visible that it's now all but invisible."

Reading Chandler led me to New Age preachers such as Marianne Williamson (yes, she is seeking — again — the White House as a Democrat) and her bestselling book “A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of A Course in Miracles.”


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News hooks? Gender, sexual orientation and religion among American college students

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News hooks? Gender, sexual orientation and religion among American college students

I know people will be surprised to hear this, but it’s rare for me to get my hands on some new data. I basically use two or three surveys for everything you see on this Substack and my social media.

But last week was a very good one because I got data that is a bit different, but very interesting, and quite newsworthy.

It comes from FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), which is an organization that fights for the ability of individuals (students and faculty) to be able to freely exercise their First Amendment right to free speech. If someone on a college campus is punished for nothing more than their speech, FIRE often steps in and sues the university. You can read several examples of this on their Wikipedia page.

One of the major research projects that FIRE undertakes is an annual survey of college students to gauge how they think about the issue of free speech and if they feel like they have to stifle their speech because of hostility on campus. Often, this includes speech connected to religious beliefs.

This is a real treasure trove of data about how the next generation thinks about all kinds of topics. Their full report of their results (which runs to 85 pages) is here. The survey that they collected contains a total sample size of 55,102 respondents who had to be currently enrolled at an institution of higher learning in the United States. A thorough description of the methodology used is here and here.

I am making one adjustment to this data — I restricted my sample to just those who are between the ages of 18 and 25 years old. While I do think the views of 40-year-old graduate students are important, I wanted to just focus on college aged folks for this bit of data analysis. That means my sample is a bit smaller — 39,178. That’s still more than enough to analyze, though.

I am going to write a series of posts with this data, especially topics related to free speech and allowing speakers on campus that generate controversy, but I gleaned so much from just the demographic variables that I had to write about them specifically.

The theme here is simply three variables: sexual orientation, gender identity and religion among college-aged folks.

What really kicked this off was a report from Brown University that indicated that 38% of their student body identifies as homosexual, bisexual, queer, asexual, pansexual, questioning or other. When that same poll was conducted ten years earlier, that share was just 14%. Is Brown an outlier here? Or are huge percentages of college students not straight and/or not cisgender? Are these issues linked to religious beliefs, or the lack thereof?


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What do seminaries do, in an age in which many believers are afraid of 'theology'?

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What do seminaries do, in an age in which many believers are afraid of 'theology'?

During the 1970s and '80s, the flocks gathered in conservative Protestant pews kept growing and growing -- until a third of the U.S. population could be defined as "evangelical."

Times were already getting tough for leaders of progressive Mainline churches, with sharp declines in budgets and worship attendance. But the waters were smooth for evangelicals.

"One might be considered a very capable kayaker if the river currents are moving along at only a few miles per hour," said theologian David Dockery, during the recent convocation rites at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Ft. Worth, Texas, after he was inaugurated as its 10th president.

But the currents changed, while many contented evangelical leaders didn't spot the dangerous waves around them. "I fear that the waters of our cultural context have become much choppier and are moving evermore rapidly with each passing year," said Dockery, who noted that he was beginning his 40th year working in Christian higher education.

Consider a sobering new study -- "The Great Dechurching. Who's Leaving, Why Are They Going, and What Will It Take to Bring Them Back" -- by researchers Jim Davis, Michel Graham and Ryan Burge. Their numbers indicate that evangelicalism has backslid to where it was 50 years ago.

The big question is, "Why?" Dockery said he accepts the study's thesis that many boom-era evangelicals lacked "deep roots in their understanding of the Christian faith." Many evangelicals failed to teach practical discipleship in daily life and seemed reluctant to defend the truths "delivered to the saints" through the ages. This fear of theology has proven to be a disaster as America "has become more secularized, polarized and confused," he said.

Thus, the "Dechurching" trend leads straight to hard questions about seminaries, noted Burge, in his "Graphs about Religion" newsletter. He teaches political science at Eastern Illinois University and is one of my GetReligion.org colleagues.

Seminaries help define religious denominations and are "an incredibly important part of the religious economy. In many ways they are the canary in the coal mine for the health of American religion," he wrote.


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Plug-In: Does traditional worship have a prayer post-pandemic? New reports offer info

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Plug-In: Does traditional worship have a prayer post-pandemic? New reports offer info

Last week we highlighted the return of a Washington state high school football coach who won the right to pray on the field.

Now, after just one game back, coach Joe Kennedy has resigned, “citing family concerns and a lack of support from school district officials,” as the Washington Times’ Mark A. Kellner reports.

In other news, X owner Elon Musk is accusing the Anti-Defamation League of, well, defamation, “claiming that the nonprofit organization’s statements about rising hate speech on the social media platform have torpedoed X’s advertising revenue,” CNN’s Jordan Valinsky writes. At the heart of this battle is an Orthodox Jewish activist who is being defended by, wait for it, Musk.

Musk’s threat to sue the antisemitism watchdog extends the platform’s war of words, Religion News Service’s Yonat Shimron notes. At the heart of this battle is an Orthodox Jewish activist who is being defended by, wait for it, Musk.

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s Greek Catholic bishops told Pope Francis that his praise for Russia’s imperial past “pained” Ukrainians, as The Associated Press’ Nicole Winfield details.

This is our weekly roundup of the top headlines and best reads in the world of faith. Our big story concerns the state of worship attendance and giving after COVID-19.

What To Know: The Big Story

Post-pandemic challenges: For houses of worship, encouraging signs that a rebound is taking place are evident in a new study.


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Pew Research Center report lifts the veil (as much as possible) on religion in China

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Pew Research Center report lifts the veil (as much as possible) on religion in China

Amid a flow of recent news stories on the economic problems that plague China and its disruptive impact on global affairs, the Pew Research Center on August 30 issued a landmark 160-page report with a wealth of information on another persistent issue -- the status of various religious groups in this nation of 1.4 billion after 74 years of unremitting effort by Communist rulers to suppress or eliminate faith.

Given North Americans’ long-running interest in both China and its religious situation, especially for Christians, this report is important news. Editors will want to summon their art departments for charts to complement coverage. The report’s depiction of data sources and the huge difficulties in obtaining reliable information from the mainland adds to this notable achievement.

The upshot, according to Pew demographer Conrad Hackett, is that by available measures, China is — on the surface — “the least religious country in the world.” Not surprising when media and public meetings are restricted and the regime forbids religious education while subjecting children to intensive atheistic propaganda at school. Only a tenth of the Chinese report religious affiliation, and 3% say religion is “very important” in their lives, compared with 98% in nearby Indonesia (or 37% in the United States).

Government barriers meant Pew could not conduct its own field surveys as in other nations. So the numbers come from government reports, research by Chinese universities (a risky academic specialty), one private polling firm and the Sweden-based World Values Survey. The report provides excellent guidance on interpreting limits and problems with the available data sources and confusion over definitions.

Note this striking example: The government lists 34,000 registered Buddhist temples, compared with 190,000 counted by Sun Yat-sen University experts.

Yet the people are permeated with spiritual beliefs and superstitions. These include gravesite visits to venerate or assist ancestors in the afterlife, rituals to seek personal benefits, incense-burning, fortune-telling, planning of activities around auspicious calendar dates and feng shui (placement of buildings and furnishings thought to manipulate energies). With or without formal affiliation, a third of Chinese believe in the Buddha or enlightened Buddhist beings, and 18% believe in Taoist deities.

Are some believers afraid to discuss faith ties, while living under China’s expanding social credit system of rewards and punishments?


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