For media exploration: Does church decline underlie what's depressing many Americans?

Here's an off-the headlines theme for media to explore: To what extent does the slide toward a Great Depression for churches since 2000 underlie America's ills?

Think about it. Surveys and pundits underscore the rampant pessimism and dissatisfaction among many citizens, the toxic political divide and the way anything from calls for COVID vaccinations to Simone Biles's Olympics withdrawal will now stir partisan furies.

Consider ills that occurred simultaneously with weakened churches, bemoaned last week by New York Times columnist David Brooks. Major depression among teens jumped 63% from 2013 to 2016. Suicides increased 33% in the two decades ending in 2019. Estrangement from a family member is reported by 27% of Americans. Since 1990, those saying they lack even one close friend have quadrupled.

Such concerns evoke the classic book "Bowling Alone" by Harvard Professor Robert Putnam, a much-mulled 2000 tome now available in an updated 2020 edition. Not just bowling leagues but hyper-individualism, minus personal fellowship, is shrinking local lodges, civic groups and charities as well as churches. This seems to be an old problem (see the video with this post) that is only growing more intense.

The 2012 National Council of Churches yearbook (the 80th and last edition before publication ceased) reported that groups representing 330,222 local congregations claiming 159.8 million members filed data (a big undercount that omitted scads of independent churches). That was well over 20 times the current U.S. outlets for McDonald's or Starbucks. Big numbers, high stakes.

Local churches' centrality in community decline and prospects for recovery was asserted by Matt Lewis, a Daily Beast conservative, in an Eastertime piece (“America’s Losing Faith, and That Makes the Next Trump All But Inevitable“) and a follow-up last week (“How Trumpists Prey on Loneliness, and Loneliness Preys on Trumpists: Frankly, We Did Join a Cult“).

Lewis describes himself as a churchgoer (no specifics revealed) and "a (very flawed) Christian" who constantly needs God's forgiveness.

As your GetReligionistas have explained many times, abortion is an issue that isn’t automatically religion-beat territory. However, most public debates about abortion (and euthanasia) end up involving religious groups and the arguments almost always involve religious language.

Yes, there is a group called Atheists Against Abortion and there are other groups on the religious and cultural left, such as the Pro-Life Alliance of Gays and Lesbians. I was converted to the pro-life position as a young adult through articles at Sojourners, including a famous essay by the Rev. Jesse Jackson.

But in the mainstream press, liberal pro-lifers hardly exist, if they exist at all. You would never know that somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of Democrats (depending on how you word the question) hold positions on abortion that most journalists would call “anti-choice.”

Thus, questions about abortion have long been at the heart of surveys linked to religion and media bias, with journalists, especially in elite urban zip codes, consistently backing America’s current regime of abortion laws to a much stronger degree than the public as a whole. It’s been that way since I started studying the issue in the early 1980s.

If you were looking for a recent Armageddon moment on this topic (other than the current U.S. Supreme Court fiasco), it would have to be the media coverage, or non-coverage, of the criminal activity of Dr. Kermit Gosnell of Philadelphia.

Here at GetReligion, the blogging and chutzpah of M.Z. Hemingway played a key role in forcing debates about that topic out into the open.

In the past week or so, several GetReligion readers have sent me the URL of a commentary at The Daily Beast that ran with this headline: “Leaked NPR Emails: Don’t Call Kermit Gosnell an ‘Abortion Doctor’.”

This piece focuses on one of the key issues raised during the Gosnell trial — what professional title should reporters describe to this member of the abortion industry?