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Gallup: U.S. church membership dips below 50% for first time

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Re: Gallup: U.S. church membership dips below 50% for first time

#51

Post by WJW »

liaukovv wrote: post #40
whalesalad wrote: post #28

I had a unique experience growing up in a religious family (that is very tolerant and respectful of all world religions) while simultaneously being immersed in Scientology via a private school experience. The thing that underscores all of my experiences has been hypocrisy. So many people just want to belong to a group, or were raised in it and know nothing better. They don’t practice what they preach. I can’t help bu…

As you said yourself, people do it to belong to a social circle. What are you replacing this extremely important function with? Vacuum?

Sports, online forums, student fraternities, social clubs of every variety, etc. There are many ways to get active in society that don't involve beliefs in higher beings.

Re: Gallup: U.S. church membership dips below 50% for first time

#52

Post by Loughla »

whalesalad wrote: post #28

I had a unique experience growing up in a religious family (that is very tolerant and respectful of all world religions) while simultaneously being immersed in Scientology via a private school experience. The thing that underscores all of my experiences has been hypocrisy. So many people just want to belong to a group, or were raised in it and know nothing better. They don’t practice what they preach. I can’t help bu…

>The thing that underscores all of my experiences has been hypocrisy.

This is, consistently, what I hear from friends and family as to why they have drifted away from the Catholic church, and is solidly my own reason as well.

You see people, day-in-day out being terrible, judgmental, hateful people, except on Sunday when they're in the front row being holier than thou. It grates on you, and leaves a bad taste. It's even worse, because those people tend to be the ones who gravitate toward leadership positions within your local church.

My theory is that people have always felt that way, but it was harder to nail down these awful people before social media. Now that everyone puts everything on social media, it's easy to see, in plain black and white print, that the deacon really is an asshole.

The one thing that I do genuinely lament from the death of large religious congregations (at least in my part of the states), is that there are no replacement social constructs for people to gather and feel a sense of community. I'm certain this has something to do with the splintering of American discourse; not the religion inherently, but the social aspect is lacking and legitimately missed by most folks.

Re: Gallup: U.S. church membership dips below 50% for first time

#53

Post by YinglingLight »

whalesalad wrote: post #28

I had a unique experience growing up in a religious family (that is very tolerant and respectful of all world religions) while simultaneously being immersed in Scientology via a private school experience. The thing that underscores all of my experiences has been hypocrisy. So many people just want to belong to a group, or were raised in it and know nothing better. They don’t practice what they preach. I can’t help bu…

2013 is calling, it wants its fedora back.

Re: Gallup: U.S. church membership dips below 50% for first time

#55

Post by cmrdporcupine »

CountDrewku wrote: post #6
yhoneycomb wrote: post #2

Curious about how high that number is for ethnic minorities. Anecdotally, minorities (black, Asian, Hispanic) tend to be more religious.

They also tend to be more conservative and I think that's starting to change their voting habits. A lot are leaving the left. Edit: Ok just because you don't like it doesn't mean it's not true. Minorities in this country are highly religious. Take a look at how many blacks and Hispanics voted for Trump this election.

They tend to be conservative on cultural issues, but "left" on economic issues and the true "triumph" of the hard right and the failure of the "left" has been that they tied these two things so closely together that people routinely vote against their own interests on economic issues because of how they feel about cultural issues.

Re: Gallup: U.S. church membership dips below 50% for first time

#56

Post by PeterisP »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #30
arbitrage wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are choosing religions that reject elite priesthoods Do you have an example of such in the modern age? I don't really see many people I know "choosing religions that reject elite priesthoods"

QAnon?

QAnon seems to have many parallels with "prophetic" religions where you don't have a priesthood class organizing specific groups of followers e.g. parishes, but you have a priesthood class interpreting the words of a prophet and popularizing these interpretations; in this case "priesthood" isn't a formal distinction, but de facto you tend to have specific minority of people fulfilling this role.

Re: Gallup: U.S. church membership dips below 50% for first time

#57

Post by visarga »

symfoniq wrote: post #38
whalesalad wrote: post #28

I had a unique experience growing up in a religious family (that is very tolerant and respectful of all world religions) while simultaneously being immersed in Scientology via a private school experience. The thing that underscores all of my experiences has been hypocrisy. So many people just want to belong to a group, or were raised in it and know nothing better. They don’t practice what they preach. I can’t help bu…

The world will be better off when we abolish freedom of belief? That doesn't sound like a world I'd want to live in.

There's a long way from freedom of belief to the kind of identity politics practiced by religious groups. Ironically religious people are under the risk of getting cancelled by their own group if they dare wrongthink, so they are less free.

Re: Gallup: U.S. church membership dips below 50% for first time

#58

Post by giantg2 »

whalesalad wrote: post #28

I had a unique experience growing up in a religious family (that is very tolerant and respectful of all world religions) while simultaneously being immersed in Scientology via a private school experience. The thing that underscores all of my experiences has been hypocrisy. So many people just want to belong to a group, or were raised in it and know nothing better. They don’t practice what they preach. I can’t help bu…

"I can’t help but think the world will be better off when we abolish big religion."

So those people who want to belong to a group and believe in it without seeing what might be better can move into political groups for their identity? The actions and methods are human nature, so I think they will just move to a different domain.

Re: Gallup: U.S. church membership dips below 50% for first time

#59

Post by ramblerman »

xyzelement wrote: post #14

There's a great discourse in one of Dan Brown's books about whether people leave religion because they have found better answers elsewhere, or because they have stopped asking the questions. Separately, I observed that that the areligious are much more likely to have few or no kids while the religious folks put a much greater emphasis on it. As the secular world moves towards a place where there's no pressure to marr…

If you take away the "god" element, and adopt a Nietschze approach to religion/culture, i.e. its utility over generations, and where it ends up.

Then areligious would seem to be a pretty useless offshoot, if its always doomed to die out.

Perhaps a third state exists, with purpose and optimism to bring children into the world, but not born out of abrahamic religions.

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