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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

#561

Post by mahogany »

brobdingnagians wrote: post #535
anonAndOn wrote: post #514

The comedian Emo Philips has a well-known joke about religion that may explain some of the decline in membership... "Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump. I said, "Don't do it!" He said, "Nobody loves me." I said, "God loves you. Do you believe in God?" He said, "Yes." I said, "Are you a Christian or a Jew?" He said, "A Christian." I said, "Me, too! Protestant or Catholic?" He said, "Protestant." I said, "Me…

And yet our society is more polarized than ever. From your anecdote, one would think that declining religion would result in peace and love overflowing in society, but we see the opposite. Public morality cannot be maintained without religion; we will sadly see the end result of that in coming years.

> Public morality cannot be maintained without religion

Do you have evidence or arguments for this, or is this just a feeling? I can see an argument for the statement "religion can be and has been used to maintain public morality" but that's not what you said, so I'm curious about your reasoning.

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

#562

Post by tracedddd »

LadyCailin wrote: post #510
xtracto wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was "in touch" with religion for 12 years (my parents sent me to a very catholic school even though both are atheists) My experience was seeing huge amounts of falsehood and hypocrisy as religious people followed and repeated all the rituals of the mass but in the day to day life they just did not care about others and pretty much ignored what their religion taught them. Thank God after those 12 years I saw everyth…

Is this the religious equivalent of a parent making the kid smoke a carton of cigarettes at once, to turn them off smoking?

A carton would be challenging. As a dumb smoking teenager I competed to smoke a whole pack and even then it made me quite nauseous. Took about 5 or 6 cigarettes back to back.

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

#563

Post by hkarthik »

brobdingnagians wrote: post #535
anonAndOn wrote: post #514

The comedian Emo Philips has a well-known joke about religion that may explain some of the decline in membership... "Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump. I said, "Don't do it!" He said, "Nobody loves me." I said, "God loves you. Do you believe in God?" He said, "Yes." I said, "Are you a Christian or a Jew?" He said, "A Christian." I said, "Me, too! Protestant or Catholic?" He said, "Protestant." I said, "Me…

And yet our society is more polarized than ever. From your anecdote, one would think that declining religion would result in peace and love overflowing in society, but we see the opposite. Public morality cannot be maintained without religion; we will sadly see the end result of that in coming years.

It's an interesting argument that you lay out, and as agnostic that came from a religious family, it's something that I've personally grappled with. In the absence of religion, where do people find their moral and ethical compass? I wasn't raised atheist, and when I ask atheists this question they often dismiss it as not important or obvious. I feel like that's half the reason religion persists, because they actually attempt to answer such questions with respect.

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

#564

Post by mensetmanusman »

0_____0 wrote: post #537
brobdingnagians wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet our society is more polarized than ever. From your anecdote, one would think that declining religion would result in peace and love overflowing in society, but we see the opposite. Public morality cannot be maintained without religion; we will sadly see the end result of that in coming years.

? how do you explain the relative stability of largely secular nations then?

People wonder if they are only temporarily stable, since the only subset groups that are reproducing at replacement rates are the religious.

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

#565

Post by gbrown »

AuthorizedCust wrote: post #102

So many of the comments here are affirming what I have long observed: much anti-religious sentiment (“much”, not “all”!) is actually a reaction to fundamentalism, which is the bad theology of scriptural literalism, which brings heresies like hating LGBT, insisting the Bible is also a science textbook, superstitious views of certain Middle Eastern lands, and more. Growing up as a mainline Protestant, I thankfully didn…

I think you're missing the bitterness that comes from growing up with a set of coping mechanisms and losing them. Moderate Christianity, taught by moral and good people, nevertheless can lead one to use the thought of eternal life as a psychological coping mechanism to deal with the reality of death and suffering in the world. If you eventually lose your ability to believe in that (which is involuntary for many), it can be quite painful.

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

#566

Post by Spooky23 »

AuthorizedCust wrote: post #102

So many of the comments here are affirming what I have long observed: much anti-religious sentiment (“much”, not “all”!) is actually a reaction to fundamentalism, which is the bad theology of scriptural literalism, which brings heresies like hating LGBT, insisting the Bible is also a science textbook, superstitious views of certain Middle Eastern lands, and more. Growing up as a mainline Protestant, I thankfully didn…

I had a similar experience as a Catholic in the northeast.

Lately as the politics of old people and loud young people have tilted right-wing, and more extreme philosophy is accepted, it’s disturbing how the theology has followed the money.

I probably sound like a simpleton here, but I’ve always found religion to be a source of peace and solace and a positive influence. Some of that is a result of ignoring teachings that are more... noxious to me personally or focusing away from behavior of the human agents of the church.

Unfortunately, cycles of religious fundamentalism is a feature of the American body politic.

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

#567

Post by ookdatnog »

kypro wrote: post #244

Although I believe religion is outdated and in many ways I'm happy to see it in decline in the West, I do worry about the side effects the decline of religion has. It seems to me that people my age today (late twenties, early thirties) are extremely self-centred and struggle to see any higher pursuit in life than self-satisfaction. This is in contrast to the few religious people I know who are far more family focused…

> I realised my sister would likely be in a much better place today if we lived in a more religious society.

I'm really not so sure about that. For instance, the top 10 states in terms of teenage pregnancy in the US is mostly dominated by religious states[0]. I'm not sure I've ever seen a stat like crime, drug use, etc, where the more religious states perform better than more secular states.

Of course, other factors might influence these stats. But at the very least it seems that, even if religion isn't actively harmful, it doesn't seem to be helping all that much.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teenage_pregnancy_in_the_Unite... ; the data is from 2010 though

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

#568

Post by CodeGlitch »

nsilvestri wrote: post #218
CodeGlitch wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Growing up in the 80's (UK) as a Roman Catholic, I remember the services being full on Sunday mornings. Not been since I left home at 18, because frankly I stopped believing in God the same time I stopped believing in Father Christmas (7?). The only reason I went was to make my parents happy. Now I'm in my 40's I do wonder if the lack of religion in society is leading us to a bad place. We know from numerous studies…

There is no evidence that heterosexual parents are better for children than non-het parents. An important factor is that their parents have a stable relationship. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01494929.2015.10... https://journals.lww.com/jrnldbp/Abstract/2016/04000/Same_Se...

I was referring more to single parent households.

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

#569

Post by shadowgovt »

What will be interesting to observe is how the US adapts to the ongoing need for the dozens of community-gluing charity responsibilities churches have historically taken on in American towns and cities. As church membership diminishes, the resources to do those tasks also diminish.

They can certainly be taken on by other charities; I'm curious how frictionless that process will be.

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

#570

Post by reducesuffering »

germinalphrase wrote: post #553
ceilingcorner wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a somewhat funny joke but it doesn't actually map to reality. Inter-Christian conflict is almost nonexistent in 2021 and has been so for probably a generation. Edit: by “conflict” I mean actual real violent conflict. Not people arguing on Reddit. People literally killing each other (or pushing them off bridges) because they are “heretics.” This doesn’t happen much at all anymore in the Christian world. Even t…

Idk, man... about two years ago, I heard an evangelical dude say Catholics aren’t even Christians. As a Catholic, I found it a bit startling to learn that I am - by default - going to hell.

Pop by r/catholic and you'll come across some people's hush-hush Catholic views that Martin Luther was evil by leading away millions to eternal damnation because there's no salvation outside The Catholic Church.
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