Why Church Attendance has Declined

Why has church attendance declined so drastically in Western Europe?  British writer Kingsley Martin famously boasted that “rationalism has argued the Church out of existence.” However, the stats stubbornly demonstrate the very opposite thing.

Meanwhile, Mary Eberstadt, senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C, offers a different explanation:

•  Social science has roundly established that vibrant families and vibrant religion go hand in hand. Conversely, not living in a family means that a given individual is less likely to be found in church. As Wilcox has summarized the data, “The recent history of American religion illuminates what amounts to a sociological law: The fortunes of American religion rise with the fortunes of the intact, married family.” Similarly, the late sociologist Steven L. Nock observed in his 1998 book, Marriage in Men’s Lives, that “changes in the number of children in the married couple’s household have large consequences for men’s church attendance…With each additional child, men increase their attendance at services by 2.5 times per year.”

•  More families and more children, in short, means more God. Similarly, to summarize other statistics, marriage increases the likelihood of belonging to a religious organization—whereas cohabitation, by contrast, has what three researchers have called a “strong, negative effect on the probability of religious activity.” Unmarried people without children are less likely to go to church than are married people, or married people with children. A married man with children, for example, is over twice as likely to go to church as an unmarried man with no children. Once again, where there is more marriage, there is more religion; where there is less.

While children draw families to church, deviant sex also drives many away. The more Westerners have practiced a sexuality that is not accepted by the church, the more they have distanced themselves from the church and affiliate with those who accept their lifestyle.

I have seen this close-up. Several gay friends have distanced themselves from me once they embraced the gay lifestyle, understandably surrounding themselves with those who affirm them. When I had reconnected with one friend after some years, he was astonished with my views. “I didn’t know that people still believed like you!”  He had immersed himself into a community where there were no dissenting opinions.

This same phenomenon pertains to other forms of deviant sexuality. The more indulgence in pornography or adultery, the more we seek a value system or community that will affirm our behavior.

We seek to assuage our conscience. Therefore, we seek to avoid any influence that will make us feel guilty. Consequently, the more that Western values and sexual practice depart from Christian values, the less attractive the church!

Has Education Argued the Church out of Existence?

Ever since Karl Marx had famously declared that “religion is the opiate of the [uneducated] masses,” secularists have been nodding approval. The secularist claims that as a population becomes more educated, the less they will fall for religion.

However, Mary Eberstadt, Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. has brought forth a competing explanation. She claims that the waning of Christianity is not the result of more education but of less family. She assembles an impressive collection of studies to demonstrate that church-goers are not primarily made up of the uneducated:

1. British historian Hugh McLeod concluded that “the poorest districts of [1870-1914 England] thus tended to have the lowest rates of [church] attendance, [and] those with large upper-middle-class and upper-class populations the highest.”

2. Historian Callum Brown also concluded that, “the [English] working class were irreligious, and that the middle classes were the churchgoing bastions of civil morality.” 

3. Putnam and Campbell concluded that, “This trend is clearly contrary to any idea that religion is nowadays providing solace to the disinherited and dispossessed, or that higher education subverts religion.”

4. Sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox concluded that “Americans with college degrees are more likely than those with high school diplomas alone to attend church on Sunday. Moreover, the statistical likelihood of attending church varies inversely with the social ladder from bottom to top.”

Meanwhile, Eberstadt claims that:

• Social science has roundly established that vibrant families and vibrant religion go hand in hand. Conversely, not living in a family means that a given individual is less likely to be found in church.

Likewise, Wilcox concluded:

• The recent history of American religion illuminates what amounts to a sociological law: The fortunes of American religion rise with the fortunes of the intact, married family. (Christian Research Journal, Vol. 36, #03, 22).

However, Eberstadt’s conclusions seem to defy a massive amount of anecdotal evidence coming from evangelists and missionaries who have concluded that it is the downtrodden who are most receptive to the Gospel. Besides, Scripture also seems to agree:

• Brothers, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things--and the things that are not--to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him. (1 Cor. 1:26-29)

It therefore would seem that we should find the least accomplished and educated in our churches. Is there any way to reconcile Eberstadt’s findings with these other considerations?

I think that there is. Initially, the church is comprised of the downtrodden - society’s rejects. However, they don’t remain rejects. By the next generation, their children are entering college.

This is what we find when we examine the older, mainline churches. Their members have become accomplished and educated. Meanwhile, their satisfied and well-fed children fail to see the relevance of God to well-being and have been leaving the mainline churches in droves.

In contrast, the newer churches – and these are more Bible-centered – appeal to the less accomplished. However, it is in these churches that the drug addict, alcoholic, and wife-beater can best find healing.