Coming Apart 3: Religion

I briefly mentioned in the last post that religiosity in Fishtown does not fit the stereotype of the poor fundamentalist clinging to God and voting against his economic interests in blind support of the GOP. I want to focus in a bit more on this issue in this post.

Murray is not a religious man and really has no axe to grind here. But what he does acknowledge—and is hard to deny—is that religion, until very recently, served a great role in our society not merely in terms of spiritual devotion or confirmation classes for youth but also in the way it spurred on other forms of civic engagement.

Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, a book examining the collapse in meaningful interpersonal relationships in the United States notes that apart from directly religious activities (church sponsored philanthropy, membership, or volunteering), religious people are also more involved across the board outside of the church. They entertain people in their homes more often, join more service organizations, sports teams, study groups, hobby clubs. In other words, religious involvement seems to correlate quite distinctively with a broad array of social engagement that engenders social capital to adherents (of course this is speaking only in generalizations).

As to religious fundamentalism, Murray found that while more of the already religious members of Fishtown identify as fundamentalist today—there was a rise in identification as fundamentalist from 34% in the 1970s to 46% today—when accounting for the rise in secularism in Fishtown in the preceding three decades the overall population (nonreligious included) of Fishtown is only slightly more fundamentalist than it was in the past (32% as a percentage of the total in the 1970s and 34% today). The rise, then, in religious believers in Fishtown identifying as fundamentalist does not necessarily denote a rise in fundamentalism in Fishtown over the period. As more Fishtown residents dropped religion altogether the ones who were least susceptible to secularization were probably already fundamentalist and remained so. Another plausible explanation, of course, is that of the decline in mainline Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. As the mass exodus from the Episcopal, Methodist, and Presbyterian congregations shows, most people felt these denominations were no longer meeting the needs of average people. Surely some of the rise of fundamentalism can be attributed to this exodus.

What really struck me about Murray’s findings in this area is certainly not that our country is becoming more secularized; I have heard pastors and authors handwringing over this tragedy my whole life. Thinking about this sociologically, and not as a Christian, the striking thing is that as secularization has increased there has been nothing to step in and fill the void left by the lack of church. Questions of theology aside, religious involvement can be extremely important in terms of socialization and community building. As Putnam shows, it also leads to broad engagement in other arenas outside of the church.

And I think people are starting to notice. Today we have the vanguards of the New Atheism talking about how there need to be atheist churches for the unbelieving to get together in community over their unbelief. What is as important to the average person as peace with God is community and ritual. Whether or not this is right, I do believe it to be true on a practical level. So when we lose religion we do not simply lose the former, but we tend to lose the latter as well. And, unsurprisingly, the upper classes and elites seem to be sheltered from this loss of faith (indeed Murray points out that the wealthy are still more functionally religious than the poor in every indicator), while the brunt of the social sea change is borne by Fishtown. Given Murray’s other findings this is unsurprising, but it certainly does not bode well for the future of the new lower class.