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THE CHURCHING OF AMERICA, 1776-1990

Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy

By Roger Finke and Rodney Stark

328 pp. Rutgers University Press, 1992.

How did America change, in the space of 200 years, from “a nation in which most people took no part in organized religion” to one in which nearly two-thirds of adults do? Why did Baptists and Methodists experience spectacular growth, while established churches declined? Finally, why did the Baptists keep growing even as the Methodists began declining?

Roger Finke and Rodney Stark ask these questions in The Churching of America, 1776-1990. The book’s subtitle—Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy—will strike some as coldly scientific, but that’s just the value the authors bring. They don’t examine the “churching of America” from a spiritual perspective—you won’t find them attributing it to God’s grand plan for world evangelism or the Spirit’s movement among a chosen people, for example. Their statistics-based analysis of 200 years of American religious history finds that:

• Colonial America wasn’t very religious at all; in fact, the lowest rate of church affiliation in the history of America was in 1776, when just one in seven adults held any type of church membership;
  

• Over the next 75 years two upstart sects—the Baptists and Methodists—experienced “torrential growth” even while the mainline denominations dwindled. It was their growth, and that of other “upstart sects,” that brought about an extraordinary rise in church adherence in America.
  

• The more successful of the two, the Methodists, then began a gradual decline, even as the Baptists kept right on growing.
  

• Ecumenicism—the idea that churches should minimize doctrinal disagreements and merge—attracts declining churches, and doesn’t produce the growth its proponents promise. 
  

The question is: why? What made “winners and losers” in an “unregulated religious economy” like America’s?

American classrooms may display images of devout Puritans at church and Pilgrims giving thanks; in reality, colonists were more likely to spend Saturday nights in rowdy debauchery than be in church on Sunday morning. At its founding, the great majority of Americans were not affiliated with any church.

Congregationalists, Presbyterians and Episcopalians made up over half of all American church members. But within just 75 years, all three dramatically lost ground to the upstart Baptists and Methodists.

Not only did they triumph over the mainline churches—their growth, and that of other sects that followed, transformed America religiously. Once only 17% of Americans affiliated themselves with any church; by 1980, that rate had increased to 62%, one of the highest in the world.

The mainline churches had a head start, more money and a far-better educated clergy.  Why couldn’t they hold their ground against the sects they so disdained?

Softening. All sects start in a state of “high tension” with their environment, and naturally move to a state of lower tension. The problem is that it is impossible for any group to be at the same time “both strict and permissive” or “very worldly and very otherworldly.” Sects become the victims of their success: the high-octane faith that fuels their growth degrades, as members drift towards accommodation with their environment.

Professional Clergy. It’s counter-intuitive, but the authors find a well-educated clergy is correlated with stagnation and decline, not growth. The lay preachers who spread the fires of Baptist and Methodist revival were often despised by their Congregational and Episcopal counterparts educated at Harvard and Yale. They were roundly criticized for not respecting the mainline denominations’ “turf.”. This mattered not to the upstart preachers, who gave their sects an enormous advantage in church planting;

The uneducated and often unpaid clergy of the Baptists and Methodists made it possible for these denominations

to sustain congregations anywhere a few people could gather, for it was the pursuit of souls, not material comfort,

that drove her clergy forth. (83)

Inwardness vs. Evangelism. In the mainline denominations, calls “to repent and to be saved gave way…to ‘a well-styled lecture….Sermons thus became a species of polite literature.’” (45-46, quoting Ahlstrom) By contrast, the Baptists and Methodists “stressed spiritual conversion and a strong individual responsibility to God.”

As Methodist growth gave way to secularization an outspoken minority of ministers, led by the Reverend Benjamin Titus Roberts, loudly protested “the way in which the church was drifting away from its historic teaching and practices:”

He noted that the New School built fancy churches and employed ‘organs, melodeons, violins, and professional

singers, to execute difficult pieces of music for a fashionable audience…[I]t needs no prophet’s vision to foresee

that Methodism will become a dead and corrupting body.’

For his trouble, Roberts was expelled from his church. The Methodists would have done well to listen: from 1890 to 1986, they lost ground relative to America’s growing population, while higher-tension sects like the Baptists kept right on growing. (145-146)

Low vs. High Demands. One would think that making high demands on members would reduce a church’s membership; no, the authors argue, it’s just the opposite: “because religion involves collective action, religious groups are always potentially subject to exploitation by free riders.”

Churches…are plagued with “members” who draw upon the group for weddings, funerals and holiday celebrations,

but who give little or nothing in return. Even if they do contribute money…their inactivity devalues both the direct

and the promised religious rewards by reducing the “average” level of commitment. (253)

Churches with increasingly-lenient standards for membership are havens for free riders. The more committed eventually reduce their participation so as not to be taken advantage of, or seek a new group that makes higher demands of all members.

High demands on members don’t weaken churches—low demands do. Costly membership mitigates the free rider problem. At the same time, each member “benefits from the higher average level of participation thereby generated by the group.”

If there’s truth to the idea that “those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it,” then we’ve been rightly concerned with learning the lessons of our own recent history. Finke and Stark offer us another perspective. We’ll do well to heed those lessons, too.

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